Episode 137: The Thames Tunnel

Host: Hazel Baker

Hazel is an active Londoner, a keen theatre-goer and qualified  CIGA London tour guide.

She has won awards for tour guiding and is proud to be involved with some great organisations. She is a freeman of the Worshipful Company of Marketors and am an honorary member of The Leaders Council.

Channel 5’s Walking Wartime Britain(Episode 3) and Yesterday Channel’s The Architecture the Railways Built (Series 3, Episode 7). Het Rampjaar 1672, Afl. 2: Vijand Engeland and Arte.fr Invitation au Voyage, À Chelsea, une femme qui trompe énormément.

Guest: Katherine McAlpine

Katherine McAlpine is the Director of the Brunel Museum. The Brunel Museum sits on the site of the world’s first tunnel under water. It was designed and built by father and son team, Marc Isambard Brunel and Isambard Kingdom Brunel.

 

 

Related Podcast Episodes:

Episode 110: Crossness Pumping Station

Episode 105: St Pancras Station

Episode 96: Gas Lamps of Westminster

Reading List:

• Museum Book: The Brunels’ Tunnel
  A beautifully produced book with illustrations, telling the story of the Thames Tunnel’s construction and its role in London history. Includes a foreword by Michael Palin and covers its use as a banquet hall, shopping arcade, and railway. Available from the Brunel Museum. Buy book

• The Brunels: Father and Son by Anthony Burton
  This book highlights Marc Brunel’s key role in engineering, including the Thames Tunnel, and explores the dynamic between Marc and his famous son, Isambard Kingdom Brunel. Buy book

Transcript:

Hazel Baker: Welcome to episode 137 of the London History Podcast, where we share the stories of people, places, and events that have shaped our capital. I am Hazel Baker, Tour Guide and CEO of londonguidedwalks.co.uk. Today we are traveling beneath the surface, quite literally, into a story of extraordinary ambition, innovation, and engineering genius.

Imagine Victorian London, the River Thames teaming with ships and beneath it, a bold and unprecedented idea, to dig the world’s first tunnel under a river. This was no fantasy but the work of a remarkable father and son team Marc Isambard Brunel and his son Isambard Kingdom Brunel 

Now our guest today is Katherine MacAlpine and she’s the director of the Brunel Museum, which stands on the very site where this groundbreaking project took shape. Many know that Isambard Kingdom Brunel was voted the second greatest Britain of all time in 2006, just behind Winston Churchill.

But fewer realised that his father, Marc Brunel, the true architect of the Thames Tunnel, was French. Forced to flee his homeland during the revolution. He made his way to New York before ultimately finding fame and fortune here in Britain. We’ll return to that remarkable journey in a moment. Katherine, welcome. It’s a real pleasure to have you with us. 

Katherine McAlpine: Thanks for having me. I’m excited to be here.

Hazel:  Now we’ve got a lot of things   we need to cover today to absolutely jam pack it in, but with focus on the first, I think the The Thames Tunnel itself.

Some people may have never even heard of it, so what is it?

Katherine McAlpine: So the Thames tunnel was the very first tunnel under a river. Anywhere in the world we take for granted. Now, particularly if you live in London you are used to ping ponging from north to south, under the river using the underground. But actually 200 years ago, in 1825, that was a complete novelty.

People have tried to dig under the Thames, to connect north and south. And had failed. Unfortunately, it didn’t work. So that’s why Thames tunnel is exciting and important because it was the world’s first. And we take it for granted now, but actually there was no guarantee of success in 1825 that this tunnel would succeed, let alone it surviving 200 years later.

Hazel: Amazing. How long is the tunnel?

Katherine McAlpine: It’s not very long at all in terms of distance, in terms of time. It took them to construct it, It took them 18 years, which was quite significantly longer than the three years that they had estimated because no one having done it before.

It was a bit of a finger in the air. Yeah. Three years. Yeah. But ended up taking 18 years to build.

Hazel: And why did they choose that particular location then from Whopping to Rotherhithe what was in it there?

Katherine McAlpine: Couple of reasons. One of the really important reasons is to do with the original purpose of the tunnel which was to carry cargo from one side of the river to the other Rotherhithe and Wapping at that time was a really important kind of docks. Lots of kind of cargo coming in from across the world, across the empire coming into, London, which was, huge port city.

And the only way at that point of crossing from north to south the furthest east was London Bridge. So there were plenty of bridges further up the river to the west. But the most easterly bridge was London Bridge. It would take a really long time to get through traffic.

Nothing ever changes. But to take things by road over the bridge took a really long time. And if you couldn’t move your cargo, you had to sort of it on the ships or the warehouses, which meant that susceptible piracy theft and people coming along

Hazel: we call it Shrinkage

Katherine McAlpine: it’s shrinkage Exactly that fantastic euphemism term.

So that was a real issue. Cargo from Side River to put in the dock makes it convenient as possible. The other reason is geology. So one of the things that was really clever about the way that Mark Brunel designed the digging of the tunnel was he used the soft earth that to his advantage, a shaft into the ground.

And instead of digging, they built it onto the ground and let it sink. So having that sort of accurate geology meant that they could supposedly mean that it would be easier to dig this tunnel. So the location with one reason, and then the sort of geology is the other.

Hazel: And of course this is gonna be saving a lot of money, let alone the shrinkage. But of course, keeping anything in a warehouse, rather than getting that product to market, it’s gonna cost money by just sitting there. So moving it as soon as you can was an advantage, which means they are saving money.

So who was putting in the money to build this tunnel?

Katherine McAlpine: So it was definitely intended as a commercial enterprise, it was meant to be this sort of toll, toll road between. The sort of the docks and you could move your cargo and you’d get lots of income from that. So lots of people saw the value of this from when Mark Brunel patented his tunnelling shields in 1818 in 1824, he gave a lecture to the Institute of Civil Engineers about this fantastic idea that he had.

Entrepreneurs private, private individuals to invest in what became the Thames Tunnel Company. So that’s how they got their original funding. But unfortunately because it was the first time they’d ever done it, it was not the most kind of plain sailing enterprise.

It was really quite challenging and they kept running out of money. So they kept having to go back to the investors, getting new investors, getting more people in. They sold paper peak shows in order to generate income. They’d bring visitors to look at the tunnel in construction to try and raise some of that money.

And actually at a point they just completely ran out of money and had to block up the tunnel to stop construction. The tunnel construction stopped for about seven, eight years. At that point, Mark Brunel. Spent years petitioning, campaigning, writing letters to, to anyone who would listen.

So say, we need to finish this tunnel. We need to absolutely finish this tunnel. And then the Duke of Wellington eventually got involved. And actually it was supported by the government. Meant that they could finally finish the project. So yeah, it had a, even though it was intended to be a sort of commercial project it was really quite financially challenging the whole time of it, the whole 18 years of its construction.

Hazel: So what inspired Mark Brunel to undertake such an ambitious engineering project anyway?

Katherine McAlpine: There was a real kind of commercial. Reason for wanting to dig, dig this tunnel to connect up the docks on either side of the river. That was really  important. And it made a lot of sense at that time. The difference, with the sort of, that’s why there’d been successful, unsuccessful projects before Mark Brunel, the thing that really made his project.

A success where others had failed was this tunnelling shield that he’d patented in 1818. And it was a way of protecting both the miners the people doing the tunnelling, but also protecting the tunnel itself,

As construction was happening. And the inspiration for that. It came from something called a ship worm.
The Humble  Torito Novartis which is not a worm at all, in fact, it’s a mollusk

 

 

 

 

 

Mark Brunel before he came to London was in Portsmouth. He was part of the rural Navy, and he saw firsthand the kind of havoc. That these sort of tiny mollusks would be on all the Royal Navy ships.

So they would dig holes using the kind of shells at the top of their heads to dig these holes in the timbers of the ship. But the really clever thing that they do is they then create a protective casing around themselves. And that was the thing that previous attempts to dig a tunnel.

Under a river had failed because there wasn’t this sort of protective casing. So when Mark patented his tunnelling shields,

 

it had this kind of wooden cover for miners to protect them for any kind of collapse from the soft earth. But behind them, you’d have these brick layers come in and then they would line the tunnel with bricks, which meant.

It could withstand the pressure from the sort of the water and the sort of geology above. So that was, that kind of being inspired by nature is one of the great elements of the ThamesTunnel story.

Hazel: So his focus wasn’t really on the. tunnelling as it were. Because if we think of working in the Navy and reinventing the, that block making system is actually fixing a problem that no one else could, they could do the bit of the tunnelling, but it was the collapsing, which they needed something.I Think. 

Katherine McAlpine: Yeah. Absolute. Yeah.

Hazel: You’ve got a model of this.what do you call it? This cage helmet thing.

Katherine McAlpine: It’s called the Tunnelling Shield. Yes. So it’s made up of 36 cells. They were all, all about the size of a man. There were no women as far as we know, involved in the construction of the Thames  tunnel. But you had sort of 12 cells along, so 12 men along and three levels, so bottom, middle, and top.

And each miner in front of them had a series of polling boards, so just wooden panels and they’d remove each wooden panel behind it by hand. This is all being done by hand tools. There’s no machinery. And all 36 of them would dig the width of a brick. And once they dug, they’d return the polling board and do the same with the next polling board, and by the time the whole thing had gone they dug out the width of this brick.

The whole thing would move forward on a sort of series of cranks and screws, and then the bricklayers would come in and do their level. So it was really painstaking work. That they do. And yeah, if for the poor miners on the bottom, they’re standing in they’re standing in Thames Water which, isn’t that lovely to stand in now, but, at this time it was, this is pre Basel jet.

This is, it’s a, the Thames is an open sewer. But they were provided with boots by the Thames Tunnel Company. So that would, that would help them. The only thing is they did have to share those boots with all of the other miners. So you come into work and have to get into someone’s stinky wet boots.

Hazel: I couldn’t do that.

Katherine McAlpine: Oh yeah, it’s worse. It’s a hundred times worse than bowling shoes. It’s horrible.

Hazel: So these miners that we are calling them literally at the mud face. Are these experienced miners? Are they what’s their skillset?

Katherine McAlpine: So we think that the sort of the miners and the tunnelers at the mud face, I really like that. I’m stealing that. I’m gonna use that. That they were experienced miners from places like Somerset and they were employed for their skill in this work at the brick layers, I think were the most skilled employees.

And they were the ones that tried to go on strike because they weren’t being paid enough. But you also  had lots of labourers, people moving the spoil. So you had, you had a bit of a, a sort of hierarchy.

Lots of different jobs, more, some more skilled, some less skilled.

Hazel: When you’re talking about skilled labour. Did they have a little shanty town where all the workers lived together?

Katherine McAlpine: A lot of them lived, quite lived locally. So the way that the kind of shift pattern worked was the shield was always an operation. It was always going. So you’d have sort of eight hours on, eight hours off. So you would finish your shift and then another minor would come and replace you, and then you’d swap that way.

One of the things about the Brunels that some of the workers certainly appeared to appreciate is that they were very hands-on. They were very hands-on employers. Isambard Kingdom Brunel, who was only 19 when the project started. And he, we’ve been talking about, is the original sort of Nepo baby because his dad got him the job and he then went on to be this incredible sort of civil engineer.

But he really learnt his craft under his dad on the Thames Tunnel project. But he was, he was really quite as far as we know, quite liked and quite well respected by a lot of the workers, not necessarily all of them because he was really hands on, he was a bit of a workaholic.

He, even then, in the early days of his career. He’d sleep in the tunnel sometimes, he just, he was like I, I need to be back here in a couple of hours to check, so I’ll just stay here. So yeah, it was real , it was like a sort of mini town, there were all these sorts of industries around the blacksmiths, forges, people making bricks, lots of things happening. It was very industrial and bustly. And if you come to the museum where the Thames tunnel is, it’s not like that today. It’s like this sort of sleepy, hidden London village.

It’s very quiet. But 200 years ago, it would not have been like that. You’d have had, you’d have had people shouting, swearing, probably half of them were drunk. They were given only, yeah, the other half were asleep, presumably. But they were given whiskey as part of their sorting, presumably because the conditions were so hard and this is how you get people into work when it’s such a tough, challenging job.

Hazel: It’s really interesting what you’re saying about how some of the work has really been appreciated. IK (Isambard Kingdom Brunel) being hands-on. ’cause I was reading his obituary in the engineer magazine. and it was very picky saying he got too involved and too hands-on, but of course written by people who wouldn’t even think of being hands-on.

So you’ve gotta keep the workers happy. If you think of an eight hour shift, that is grueling with the amount of stuff you are having to step through and work in. What about the air quality as well?

Katherine McAlpine: Yeah, the air quality was not great. So if you think about it, the air’s only coming from this sort of shaft suddenly on the rather hidden side of the river. That’s where your kind of air is coming in from. And the further under the Thames you go. The less good that air quality becomes.

Add to that, the fact that you are stepping in Thames water, which is basically, human waste. And then also the other challenge that they had is as they would be digging, they’d occasionally encounter sort of pockets of methane or other gases, and bearing in mind that this is entirely lit by gas lamps that explosions were not uncommon.

There were also times they’d encounter I think certainly I think it was sulfuric acid. It was certainly an acid. And we’ve got reports of people suffering from what was known as tunnel blindness, either, usually temporarily, but sometimes not. So it’s really, not this is Victorian health and safety at its best in, in that it’s completely non-existent.

Hazel: And what were Brunel’s feelings/thoughts on the kind of human cost?

Katherine McAlpine: So that’s an, that’s a really interesting question. Both Marc and Isambard worked very hard. They were very quite driven, and quite motivated people. And we have an entry in Mark Brunel’s diary from sort of Christmas one year, quite early on in the project where he’s I can’t believe that they want Christmas off.

I can’t believe that. They don’t want to, so he comes across as a proper groove?, like a real sort of. Isambard similarly was, it’s quite well documented. He worked incredibly hard, his ideas, modern ideas like self-care, very much not something that he would recognise.  

But actually when the workers went on strike, this was a week into Isambard being resident engineer. So he’s just been given his first big job by his dad, and then he’s told, oh, now you’ve got to go and break this strike. Which he does because that’s his job and that’s what he’s been told to do.

But in his sort of personal diary he writes, I don’t really understand why these people shouldn’t be getting properly paid. They should be compensated for their work. So it’s quite interesting that kind of public private persona as well. So yeah they’re quite they were very involved.

Certainly both Brunels in the kind of day to day. But yeah their attitudes probably. Difference in the way that they responded to the people around them.

Hazel: And what about the public perception then, with this tunnel evolving and they must have been seeing adverts to, invest, et cetera.

Katherine McAlpine: So I think like anything new and different and a bit novel and there’s an equal mix of kind of fascination and frightening. And I think people really saw that they, we’ve got reports of the local vicar in his weekly sermon after one of the floods saying that’s what you get, for digging towards the devil.

And that, there was this real sense that hell was down there. Why are you going down there? And so some people really were quite frightened by it, thought it was really a bit beyond the pale and other people were just completely fascinated. So that we’ve got some, we’ve got some amazing accounts of.

People came to visit the Temps Tunnel because it was one of the ways that they generated income for the project. Mark Brunel didn’t like it. He was worried, interestingly, he was worried about the safety of the visitors. He thought this was quite a risky project. I don’t think we should be just letting you know civilians down here.

But the actress,  Fanny Kimbal. Came to visit and she was absolutely fascinated by the engineering that was taking place. And another person that your  listers might have heard of is  Anne Lister. Gentleman Jack from the TV series tried to bring a date to the Thames tunnel.

And the date wasn’t. I wasn’t keen. I think the date never turned up but Ann Lister went on her own and has written about the fascinating engineering that was happening. So there were lots of people who were really quite swept up in this exciting project.

Hazel: Are there any particular artifacts or maybe stories in the museum that you feel really capture that spirit or drama of the Thames Tunnel Project?

Katherine McAlpine: So I think we’ve got some fantastic we’ve got some fantastic kind of works on paper. And one of the things that, that isn’t on display yet, but will be is a, this sort of beautiful cardboard model. It’s hand handmade. And it shows the tunnel in progress. It shows the tunnelling shield complete with little, absolutely tiny about centimetre and a half miners and brick layers.

And, and their paper. They’re absolutely, they’re so delicate. And the one we have in our collection was Mark Brunels. But these were made and sold. There was a little guidebook that went with them that is on display in the museum. And they were sold to raise money for the project.

They were oh look, we’ve made this lovely shiny, the way that you might get a brochure now if you’re thinking about investing in something. Instead in eight, the 1820s, you get this sort of beautiful little paper model. And I just think that sort of captures. It, but it’s also this sort of stylised view of what it was like that doesn’t really capture the sort of grim reality.

And I suppose that’s one thing that all of the sort of images you get because of who produced them show this kind of relatively sanitized view. But we do have some amazing sketches as well that sort of show. The tunnel after the floods , that sort of gives you a sense of some of the sort of danger that they were dealing with.

Hazel: And how did the opening of this tunnel, if you’ve got this little shanty town, how did that happen? Turn and also the wider area of London effect once this tunnel was finally open.

Katherine McAlpine: So I think the important thing with the sort of tunnel finally being open after, after  18 years of construction and digging. Unfortunately even though it was always intended to be this kind of cargo tunnel to take horses and carts with cargo from one side of the river to the other in order to facilitate that, they needed to build what they refer to as the grand descents.

Shafts like we’ve got on the north and south side at the moment, but much bigger, which would’ve given you a much greater diameter for horses, horses, and carts to go. Go down. By the time they’d finished the project 18 years later there was neither the sort of finance available.

There’s the, the lenders, the investors were just like, no, we are not giving you any more money towards this project. It’s already taken enough of my money. There wasn’t enough money to purchase the land to do those grand ascents, but even if they had the money, the land had actually been sold.

Don’t ask me why they didn’t at the beginning of the project go, we need that land. Let’s buy it now. It was characteristic of the business decisions that they were making at that time. So because they didn’t build those defences, which meant that they could move cargo.

When it opened in 1843, the Thames Tunnel opened as a pedestrian foot tunnel. So not the cargo tunnel, it was meant to be you paid a penny to go through it, which is much less than the sort of cargo tolls that they’d been anticipating. So they needed to generate revenue some other way. So it opened to huge fanfare in 1843.

It was really exciting people had been waiting for. Hugely popular. But actually they needed other ways of generating income. So it became this underwater shopping arcade that sort of, you had people buying and selling wares.

It became this huge tourist attraction. And was really popular.

Hazel: And what about special events then? What was happening to get people down there?

Katherine McAlpine: So one of the other things that they did in order to make money and recoup these costs were they ran things called Fancy Faires. So they would have these sort of big, extravaganza type events with all sorts of victorian Entertainment including I think my there, there’s two that are favourites for me.

One is electricity, see that was such a novelty at this point, that was put on one of the posters as something to come and see. And a woman someone called the mysterious lady and she was a sort of mind reader type act. So she was a sort of proto Darren Brown in the Victorian era.

So all sorts of interesting sort of Victorian entertainments you could come and see in the tunnel.

Hazel: And what kind of inspiration did people take from this tunnel then? Did it have a knock on effect elsewhere in other engineering projects?

Katherine McAlpine: In terms of tunnelling, one of the questions that we get asked quite often, one, one of the things that we get asked at the museum is. The rather high tunnel. And we have to explain that the Thames Tunnel is now part of the wind rush line. It’s actually part of the overground network.

And the rather high tunnel came later and is the road tunnel. But what I think’s really interesting about the different tunnels under the Thames pertaining to London .

They took another generation for people to be ready to try to dig another tunnel onto the Thames. So there’s quite a good chunk of time between the Thames Tunnel being started and finished, and then people looking at the rather high tunnel, the Greenwich Foot tunnel. The Black Wall Tunnel, they were all completed within about 15 years of each other, but it took a good sort of 50 years between the temps tunnel being completed to someone going, okay.

I think we, I think we’re ready for this again, because it was, my take on it is that it was such a sort of undertaking and a bit of an ordeal that it took a long time for the next generation of tunnels to be dug. Today all tunnelling projects have this, their foundation was laid by Mark Brunel 200 years ago.

So the tunnel boring machines that made crossrail possible, that are making HS two possible, that made the channel tunnel possible. That’s all a sort of modern version of Mark Bruno’s tunnelling shield.

Hazel: That’s a really nice way to put it. I remember reading a bit of a stat on a press release that we in Britain are leading the tunneling engineering world. And we have the only apprenticeships for tunnelling on offer. There you go.

Katherine McAlpine: It’s good. It’s very important. We would, if you, I hope that, your listeners are after this thinking. Start to notice actually when they go under the river a little bit more. And actually the sort of engineering that goes into that.

Hazel: Actually that’s a really good point. So you are talking about a Victorian tunnel in which many trains, on the overground, go through it a day. What about any restoration or anything that’s been going on, or are we really on borrowed time?

Katherine McAlpine: Yeah, I think it’s the sort of last part of the story. So it, I always think of the sort of Thames tunnel of stories being so three chunks really. They’re constructed from the 1820s to 1843. There’s a sort of shopping arcade and fancy fairs kind of time, sort of 1843 to late 1860s.

And then in the 1860s it was sold to the London Metropolitan Railway. It got a second life. As a train tunnel, this is, this is in the very early days of the London Underground and steam trains. And so it was sold to the Metropolitan Railway. It became the East London line, which kind of ran.

From White Chapel to New Cross, so it’s not a very long line. And then in 2011 when the East London line became part of the overground it all connected up and there’s, now it is the kind of wind rush line. And I think something like 60,000 people go through it every single day, which is just a phenomenal amount.

In terms of restoration in the 1990s it was only in the 1990s, sorry, I should say that. The tunnel itself was recognised as a sort of historically important. Feature that it had been, it had trains running through it for over a hundred years by that point.

But no one has really given it much thought or and there were plans to put shock creek kind of concrete type material over the tunnel over Mark Brunels, fantastic tunnel. And it was only that I think the engineers were done on site at sort of 8am on the Monday morning and lasting on the Friday.

The Minister for Heritage signed a letter saying, please don’t put any shotcrete on, mark Brunel’s tunnel. So I think it is a shotcreted under the Thames in the section actually under the water. But the sections of the original tunnel on the sort of whopping or rather hide side are protected.

And you can, if you stand up Wapping, if you stand on the platform Wapping and look back towards the hive, you can just about see the double arch of Mark Brunel’s original tunnel.

Hazel: Ooh. I’ll tell you what gave me goosebumps: the 60,000 people a day going through the tunnel, and one of them could be listening to this podcast.

Katherine McAlpine: They might be listening to it now. That would be amazing.

If you are, just pop out or rather hi and come and say hi to us.

Hazel: There you go. What aspect of the tunnel’s history fascinates you most?

Katherine McAlpine: I just love that it’s this story of adaptability and kind of perseverance. And, continuing against all odds because it was such a challenging project. And then, it took so much longer than they thought it would. And, although they completed it and it, they managed to make something really amazing and unfortunately, both Mark and Isambard died before the tunnel was sold to the railway.

So they never saw, it’s kind of a second life. As a railway  tunnel. And I wonder how they would think, 200 years later after they started construction that oh, it’s being used by 60,000 people every single day. This tunnel has survived and has, it’s adapted and it’s become something else that’s really genuinely useful.

And that’s what I sort of love when people come into the museum and they ask them how they got there and they’re like, oh I just got on the Windrush line from White Tap. I’m like, you’ve been through the tunnel. You’ve already been through this fantastic tunnel.

And now find out about how it got there. So that for me, I think is the story that I think is just so interesting about it.

Hazel: And what about a particular object that really tells the most powerful story? What is there to see other than the shield model, which I think is absolutely fantastic. 

Katherine McAlpine: Yeah, I love all the stuff to do with the construction. I love all sorts of drawings and the models. But I think what I also think is just so fantastic are these paper peak shows. And we’ve got one in our, one in our collection that and these were things that were sold to raise money 

for the construction itself and gave this idea of what it was meant to look like. And we’ve got this absolutely brilliant one, which is quite rare ’cause it’s a double layered peak show. And the top layer shows you the river. So it shows you people on boats and some sort of ships.

But then underneath you can see the tunnel itself. You can see the people walking through having their conversations. And I just love that. I just, I think it just gives this really it gives you this real context of where the tunnel is, that it is under the river and sometimes you forget that.

Hazel: Yep.

Katherine McAlpine: But just, yeah, the amount of kind of energy and effort and engineering that has to go into taking something for granted, I think is quite lovely actually.

Hazel: Your team is very busy at the moment with the creation of a brand new exhibit opening on the 12th of September. Can you tell us a little bit more about that?

Katherine McAlpine: Absolutely. So we’re really excited about this because we wanted to ask the question about how Marc Brunel, born and  raised in France, had to leave because of the French Revolution, and end up digging a tunnel in Southeast London. How do you get from Ruan in Normandy to southeast London?

And I think that’s such an interesting kind of premise. And it means that we get to put on display some of our most beautiful objects and one of those objects, which I absolutely love. Is a pair of shoe buckles.

They’re silver with jewels on and they belonged to Mark Brunel. And I think they just give such an indication of his kind of personality and his character that, this man who built this kind of, this tunnel and this, this really gritty engineering project.

He loved a shiny shoe buckle. And it also really speaks to his political affiliations because he was a royalist. That’s one of the reasons why he had to leave France during the revolution and the shoe buckles were a sort of sign of his political affiliation.

Shoe Buckles that once belonged to Marc Brunel | Photo by Brunel Museum

Shoe Buckle that once belonged to Marc Brunel | Photo by Brunel Museum

Shoe Buckles that once belonged to Marc Brunel | Photo by Brunel Museum
And I, and the fact that we have those and these tiny little objects can tell such a big story, I think is just brilliant. I’m really excited to share those with our visitors.

Hazel: Fantastic. You have very kindly shared some photos which we’ll be putting on the show notes in the video and of course on the transcript page of the website Anyway, but of course you can go and see these super shiny buckles with some really wonderful, some of the oldest artefacts in the museum’s collection. In this exhibition, which is from the 12th of September to 15th of December 2025,  we’ve also got some films that we can enjoy.

Katherine McAlpine: Yeah. We’re also doing a series of film screenings. All about the French Revolution. So we’ve got. Liaisons. We’ve got Mary Antoinette and Napoleon. So that’s four weeks September, October, every Wednesday. And the brilliant thing about that is we are screening them in our tunnel shaft.

So the big structure that was sunk into the ground that made the whole thing possible is now our major event space. And you can come there and you can watch Mary Antoinette or Napoleon and understand just that amazing story of, how did all these events happening in a different country end up with kind of the world’s first underwater tunnel in southeast London.

Hazel: , And hopefully you’re gonna tell the love story between Mark and Sophia.

Katherine McAlpine: Oh, absolutely. Yes. So actually we’ll be doing some Valentine’s Day events in 2026. All about the love story between Mark and Sophia. I think that’s a whole other podcast. Their love story.

Hazel: I’m up for that!  All right. Katherine, thank you so much for joining us today. It just shows you, doesn’t it, how important the Thames Tunnel is, and we don’t really think about it. We just use it.

We’ve organised a special treat for our listeners — enjoy 50% off museum tickets with the code LDNHIST25.

RevolutionSeason | Photo by Brunel Museum

Brunel Museum Building in Rotherhithe | Photo by Hazel Baker

Jar made of thames clay | Photo by Hazel Baker

Thames tunnel book | Photo by Hazel Baker

View of Thames tunnel | Photo by Hazel Baker

Picture of time history of thames tunnel | Photo by Hazel Baker

We’ve organised a special treat for our listeners — enjoy 50% off museum tickets with the code LDNHIST25.