Island Gardens & the Greenwich Foot Tunnel

Why is it significant?

Stand at the railings of this little riverside garden on the tip of the Isle of Dogs and take in the view across the grey-green Thames: two white domes, long colonnades, a small white house tucked between them, and an old observatory on the green hill behind.

Key Facts

Open the walk

Stand at the railings of this little riverside garden on the tip of the Isle of Dogs and take in the view across the grey-green Thames: two white domes, long colonnades, a small white house tucked between them, and an old observatory on the green hill behind. You are looking at three centuries of British sea power, arranged like a stage set... and you have the best seat in the stalls.

The view is no accident. When Christopher Wren designed the great hospital for old sailors on the far bank, he split it into two halves so that the little Queen's House would keep its view down to the river. And around 1750 the Venetian painter Canaletto, then working in London, painted this very scene from this side of the water. His picture hangs today in the National Maritime Museum, a short walk from the place it shows. The garden around you opened to the public in 1895, and the view has been protected ever since.

Now turn to the round brick building with the glass dome. That is the northern entrance to the Greenwich Foot Tunnel, opened in 1902. Before it, thousands of dockers and shipwrights who lived in Greenwich crossed to the West India Docks by ferry, and a ferry could be stopped by fog, ice or a bad tide. The engineer Sir Alexander Binnie drove a cast-iron tube through the clay beneath the riverbed instead, about three hundred and seventy metres long and lined with white glazed tiles. It has carried walkers ever since.

Go down the spiral staircase and listen. Every footstep rings off the tiles. Near the northern end, the tunnel suddenly narrows, and the tiles give way to a thick lining of steel and concrete. That is a wartime scar: the repair of bomb damage from the Second World War. Commuters hurry through it every morning, most of them never wondering why the walls close in around them just there.

So follow them. Walk under the Thames, climb out through the twin domed rotunda on the south bank, and you will find yourself almost at the foot of a tall black ship with gilded carving on her stern, the most famous sailing ship in London, moored so close to the tunnel that she seems to be waiting for you.