Road Tunnels in the United Kingdom — Complete List by Length

• 53entries listed
• 3.24 kmlongest bore
• 1832–2011openings span
• 37.1 kmtotal length

The record table

How this archive measures: lengths, bores, dates and ordering

How this table is compiled

Where one of these 52 lengths disagrees with an operator's own figure for the United Kingdom, the table keeps the published value and notes the difference instead of averaging the two. Dates for the United Kingdom refer to opening to traffic, not breakthrough, so the 1832 entry was under construction for some years before that.

Lengths for the United Kingdom are recorded in metres which is how the operators publish them and why the shortest entry here reads as 75 m and not a rounded figure. The shorter half of the table totals 7.22 km against 29.88 km for the longer half, from the same number of rows.

A new scheme in the United Kingdom would have to beat 3.24 km to change the head of this table, and that is the figure worth rechecking when one opens. After the 1990s the next busiest decade here is the 1980s with 4 openings, so the building effort came in more than one wave.

This page records the road tunnels catalogued for the United Kingdom in a tunnel almanac maintained at this address since the late 1990s. Laid end to end the entries on this page would run 37.1 km, which is a number with no engineering meaning but a useful sense of the scale of what is catalogued.

Dated entries run from 1832 to 2011, and the busiest decade is the 1990s with 5 recorded openings. The table on this page runs to 53 rows and records Tunnel, Length (m), Date of opening, Region and County for each of them, which is the shape the original compiler chose rather than one imposed here.

Reading the figures

Between the longest and the tenth-longest the drop is 1.94 km, which is the part of the table that changes when a single scheme opens. The tunnel column names 52 distinct entries on this page, Mersey Queensway and Mersey Kingsway among them, each traceable to the operator or administration record it was taken from.

The dated entries carry 20 distinct opening years across 179 years, and the median opening year is 1983. Read down the length (m) column, the 53 values run from 75 m to 3 237 m with a midpoint at 450 m; the spread rather than the maximum is what says how uneven this set is.

Roughly 3 of the dated entries opened in this century, which is a rough measure of how much of the network is recent. The captions name 19 distinct places and structures — London, Thames and Wales among them — and those names are the index into the length tables where each is recorded with its own figure.

The earliest dated entry is Rotherhithe, opened in 1908, and the most recent is Hindhead bypass in 2011. The material on this page is held in 25 captions rather than in running text, 191 words of it, each written against the image or row it belongs to by the compiler who put the page together.

One of those 53 is recorded as under construction or planned, Stonehenge at 2.1 km, so the count includes it while every measured figure — the range, the median, the total — describes the 52 rows carrying traffic today: an unopened bore cannot hold a record. Road tunnel lengths are measured portal to portal along the carriageway.