Tunnels Exhibition at the Museum of London Docklands

London. Monday morning. Overrunning engineering works and signal problems at Woking causing sever delays into Waterloo - the station due to start a massive upgrade on 5th August for the rest of that month. Thankfully, where I live I have several ways of getting into London. Where there is a will there is a way round most problems and actually avoid them.

We had trip planned to the Docklands Museum near Canary Wharf today. With my usual route out it was down to consulting the tube map (several lines were also experiencing problems). But hey, the Northern Line was running real good! So a bus journey to our nearest Northern Line stop and straight through to London Bridge (avoiding Waterloo) and change onto the Jubilee Line. Brilliant!

I can master the tube system but not Canary Wharf. I'd lost my map of the place. I find it a nightmare place and it's not somewhere I'd elect to go to unless there was a good reason. There was this time. I wanted to visit the Tunnel exhibition at the Docklands Museum. We soon got lost once out of the station and had to double back, but once I saw the Crossrail building I knew where I was.

It was cool windy day - all those tall buildings I suppose, so not a pleasant walk through concrete and along the waterside. There is still massive building works going on. Will they ever be finished?

Gloomy Canary Wharf

The exhibition was excellent. Poor hubby had been round it about three times before I'd got round once! I got hooked on Crossrail when there was a series of TV programmes about it. I was fascinated by everything - the cutting equipment, the machine that places the white sections on the tunnel walls and ceiling, the deep shafts and the measuring equipment fixed to buildings near the shafts to monitor movement due to the work. I never thought engineering could be so absorbing! And then there were all the finds as they dug down through the layers of soil - medieval, Roman and pre-historic. The latter two are the most fascinating to me. The further back the better, but it's all so interesting. It's strange to think that once we had Woolly Mammoths wandering around London and there were many rivers that are now lost and built over.

As well as the pottery and rubbish from dumps there are the skeletons, some plague positive. The excavation at Liverpool Street revealed 3,300 burials. Everyone of them was recorded and they are trying to put names to them. Known as The New Churchyard it was part of the Old Bethlehem Burying Ground, later shortened to Bethlem and then Bedlam. Scientists are analysing the remains to find out as much as they can about what sort of life these people lived.

In with the Roman finds there coins, shoes, jewellery, chains, writing equipment and a cremation urn. Some of the work for Crossrail meant that some buildings had to be demolished. Before that happened the buildings were photographed and some of the photos are on show. What a shame some of these lovely buildings had to be destroyed. When I looked at the old photos of London before it was built up I felt a kind of nostalgia, or maybe loss for what was. I know the old rivers were polluted (before we had sewers) so they must have stunk to high heaven in places! In fact it was parliament not being able to stand the smell that got the sewers built - never mind about the poor who'd suffered with the smell long enough (nothing changes there!).

This exhibition visit was nicely timed as a couple of weeks ago I attended a one day class on Subterranean London in which we looked at lost rivers, tunnels, crypts, underground rooms, caves and the underground railway. I can see this is going to lead to some book reading and walking to some of the places we learned about to see what's left for the public to view (if you know where to look).

My great grandfather grew up near the Neckinger River in Bermondsey. This is now a lost river. It's been built over (there's an estate). It runs underground now and runs out into the Thames (see photo).The only place we could find from the times of great grandfather was an old leather work factory. Somewhere I do have a photocopy of the road my great grandfather lived in (acquired at the local history museum). It was a hot spot for cholera. It is also near the debtors prison where Charles Dickens' father was, and there are lots of references to him in the area (names of estates etc.). The book Oliver Twist is set there!

So, learning about my ancestors and the Crossrail Project has certainly started something!

The Neckinger River (looking back) taken from it's entry point into the River Thames