At King's Cross, a Channel Tunnel terminal, a new Underground concourse and a new station for Thameslink are being built. At the bottom of an open shaft about twenty feet deep, walled partly in concrete, partly in brick and partly in raw clay, two mechanical diggers on caterpillar tracks are at play. They are too small to have cabs. Operators in yellow coats and hard hats direct them by way of long cables ending in consoles on which they push joysticks, as children do to send toy racing cars whizzing about. Down there in the mud the diggers heap spoil into piles. A full-size earth-moving machine reaches down, claws out bucket-loads of earth, concrete and brick and dumps them into skips.

LRB 3 June 2004 | PDF Download