Obviously
everyone knows about the Williamson
Tunnels, very very dear to Liverpudlians’ hearts.. no body
has Williamson, this is our unique element. Except to say, he wasn’t
a Liverpudlian - he was a Warrington lad, came to Liverpool, fell
in love, earned a fortune, what more could you want?
Traditionally,
bridewells and police stations are linked by tunnels. The most spectacular
of these are outside the Town Hall.
 |
| High
Park Street Reservoir |
What
about the story of slaves being taken down to the docks through
tunnels underground around the castle? Well, there is such a tunnel
and it runs down the length of Water Street. And you can actually
see little markers in the street. It was never meant to take slaves,
though, it was probably some sort of open sewer.
Probably
most of our existing tunnels centre on railways and that’s because
Liverpool is a hilly place. The result was that when they took the
railway through to Crown Street, they had to dig tunnels, and of
course how many Liverpudlians have walked down Tunnel Road and not
even thought about whether there were tunnels there? There are,
whole myriads of them, and nothing to do with Williamson.
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| The
construction of the Queensway Tunnel, opened by His majesty,
King George V, July 1934 |
Regarding
the two Mersey Tunnels,
the old one was largely hand dug. Underneath they were going to
have another tunnel, they even had diagrams showing buses and trams
and things going along, but it wasn’t a real prospect.
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| This
well was discovered near the Royal Court theatre in 1965 |
There
are all sorts of branch tunnels and in particular where the ventilation
shafts are there is massive space and there’s one vehicle
there. It looks like something out of Doctor Who, some sort of spider
thing, which can actually run along rails to serve the utilities.
The
early water companies had a stranglehold on trade, charged exorbitant
rates but actually could not meet our needs, and so they dug some
enormous wells that went down
something like a thousand feet.
It
is fresh water, as long as you don’t pump too much - if you do,
the salt water will come in. The big wells still exist and alongside
them are very large service reservoirs which store the water - by
and large they are not used.
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