Late great engineers: John Fowler - Mastermind of the London Underground

‘Nobody can look at the Forth Bridge without being aware that it is great not only in size but in conception. It is a mighty work of engineering and it is also a work of art.’ So wrote Trystan Edwards of Sir John Fowler’s magnum opus in the Structural Engineer in 1925. But, warned the noted architect and town planner, in comparison with the Forth Bridge, ‘his other engineering achievements seem necessarily somewhat dwarfed.’ And yet these others were immense, including Fowler’s landmark work as chief engineer on the first underground railway – London’s Metropolitan Railway from Farringdon to Paddington – as well as much of what now makes up London Underground’s Circle Line.

Fowler also consulted on many other railways and bridges both in the UK and overseas, as well as proposing the ill-starred fireless locomotive, built by Robert Stephenson and Company. Such was his influence on the so-called age of ‘railway mania’– the second half of the nineteenth century during which £3bn was invested in railway building – that on his death in the twilight of the century, the Institution of Civil Engineers proclaimed in its 1899 obituary that Fowler had been ‘one of the most eminent of engineers whose names are associated with the great material progress effected during the Victorian era’. In response to Fowler amassing a colossal personal wealth from his endeavours – for his work on the Metropolitan Railway alone he was paid £152,000 (£17.1 million today) – the industrialist Sir Edward Watkin commented acidly that ‘no engineer in the world was so highly paid’.