As to the psychogeography of the place, there are two aspects that stand out for me. There’s certainly always something strange about crossing a river in a city, and doing it by tunnel is completely different from doing it by bridge. The latter seems to tie the banks of the river together, whereas travelling by tunnel radically dissociates the two end-points: it’s the closest we can get to teleportation. At the southern tip of the Isle of Dogs we entered a kind of hyperspace and emerged in Greenwich.

The process of getting from one place to another appeared to be unrelated to the topography we could see from either end. This sense that a journey undertaken during a continuous interval of time has mapped us into a discontinuous portion of space — something we intuitively know can’t happen — has been noted before, in particular in relation to air travel. In this case we walk exactly the right distance but, as it were, in a different space — an echoing, constrained space bathed in artificial light, surrounded by crazed tiles and rusted iron. If you commute through the tunnel this effect must disappear; commuting is almost always about erasing the journey so as to make it as much like teleportation as possible.

The second thing is the texture of the place, which was mostly what we wanted to record on this occasion. The surfance of the tunnel is heavily weathered. Rust, wear and tear and small acts of vandalism are everywhere. Almost every square foot of surface in the place is covered in scars, from the large to the microscopic, left by the people who pass through it and the natural processes to which it is, like everything else, subject. This form of natural rustication gives the tunnel much of its present charm for urban Romanticizers, perhaps because it makes it similar to a living thing. I admit it would be a shame to see such a lovely patina of london foot-traffic disappear, but other things matter too: safety, utility, economy, efficiency. These things mattered to the tunnel’s original constructors, and it would seem unreasonable for us to complain if Greenwich Council pursues the same agenda.

The Greenwich Foot Tunnel is a fine piece of Edwardian industrial engineering that’s weathered its heavy usage rather elegantly, probably thanks to the choice of materials and the rather minimal design. Although very battered, it still doesn’t look shabby to me. The pictures we took are intended to record that — and especially some of the less picturesque details such as bolt-heads, makers’ marks etc — in case anything does change in the near future.

As an aside, this activity was apparently illegal, although nobody grumbled at us about it and I’d have grumbled back if they had.

You can see all of my pictures here and Mark’s far more professional ones here.