The Tunnel of Love: Most new roads go billions over-budget and bring out the eco-warriors. But this one has drivers and tree-huggers united in joy
You might have thought someone was offering a free holiday or a front row seat for Olympic opening night. Why else would tens of thousands of people stay glued to the internet through the night in the hope of snapping up a ticket?
Demand for places was so great that the website crashed the moment it opened. When it managed to reappear, all 6,600 tickets were snapped up within hours. Many times that number were left furious at missing out on what some have described — in all sincerity — as the ‘opportunity of a lifetime’.
So, what was this great prize? What was this real-life equivalent of a golden ticket to Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory?
Full speed ahead: Robert Hardman at the Devil's Punchbowl tunnel, ahead of its opening in July
Actually, it was merely the opportunity to stroll through a building site. And what’s more, each of this weekend’s 6,600 walkers who set off through the new tunnel on the A3 at Hindhead, Surrey, were charged £6 for the privilege. Considering the entire thing has been financed by the taxpayer already, one might wonder why they all bothered.
Yet, this is no ordinary construction project. It is, in fact, Britain’s most ambitious tunnelling project since the Channel Tunnel. It’s actually a pair of record-breaking, 1.3 mile, 70mph road tunnels — one north bound, one south bound — underneath one of southern England’s prettiest beauty spots.
Not only has the project managed to come in ahead of time and slightly below its £371 million budget, but it is considerably cheaper than the tunnel which it supersedes in the record books as the longest ‘underland’ road tunnel in Britain. What’s more, it has united everyone from lorry drivers to petrol-slurping boy racers to the fluffy bunny wing of the Green movement. They are all singing its praises.
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The international civil engineering profession has just given it the tunnelling equivalent of an Oscar. And as for the local residents, it is no exaggeration to call it a life-changer. Many of them have spent a large part of their adult lives sitting in traffic jams at one of England’s most tiresome bottlenecks. Not for much longer.
This thing could shave up to half an hour off the time it takes to get from London to Portsmouth and the South Coast. Over time, it is expected to save the economy £1 billion in time-wasting, thumb-twiddling and road rage.
And when it finally opens to traffic in few weeks’ time, it will bring to an end the longest-running bypass dispute in British transport history.
'Once-in-a-lifetime': Some of the 6,600 who walked through the tunnel this weekend
Civil servants were arguing about this problem as far back as 1936, the year that George V died, so to call the solution overdue is an understatement. Anyone who has ever been late for a ferry to France or the Isle of Wight will know what a pain the A3 has been all these years.
All in all, it is not so surprising to find a party atmosphere down
here in the half-light amid the diggers and cherrypickers and
hard-hatted platoons installing light bulbs and signs and ventilation
fans.
The route from London to Portsmouth has been a vital one
since the creation of the Royal Navy. Yet travellers have always had to
contend with a weird and wild bit halfway down in the hills around
Hindhead on the Surrey-Hampshire border.
The Victorians used
to call the area ‘Little Switzerland’ because of its altitude, its
plunging, pine-covered valleys and its perceived health-giving
properties.
There is still a memorial to a sailor murdered
there in 1786 as he returned to his ship. The three brigands who killed
him were hanged and then strung up to rot on what is still called Gibbet
Hill — one of the highest and bleakest in the South.
The famous Georgian writer and radical, William Cobbett, grew up
nearby and called it ‘the most villainous spot that God ever made’ and
tried to avoid it at all costs. And it is dominated by a huge natural
amphitheatre which God-fearing ancients labelled the Devil’s Punchbowl.
For as long as anyone can remember, the London-Portsmouth road, now the A3, has clung to the side of this dramatic canyon — and still does. The A3 is motorway and dual carriageway all the way from the capital to the coast, except for this solitary stretch where all the traffic is squeezed down to a single-lane, meandering country road.
And everything just grinds to a halt a little further on at a set of traffic lights in Hindhead, next to the house where Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wrote The Hound Of The Baskervilles.
And it’s been like that pretty much since Conan Doyle’s day because no one has been able to come up with a workable alternative.
Back in the early Eighties, a young civil engineer called Paul Arnold was part of a Department for Transport team charged with plotting a solution to the Hindhead problem. He spent several years working on yet another new road scheme only to see his plan abandoned like all the others before it.
Members of the public who were allocated a ticket in a popular draw took the chance to walk through one of the great British engineering projects of modern times
A combination of cost and local opposition made it unviable. The eco-warriors — remember Swampy and co? — would have been all over it.
Finally, in 1993, the government started exploring a tunnel option. It was another eight years before the idea got the go-ahead and a further seven years before the first excavator started boring its way into the first bit of Surrey hillside in February 2008. At the same time, several miles of new road would have to be built to link the tunnel to the existing route.
Three years on, Mr Arnold, now 61, is extremely proud to be the senior project manager on what the Highways Agency regards as one of its great projects of modern times.
‘It will be a very, very satisfying moment when it opens,’ this modest, studious man tells me as he takes me on a guided tour. ‘To have the local community and all the environmentalists on our side really has been a major achievement.’
It was a particularly proud moment when the contractors, Balfour Beatty, picked up the 2010 International Tunnelling Award at London’s Grosvenor House last December. More than 4,300 individuals have now worked on a project which, at times, has taken community relations and eco-friendliness to the realms of comedy.
What has really pleased the environmental lobby is that the existing road around the Devil’s Punchbowl will disappear completely.
No sooner had the builders started constructing a new underpass at one of the tunnel approaches than a wagtail started building a nest in it. Most builders would probably have checked no one was looking and shooed the thing away. In this case, work on the underpass was shelved for a month to allow the wagtail to finish its business.
Mr Arnold explains he has installed dormouse bridges and even hired wildlife contractors to shift affected reptiles — ‘179 in total including lizards, slow worms and adders’. Then there is all the rabbit and badger fencing along the approaches.
The 737,000 cubic metres of earth which has been dug out to make the tunnel has stayed on site to create embankments and to bury the present A3.
What has really pleased the environmental lobby is that the existing road around the Devil’s Punchbowl will disappear completely. It’s all National Trust land and, very soon, the public will have the free run of a 1,500-acre canyon without having to dodge an overcrowded road carrying 30,000 vehicles per day.
Many locals wanted to retain the old road as an emergency route, but Paul Arnold points out that if one tunnel is blocked, the other one can switch to two-way traffic in a matter of minutes. And by abandoning the old road, the project satisfied all the environmental lobbies.
The Hindhead tunnel will be the longest ‘underland’ road tunnel in Britain (the two tunnels under the Mersey are longer but travel under the sea). It narrowly beats East London’s Limehouse Link tunnel which became Britain’s most expensive bit of road after it opened in 1993 at a cost of £450 million (£680 million in today’s money). At £371 million, Hindhead is, surely, a snip.
The ‘Little Switzerland’ label seems rather appropriate as you approach from the north and see the road disappearing into a huge, coniferous hill. It does look rather like a trip into Heidi country. The Highways Agency has removed 200,000 trees to build all this and is in the process of sticking another 200,000 back.
Historic: People pose for pictures in the Hindhead Tunnel, which has been constructed to plan without delays or serious accidents
Inside the tunnel, it is, well, a great bore — two great bores, in fact. Every 100 yards, there is a ‘safety niche’ built in to the outer wall and cross-passages linking the two tunnels via hefty fire doors.
Radio boosters will make sure that you don’t suddenly lose the Archers or the sound of local resident Chris Evans over on Radio 2.
But there are no mobile phone boosters. And new-generation radar guns will check the average speed of every car. A separate radar system in a two-man control room will also detect anyone on a bicycle — or on foot — coming anywhere near the entrances (the tunnel is cars-only). A path and cycleway winds its way along the edge of the Devil’s Punchbowl up above.
It’s all gone to plan with no delays, no strikes and no serious accidents. Transport Secretary Philip Hammond will cut the ribbon in early July, but it won’t be a day for party politics. This may be true-blue Conservative Surrey, but the locals are quick to praise the last Labour government, which finally got this thing off the ground.
Looking down from the woods at the southern end of the tunnel, I bump into housewives Carol Goddard and Virginia Morgan-Davies walking a pair of collies. Both were on this weekend’s walk (even if they had to leave the dogs behind) and have a lot of disappointed friends.
‘I’ve got a lovely neighbour in his Nineties who has been waiting for this tunnel for most of his life and he couldn’t get a ticket,’ says Carol.
The whole world will see it all soon enough. And while it will undoubtedly be great for the motorist and the hedgehog alike, it is not such good news for the more dilatory residents of the South. After the best part of a century, they are no longer going to be able to trot out the usual excuse: ‘You should have seen the traffic.’
