project47

  The Greenwich Foot-Tunnel is, for my mind, a site to be reckoned with. Its limitations are second to none. Yes, the prison is necessarily restrictive in terms of visitor access, but do not let the public nature of the tunnel deceive you: any project in here must not obstruct thoroughfare, must not harm or damage the original tiled surface of the walls, and cannot pose a safety risk in terms of combustibles in a confined space.

Limitations aside, as a project site, the tunnel is rich in terms of what it speaks to, both historically and socially. Links abound everywhere. Streaming form the tunnel’s very fabric, as if mirroring its primary function as a space of transit, are innumerable wormholes to Victorian and modernist worlds, imaginaries and utopias.

  Much like Benjamin’s arcades, the tunnel exists as a ruinous window upon an age of Victorian engineering splendour and industrial/imperial ambition.

The sense of linear assuredness of the tunnel speaks to an epistemological certainty in the straight line to deliver, quite literally, progress. Part tunnel, part trench, part tube station, part inverted glasshouse; the Greenwich tunnel speaks to an infantile age of high capital, dominated by invention, patents and manufacturing glory.

Alongside this ambition written into the very being of its structure, the tunnel’s adornment also calls out to a similar sensibility – the original tile work harking back to an early age of increased medicalization of public spaces. As much as the white tile stands for a growing awareness of the need for proper sanitation in hospitals, when taken outside of the hospital it also speaks to colonial ambition (the spread of Hygiene and Tropical Disease institutes in the colonies) as well as internal domestic order and control (the promotion and enforcement of a morality of cleanliness and social order through public hygiene).