INTERVIEW | KEITH BOWERS
throughout the rush hours without closing down the stations or interrupting people on their daily commute must have been every bit as complex as the actual digging. “London Underground has long valued
what they call ‘lost customer hours’. That means they plan work to avoid disrupting people’s journey as much as possible,” he says. “And in those big station jobs, particularly the ones in the centre of the city, an awful lot of work goes into working out how to do it with the minimum of disruption. “At Bank, for example, we didn’t start where the jobsite was. We put a shaft
down and tunnelled in to the site to minimise the amount of movement we had to do right in the centre. “For the big urban jobs there are two key
problems that you tend to run into every time. One is getting through the planning process – that can be hard work. And the other big one for a tunnelling job is usually not how to get your equipment in but how to bring the spoil out. The largest volume of material you are moving is generally the spoil, and an enormous pile of spoil in the middle of the city is a bit of an embarrassment. If you can solve those two issues, of consent and of getting the
spoil away, you have actually addressed a lot of the challenges. “So consent is the first hurdle: balancing
long-term public utility against cost, environmental damage, what people who live there want, what people who don’t live there but will use the infrastructure want, and so on. There are obvious considerations, and also less obvious ones. “The business case for the Lower
Thames Crossing has a number of positive impacts, but obviously one of them is around the relief of the existing transport system,” he says. “One of the things people don’t realise is that a very high proportion of the traffic across the Thames is freight. It is heavy goods vehicles rather than cars; and that’s partly because an awful lot of the UK’s freight actually comes in through the ports in the South East. The Channel Tunnel and Dover feed in heavy goods vehicles that aren’t necessarily going to Kent or Surrey. They could be going to the West Midlands or somewhere to the north; so there is a big demand for freight movement across the Thames. “But if you look at the Thames Estuary
Above: LUL hand tunnelling 34 | February 2026
a bit more widely you have in some ways quite similar areas each side of it, in Kent and in Essex. You might expect there to be quite a lot of movement of people between those places, of people going to work or whatever. The freight doesn’t have much choice. It pretty much has to get across the Thames. But people do have a choice: they make that choice by not getting a job the other side of the river. And yet Tilbury on the north bank
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