Isambard Kingdom Brunel was Britain's greatest engineer, he was the man
who built everything on a huge scale, he built Britain's biggest ship,
some of Britain's most spectacular bridges, a tunnel under the Thames
and the finest railway line in Britain, the London to Bristol route of
the Great Western Railway. Everything he did was on a scale not seen
before, not just in Britain, but in the world. Brunel left a legacy of
industrial architecture and design, from the vaulted roof of Paddington
station to the SS Great Britain, the first true ocean greyhound, from
the Clifton Suspension Bridge to the Tamar Bridge, which bears his name
on its approaches. His life was one of superlatives - bigger, wider,
taller and faster. Nearly drowning in the Thames Tunnel, he eventually
suffered a stroke aboard his Great Eastern, the world's largest vessel
for almost half a century, and died two days before her maiden voyage.
As the historian Dan Cruikshank put it, Brunel was quite simply 'a
one-man Industrial Revolution'. Here, John Christopher tells the story
of the man and his tunnels, bridges, railways, ships and buildings, with
many new illustrations accompanying the old, showing the changes time
has made to Brunel's greatest legacy - the things he designed and built
that we still take for granted and use every day, over a century and a
half since his death.
