Building the Metropolitan Underground Railway

Building the Metropolitan Underground Railway – Craven Hill, London, 1866
📍 City of London, Greater London, England

This extraordinary image from 1866 captures a team of labourers working on the Metropolitan Underground Railway at Craven Hill, part of the earliest stages of what would become the London Underground — the first subway system in the world.

Steam-powered machinery, wooden scaffolding, and rows of shovels show the intensity of manual labour required to carve tunnels beneath the streets of Victorian London. These workers, clad in waistcoats, caps, and mud-covered boots, helped lay the physical foundations of a network that still carries millions today.

Craven Hill, near Paddington, was part of the westward expansion of the original line, just three years after its first opening in 1863. The “cut and cover” method used here involved digging vast trenches and then roofing them over, a process that disrupted traffic but enabled a revolution in urban mobility.

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