London’s underground maze

By Clare Clark

Thanks in large part to Victor Hugo, the subterranean tunnels of Paris have long exerted a pull on the imagination, drawing tourists underground since the 1850s. The same is not true of London, though its underground maze is no less intricate. Perhaps this is because so much of it was the creation of the Victorians, for whom subterranean London represented not the shadowy underbelly of the capital but rather a thoroughly modern blend of technological innovation and national pride. From Brunel’s Thames Tunnel, the first thoroughfare to run beneath a river, to Bazalgette’s pioneering sewers and the Metropolitan Railway, the world’s first underground transport system, London’s subterranean networks were marvels of civic engineering, literally breaking new ground.

And yet the tunnels were not all new. Many of Bazalgette’s sewers followed ancient rivers, tributaries of the Thames and the Lea, which, as the villages clustered along their banks spread and merged, had been built over and buried. Even in medieval times these rivers were far from pure; as early as 1290, the monks of Whitefriars complained to the king about the "putrid exhalations of the Fleet", choked and polluted by the detritus of the leather tanneries, cloth dyers and tripe-dressers upstream.