Edge Hill Cutting, Liverpool (1990)

When trains approach Liverpool’s Lime Street Station from Edge Hill, it’s possible to discern oddities in the smooth sandstone surface of the dank, vertical-sided cutting.  The line, which was originally in tunnel, runs through a very strange part of the city, honeycombed with what are now called the Williamson Tunnels.

Joseph Williamson was born, possibly in Warrington, on March 10th 1769.  At the age of eleven he arrived in Liverpool looking for work, and made his fortune as a tobacco and snuff merchant and built speculative housing at the then picturesque settlement of Edge Hill.

Standing on the edge of a slope looking down on the River Mersey, these houses were built with arched cellars, which were extended above ground as the natural contour dropped some twenty feet towards Smithdown Lane.

Quite how this development led to the construction of the first man-made caves in the sandstone is unclear.  Possibly Williamson recruited workmen from the droves of unemployed that came seeking work, particularly after the end of the Napoleonic wars in 1815.  Perhaps he wished to offer financial support without giving charity.

Legend has it that when in the 1830s Robert Stephenson engineered the first railway tunnel from Edge Hill to Lime Street, the navvies unexpectedly broke through the floor of their works and were confronted by Williamson’s men going about their own tunnelling business.  Stephenson’s men, convinced they had penetrated into Hell, apparently fled.  Eventually, Robert Stephenson and Joseph Williamson met, and the young engineer was sufficiently impressed by the scale and quality of the Edge Hill tunnels to pass on some of Williamson’s workforce to his railway contractors.

At Williamson’s death in 1840 all work on the tunnels stopped, and the owners of the surrounding property quickly took opportunities to break through to dump rubbish in the voids beneath their houses.  The opening out of the rail tunnel into Lime Street sliced through the entire network, including a triple-deck tunnel, evidence of which can still be discerned with difficulty in the walls of the cutting.  Over the following decades the accessible spaces were filled in, and to this day the foundations of new building operations on the former Williamson estate are customarily disrupted by unexpected voids.

By the late twentieth century Williamson’s works had been largely forgotten, except as apocryphal local stories.  In the mid-1990s a group of enthusiasts formed to rediscover and where possible preserve the Edge Hill caves, and to take practical steps to make them accessible to the public.

Three sites are currently under investigation, on Smithdown Lane, Mason Street and Paddington.  A previously unknown entrance to the system was discovered during the construction of the Williamson Student Village.  At Smithdown Lane the Williamson Tunnels Heritage Centre opened in September 2002, utilising the former Corporation stables that abut one part of the tunnel complex.

Mersey Tunnel Queensway: Central Avenue

When you drive through the two Mersey tunnels, the 1934 Queensway and the 1971 Kingsway, you’re being watched – and cared for – by a small team of professionals, many cameras and, in Queensway, a great deal of 1930s over-engineering.

The Mersey Tunnel Tour is the public’s opportunity to see behind the scenes of Queensway, and to understand that it’s much more than a hole in the ground.

The tour takes visitors from the top of the George’s Dock Building, which is essentially an elegant Art Deco fan-assisted chimney with an office block attached, to the safety refuges below the road-deck.  And, of course, back to the surface.

It’s a moderately strenuous two hours, and because the ventilation station is a dusty, though not dirty working building, it’s a good idea to go dressed for gardening rather than tourism.  (On the 2011 Liverpool’s Heritage tour, we came straight from St George’s Hall and may have been a little over-dressed.)

The 1920s designers couldn’t be sure how the finished tunnel would work practically.  At the time it was the longest under-river bore in the world.  Furthermore, traffic was changing as horse-drawn carts and electric trams began to give way to motor vehicles.

In these circumstances, especially in a two-way tunnel, ventilation was crucial, and could not be skimped.  The later Kingsway is in fact two unidirectional bores, so the traffic itself acts as a piston, pushing foul air through.  Queensway has six ventilation stations;  Kingsway needs only two.  In each case, the fresh air has to be pumped in at either end:  after all, there’s a river in the middle.

The party-piece on the tour is to see one of the 22ft-diameter fans start up, high in the George’s Dock building.  These are the original 1934 fans, built into the building.  Even at the lowest of four speed-settings, they’re distinctly draughty.

And they work.  When you stand beside the traffic lanes below the river, the air is remarkably fresh.

Another resonant experience is to stand below the road-deck on Central Avenue, an empty corridor intended for double-deck electric trams to connect the Liverpool and Birkenhead systems.

The original specification assumed that the road tunnels would carry 3,000 vehicles per hour, travelling at an average speed of 15mph while maintaining a distance of 100ft apart in four lanes.  Down below, an endless procession of double-deck trams, each carrying perhaps sixty people, could have shifted many more thousands.

Of course, it didn’t work out that way.

In a different age of faster, cleaner road vehicles with far better brakes than between the Wars the ventilation system has a much easier time, yet carries enough capacity to cope with any foreseeable emergency such as a blockage or fire.

One of the benefits of the Mersey Tunnel Tour is the reassurance of seeing how efficiently motorists are looked after if the traffic in the tunnel stops in its tracks.

Not that most people give an emergency a second thought as they breeze between Liverpool and the Wirral, listening to their car radios.  And not realising why they can use their radio in the tunnel.

Booking a Mersey Tunnel tour requires premeditation:  e-mail to tours@merseytravel.gov.uk.

For further background information on the Queensway Tunnel, see http://www.cbrd.co.uk/indepth/queenswaytunnel.