Building London's Underground

This book is about the civil engineering that created the London Underground, and the amazing feats of tunnelling that created the network of tunnels beneath the capital. Work started a little over 150 years ago, and continues today, but on a scale and with machinery that would be unrecognizable to the navvies who dug the Metropolitan Railway with picks and shovels. The stories of how the tunnels and stations were made are presented, roughly in chronological order. The aim is to trace the history of building the subterranean parts of the Underground, and the focus is on the innovation that occurred with each subsequent line or extension that opened, and so not every engineering event is included. Those who wonder just how engineers in late Victorian times managed to carve out tunnels through the London clay and make them meet to within an inch or so, using little more than plumb-lines, theodolites, and pick-axes should find the answers in these pages.