Isambard Kingdom Brunel - Engineering modern Britain

Isambard Kingdom Brunel is the most famous and arguably the greatest engineer of Victorian Britain, an era when the achievements of the profession were often hailed, quite justifiably, as ‘heroic’. None of his contemporaries was as versatile, and none was entrusted with projects on such a scale at so young an age – he was just 27 when he was made engineer of the Great Western Railway (GWR).

Trained under his French father, Marc, Brunel designed dockyards, a prefabricated hospital for Florence Nightingale, tunnels, bridges, viaducts and railway stations. One of his ocean-going steamships was the first to be propeller-driven (his design being only 20% less efficient than modern ones). He was the Leonardo of his age, devising innovative solutions in different fields. Incomparably ingenious, yes, but his achievements were also founded on force of personality, limitless energy and unrelenting determination.

His creations have largely survived the test of time. His bridges carry trains at a speed – and of a weight – that even he had not envisaged. His stations are revered as architectural triumphs, and even one of his three vast ocean-going vessels was saved by the most remarkable rescue in maritime history.

The tour encompasses every aspect of his life and work, beginning with his time in London working under his father on the Thames Tunnel, during which Brunel nearly lost his life. (Trains now pass through every few minutes.) The graceful arches of Maidenhead Bridge remain the widest brick spans in the world. The Swindon Railway Village reveals a remarkably unaltered area of New Swindon, laid out and designed by Brunel with facilities ahead of the time. Besides Brunel’s station, Bristol boasts the Clifton Suspension Bridge, the resurrected steamship Great Britain, displayed at the dock in which she was built in 1843, and the fine archive of Brunel material in the adjacent multi-award-winning Being Brunel museum. One of the former broad-gauge railways in Devon is now a steam-worked heritage railway, and the tour concludes with Brunel’s last great work, the Royal Albert Bridge over the Tamar, across which he travelled as an invalid on a special train shortly before its formal opening and his early death aged just 53.