"The Eighth Wonder of the World": Design and Danger in Marc and Isambard Brunel's Thames Tunnel Project

During the first half of the nineteenth century, Londoners were galvanized by the construction and spectacular display of Marc and Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s Thames Tunnel project (1826 – 1865). The Thames Tunnel was the first subterranean structure in the world to exist underwater, a feat of engineering made possible by Marc Brunel’s tunneling shield innovation. Its construction site was the most popular site of industrial tourism in nineteenth-century London, with over 24 million people passing through during its lifespan. The visual culture surrounding the tunnel was equally prolific: it included watercolors, a pantomime, annual fairs, fresco exhibitions, peepshow souvenirs, and topographical drawings of the Tunnel in both cross-sectional and planar formats. This paper focuses on one such ink and watercolor drawing by the Brunels, which depicts the Tunnel’s planned carriageway descents as two large black spheres set into the Wapping and Rotherhithe neighborhoods. The drawing's ominous projection of a thwarted binocular opticality gives visibility to the frictions between old and new technologies, between avant-gardism and ruin, and between a capitalist structure and the repressive politics of a post-Napoleonic moment. The Thames Tunnel embodied key paradoxes of an early nineteenth-century modernity, modeling ideologies of both the Enlightenment and the darker cultural trends of the Romantic in its visual rhetoric. This presentation situates the Brunels’ Tunnel as a crucial moment of visual modernity, by analyzing the topographical drawing – and the cross-section – as a visual technology of power that was, by turns, a stabilizing force and an entropic, almost diabolical device.