Text 1: Forty metres beneath the high street, by Maya Ushaw

An original contemporary magazine article.

The lift down the shaft takes ninety seconds, and when the doors open I step into a long grey cavern of wet concrete. Lights run away in a straight line into the dark, and lying along them, like a train that has forgotten how to move, is Clementine: a tunnel boring machine one hundred and fifty metres long, named, as tunnelling tradition demands, after a woman.

Somewhere at the far end of her, a cutting head seven metres across is grinding through clay at roughly the speed of a minute hand. On a good day Clementine advances fifteen metres. On a bad day, when she meets flint or a forgotten well, she may manage two.

‘People imagine it’s loud and dramatic,’ says Dani Asante, who steers the machine from a cabin that looks more like the flight deck of a plane than anything with a shovel in it. ‘Mostly it’s screens. If I’m bored, everything’s going right.’ One monitor shows the pressure at the cutting face; another shows the direction of the drive to a fraction of a millimetre. Next spring this tunnel must meet a second one, dug from the opposite direction, beneath the railway station. If the two ends miss by more than a few centimetres, Dani says cheerfully, she will never hear the end of it.

Behind her cabin, a robotic arm lifts curved concrete segments, each weighing three tonnes, and slots them together into the rings that form the tunnel wall. The clay Clementine chews travels back on a conveyor belt to the shaft, where it is hauled to the surface and driven away to raise the level of flood-prone farmland.

It is warm down here, and the air tastes of diesel and damp earth. The crew of fourteen work twelve-hour shifts, eat their sandwiches in a steel container fitted with a microwave, and are tested for alcohol before every shift. Nobody has been seriously hurt in the eighteen months since digging began, a record chalked on a board at the bottom of the shaft and updated every morning.

When I return to the surface, the high street is exactly as I left it: buses, coffee queues, a man arguing with a parking warden. Not one of them knows that, forty metres beneath their feet, a woman is calmly steering a machine through the dark towards a target she cannot see.

Text 2: The works of the new underground railway, by A Special Correspondent

An original newspaper report written in a nineteenth-century voice; a period simulation, not an archival document.

In this newspaper report, written in 1862, a journalist describes the digging of an underground railway beneath a city street.

Whoever wishes to understand what is meant in our age by the word ‘improvement’ should walk, as I did on Tuesday evening, the length of Greystone Road while the works of the new underground railway are in progress. For half a mile the street has simply ceased to exist. In its place is a trench some forty feet wide and as deep as a house, its sides held back by a forest of timber props, and spanned at intervals by rough bridges of planks over which the public is permitted to pick its way, at its own risk.

Below, by the glare of gas flares and tar torches, some hundreds of navvies labour without pause. The ring of picks, the rumble of barrows, the snorting of the steam engines which pump out the water as fast as it rises, and the shouts of the drivers urging their horses up the muddy ramps with loads of earth, combine in a din which no description can convey. At the nearer end, bricklayers were already turning the great arches which are to form the roof of the tunnel, after which, we are promised, the road will be laid again upon the top, and the omnibuses will rumble over the heads of the passengers beneath.

The shopkeepers of Greystone Road do not share the general enthusiasm. A draper has placed in his window a placard reading ‘Business as Usual, in Spite of the Railway’, though I saw no one able to reach his door. A water main burst last week and flooded every cellar on the north side.

I spoke with one of the navvies, a broad, good-humoured fellow from Lincolnshire, who told me that the wages were good, five shillings a day, and the beer better. A fortnight ago, he added, a man of his gang had been crushed by a fall of earth. He spoke of it as he might of the weather.

I confess I came away with my boots clogged with clay to the ankle and my mind divided. I am persuaded of the courage of these men. I am not yet persuaded that respectable persons will consent to be carried through a sewer in the smoke of an engine.

Both of these texts are about digging tunnels beneath a city.

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• what the writers say about the work of tunnelling
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