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The museums, the machines and the men and women who worked it out: laboratories kept as they were, beam engines under steam, the tunnel, the barrier, the roofs, and the plaques on the houses where the ideas came.
The first tube railway in the world, 1870, under the Thames from Tower Hill: all that is left above ground is a round kiosk by the Tower ticket office.
Engineering landmarksFree
Peter Barlow and James Henry Greathead drove a seven-foot iron tube under the river in under a year using the shield Greathead had devised, and from August 1870 ran a cable-hauled wooden carriage through it twelve passengers at a time. It lost money within months; by Christmas the same year the rails were out and it was a foot tunnel with a halfpenny toll. Tower Bridge opened free alongside it in 1894 and the tunnel gave up in 1898. It now carries water mains and cables, and the Greathead shield is the ancestor of every tube tunnel since.
The round brick kiosk on Tower Hill, beside the Tower ticket office, is the northern entrance shaft and the only part you can see. It is not the original: the London Hydraulic Power Company, which had bought the tunnel for its mains, rebuilt it in 1926 and put the company's name and the 1868 construction date on the lettering, which is why a building of the 1920s appears to announce itself as Victorian.
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Data is compiled from public sources including OpenStreetMap, under the ODbL. Hours change often, so check before making a journey.