Being the tube

In the London underground you are constantly told to mind the gap. Let's not mind it for a minute and visit the underground worlds of:

The Thames Tunnel is the first tunnel in the world to be build under water. That's right, with it's 400m length it crosses the Thames from Rotherhithe to Wapping (Jesus Christ, where do British people come up with their Names?!). 

As you see I am not making this up. 

The tunnel is used buy the overground today so it is mainly a tunnel with railways but on special occasions they open this to the public and show it. Why is this so interesting?

Not only because it looks like in the picture above (that could be a scene from some kind of post-apocalyptic movie, btw) but also because, being the first around this tunnel has quite a bit of history. Apparently it was the invention of the tunnelling shield (a protective structure that prevents all the soggy sub-thamesian (?) soil from falling on your head while you are digging) that enabled the previously failed attempts at tunnelling under water.

As you can imagine this was a rather expensive endeavour (of course it flooded sometime and the working conditions were beyond terrible) so in the end there was no money to do an entrance for vehicles and they had to leave it as a pedestrian entrance. Every human being that thinks about this for about 20 seconds will realise that this rendered the whole idea rather useless as you can imagine that there was not much use for a creepy equivalent of an ordinary bridge.

Apparently they tried everything: they opened a market (which after a year of success turned into some sort of creepy illegal underground meeting place (What??! Who would have seen that one coming?! Really??! Nooo!!)), they even relaunched it as a fair with circus people and artists after relocating the previous clientele to prison but still the income was sparse. The owners were therefore probably relieved when the british railway bought it off to build the railways through it, although it remained quite a monetary loss.

Be as it may, the trip was quite interesting and it was nice to see what the tunnel looked like. As you can tell from the last picture it was not like the regular ugly underground tunnels due to it's historic past (it was really unbelievable to imagine people walking along that same path but doing shopping or to think of the decorated walls with the dancers (there is actually a sketch in wikipedia that looks nice, I think: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/62/Thamestunnel.jpg). What a difference!