On this day the Englishman Graham Fagg and the Frenchman Phillippe Cozette met in the middle of the Channel Tunnel under the English Channel. Work on the tunnel had begun in 1988 but it did not become operative until 1994. At the peak of construction 15,000 people were employed with a daily expenditure of over £3 million. Ten workers, eight of them British, were killed during the construction. Plans to build a cross-Channel tunnel had been proposed as early as 1802, but fears of compromising national security had disrupted attempts to build one. Many people felt that the sea had protected for centuries what Shakespeare described as “this precious stone set in the silver sea.”
Channel Tunnel: Midway Meeting
1st December 1990