On May 6, 1994, Queen Elizabeth II and French President François Mitterrand inaugurated the Channel Tunnel in a ceremony at Calais, opening a 31-mile rail link beneath the English Channel that had taken six years and over 13,000 workers to build. The tunnel, connecting Folkestone to Coquelles, ended Britain's physical islandhood, an idea first proposed to Napoleon in 1802 nearly two centuries earlier.
The dream of tunneling under the Channel dated back to a French engineer's proposal to Napoleon Bonaparte in 1802, envisioning an artificial island midway with a chimney for horse-drawn carriage ventilation. Various starts and stops followed over nearly two centuries, including an aborted 1970s attempt, stalled by cost overruns and British anxiety about invasion and disease, until a formal treaty between Thatcher and Mitterrand in 1986 finally launched construction.
Eleven boring machines, some as long as a football field, chewed through chalk marl from both the English and French coasts simultaneously, with the two sides meeting beneath the seabed in December 1990, a moment marked by workers reaching through a narrow gap to shake hands. The project cost roughly £4.6 billion, about 80% over its original budget, and ten workers died during construction.
When the Queen and Mitterrand cut the ribbon on May 6, 1994, riding through the tunnel on separate trains that met at the midpoint, it symbolized more than an engineering feat: for the first time since the last Ice Age, when a land bridge connected Britain to Europe, people could travel between them without a boat or a plane.
Key people: Elizabeth II, François Mitterrand