Qualla: Blackwall Tunnel

Blackwall Tunnel: Introduction

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Poliphilo, CC0. The diggers found a human skeleton with a stake driven through its middle, and beside it an elephant's tusk. Neither belonged in east London, certainly not under the Thames mud in the 1890s, but the men kept digging anyway. They were sinking the Blackwall Tunnel by the new Greathead shield method, and the bones and ivory went into a curiosity drawer somewhere while the work pressed on. When the Prince of Wales opened the single bore in 1897, lit by three rows of incandescent street lights and lined with iron rings cast in Glasgow, it became the easternmost permanent crossing of the Thames in London - a place where two-fifths of the city's population finally had something other than ferries and distant bridges to choose from.

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Image: Poliphilo | CC0

Blackwall Tunnel: A Victorian Wonder, A Victorian Compromise

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit UggBoy♥UggGirl [ PHOTO // WORLD // TRAVEL ], CC BY 2.0. The tunnel got its odd, snaking course because the engineers had no choice. The bore had to land at Northumberland Wharf on the north bank and Ordnance Wharf on the south, and somewhere along the way it had to dodge a sewer beneath Bedford Street. So the tunnel bent. It still ben...

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Image: UggBoy♥UggGirl [ PHOTO // WORLD // TRAVEL ] | CC BY 2.0

Blackwall Tunnel: Twin Bores Under the Tide

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Mark Towning from London, England, CC BY 2.0. By the 1930s, with motor traffic multiplying and the East End importing and exporting through the docks, the Victorian bore was strangling. An MP for Dartford complained in 1930 that heavy lorries between Essex and Kent had nowhere downstream to cross. Parliament authorised a sec...

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Image: Mark Towning from London, England | CC BY 2.0

Blackwall Tunnel: A Bomb at 12:40

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Christine Westerback, CC BY-SA 2.0. On 18 January 1979, an anonymous voice phoned the Press Association: the Provisional IRA had planted a bomb in the Blackwall Tunnel, set to go off at midnight. The Metropolitan Police were inside searching when the device detonated at 12:40 a.m. - not in the tunnel itself, as the...

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Image: Christine Westerback | CC BY-SA 2.0

Blackwall Tunnel: The Bottleneck That Won't Quit

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit David Dixon, CC BY-SA 2.0. For decades, the Blackwall Tunnel has been one of London's most reliable sources of misery. A TfL study in 2009 found that the 1.7-kilometre approach to the northbound bore took about nineteen minutes in rush hour - roughly eleven minutes of delay per kilometre. A tidal-flow syst...

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Image: David Dixon | CC BY-SA 2.0

Blackwall Tunnel: The End of Free Crossing

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Pete Chapman, CC BY-SA 2.0. On 7 April 2025, after more than 125 years of free passage, the Blackwall Tunnel started charging tolls. The newly opened Silvertown Tunnel just under a mile to the west, the long-debated reinforcement of east London's river crossings, opened on the same day and at the same price...

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Image: Pete Chapman | CC BY-SA 2.0