Passage: The Channel Tunnel – A Historical Perspective

The Channel Tunnel has had an environmental and economical impact not just on Nord-Pas de Calais, France and Kent, Britain but also on other areas of Europe. The history of proposals to build a fixed link through the 27 kms of sea separating the UK from France can be traced back to 1751. No matter how elaborate the arguments for or against the Channel Tunnel, the United Kingdom has always had to grapple with the more profound, psychological question of losing its 'island status'. This led historians to observe that for the UK, the Channel Tunnel amounted to more than a mere engineering project; it was a 'state of mind' describing the UK's traditional ideological insularity. In France, the attitude towards the Tunnel has always been pragmatic and supportive. It is this mixture of pragmatism and nationalism, coupled with the complexity and financial commitment needed to build a fixed link, that makes the Channel Tunnel a fascinating case-study of Anglo-French relations in modern times.

While, in the rest of this work, we shall seek to evaluate the major milestones in the history of the Tunnel and clarify some of the arguments for and against its construction, in this segment we look at a brief account of the historical evolution of the Tunnel, in order to understand why progress on the project had been so modest throughout much of the 19th and 20th centuries and explain how and why in 1986 the state of inertia was broken.

In 1751, a Frenchman named Nicholas Desmaret presented a report to Louis XV which claimed that Britain and France were at one time geographically linked by a spit of land. Desmaret's report suggested that a direct link between these two great European powers could be restored by building a bridge, a tunnel or a dike. However, Desmaret's ideas amounted to little more than an expression of interest. The first serious proposal to construct a fixed link between Britain and France was designed by Albert Mathieu-Favier in 1802. The Peace of Amiens, signed on March 25, 1802, temporarily ended Britain's conflict with revolutionary and Napoleonic France and enabled Mathieu-Favier to pursue his plans for a tunnel under the Channel. Mathieu-Favier, a mining engineer, proposed a tunnel for stagecoaches to be built in two 15 km sections on either side of an artificial island (where coaches could change horses) constructed on the Varne Sandbank, an area of shallow water halfway between England and France. He proposed illumination by oil lamps and ventilation by a series of chimneys projecting above the surface of the Channel.

Mathieu-Favier was successful in bringing his project to the attention of Napoleon Bonaparte, who in 1802 was the first Consul of France. Napoleon was impressed with the project and at the Peace of Amiens discussed the fixed link idea with the prescient Whig leader, Charles James Fox. Both Napoleon and Fox supported Mathieu-Favier's project to build a Channel Tunnel. Notwithstanding this initial enthusiasm for a cross-Channel fixed-link, the project was abandoned following the resumption of war between England and France in 1803.

From Napoleon’s time to the mid-19th century, more proposals for a fixed link appeared. Geotechnical investigations evidenced the presence of chalk strata adequate for tunnelling. In 1839, Aimé Thomé de Gamond, a Frenchman, performed the first hydrographical surveys on the Channel. In the 1880s, undersea tunnelling actually started at Shakespeare Cliff, England and Sangatte, France, but was stopped for political reasons. In 1974, a tunnel scheme was stopped for political reasons on the British side.

In 1979, the European Channel Tunnel Group initiated studies for various private railway tunnel schemes. A competition was organized by the French and British governments in 1985. Four main projects were submitted: Euroroute, a hybrid solution of a bridge-tunnel-bridge, Europont, a suspended bridge, Transmanche Express, four bored tunnels allowing both rail and road traffic, and Eurotunnel, a rail shuttle service for road vehicles with provision for through-trains, using three tunnels, two for rail and one for maintenance. The concession to build and operate the fixed link across the Channel was awarded on 20th January 1986 to France-Manche and Channel Tunnel Group subsequently to become Eurotunnel (ET) and Transmanche Link (TML) in March 1986.