The engineers Marc and his son Isambard Kingdom Brunel would have approved, the director of the Brunel Museum Robert Hulse reflected, as he removed the legs from a Bechstein grand piano and helped wrestle it down a twisting staircase into the massive iron shaft they sank into the banks of the Thames 190 years ago.
The space they designed as their Grand Entrance Hall, which in the early 19th century led the way down to an engineering feat described as the eighth wonder of the world – the first ever road tunnel under a river – has now become one of the capital’s most dramatic performance spaces. It has been fitted with lighting and sound equipment, but left with the scarred walls where the Brunels’ original staircase was ripped out, still scorched with soot from the years it spent as a ventilation shaft for steam trains running through the tunnel.
The newly created access is via a ramp around the outside of the shaft, then a new oak and steel staircase designed by Jerry Tate of Tate Harmer. He said they tried to keep the space as raw as possible, preserving every possible scrap of the Brunels’ work, now Grade II* listed.
High up on the wall, there is a little barred entrance passage which has its own place in engineering history: when there was a collapse during the construction, the river burst through the half-excavated tunnel and up the shaft, killing six men. Isambard Kingdom Brunel, then a teenager, was washed so high up the shaft that a foreman dragged him out of the water by his coat collar. He was more dead than alive, but survived to build marvels including the Great Western Railway, the Clifton suspension bridge and the SS Great Britain.
It turns out that their enormous shaft, 50 feet (15m) in diameter and 50ft deep, built on land and allowed to sink into the ground under its own weight – “a giant pastry cutter”, Hulse said – has a superb acoustic.
The piano and the two voices of singers from Popup Opera will give two performances of Bellini’s I Capuleti e i Montecchi there next week. Performances will have regular interesting rumbling noises though: London Overground trains still run through the Brunel tunnels, the oldest part of the London Transport network. “We specialise in performing in unusual spaces,” Popup Opera founder Clementine Lovell said, “and as soon as we saw this we knew it was for us.”
Hulse thinks the Brunels would have been delighted. As so often, their project didn’t quite go as planned: the engineering was genius, the finances less so. The twin tunnels were intended for horse-drawn freight, but the money ran out before the ramps twining down the shaft walls could be built. Only pedestrians could get into the tunnel, and so, Hulse explained, in the years until the arrival of the steam trains, “it became a kind of underwater shopping mall, banquet hall and fun fair – and, after dark, a knocking shop.”
“It’s been fun restoring it to what it was in its first 20 years, a palace of delight and entertainment – though not the knocking shop bit, of course.”
