Building London’s Underground – From Cut and Cover to Crossrail

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Building London’s Underground – From Cut and Cover to Crossrail
This book is about the civil engineering that created the London Underground, and mostly about the amazing feats of tunnelling that created the network of tunnels beneath the capital. The 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. In the chapters that follow, 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. There is little about the parts of the Underground that are on the surface: these were built using methods that were tried and tested by the time that these lines were made. But 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.