Boring Postcards

Boring Postcards
The foundation texts of this blog.

Friday, 8 January 2016

Mersey Tunnel Junction Chamber, showing main and branch tunnel

This is a rather dark and miserable one, google maps needs to work on their low light road capturing because the Mersey Tunnel looks like a location from The Road in the image below.

So here's the original, a high point in the book I think.

Mersey Tunnel Junction Chamber, showing main an branch tunnel 

Another nice and easy one to find.  This is now known as the Queensway Tunnel (or Birkenhead Tunnel) as a further tunnel (the Kingsway Tunnel) has now also been constructed.  

 

It opened in 1934 and wikipedia has the following to say about it:

"The tunnel entrances, toll booths and ventilation building exteriors were designed by architect Herbert James Rowse, who is frequently but incorrectly credited with the whole civil engineering project. Their decoration is by Edmund Thompson. These are Grade II listed buildings. 

More than 1.2 million tons of rock, gravel, and clay were excavated; some of it used to build Otterspool Promenade. Of the 1,700 men who worked on the tunnel during the nine years of its construction, 17 were killed. At the time of its opening it was the longest road tunnel in the world, a title it held for 14 years until the opening of the Vielha Tunnel in Spain in 1948, though it remained the longest underwater tunnel as of 1955. 

The tunnel, which cost a total of £8 million, was opened on 18 July 1934 by King George V; the opening ceremony was watched by 200,000 people."


And this is what it looks like now.  As you might imagine, not a huge number of changes, though the lighting seems to have got a lot worse.

 

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