Image: Chris Melville-Brown

1862. Jack digs and lines "The Warren" with bricks, by hand in foul conditions.

 

It is the well intended to supply water to the new Brighton Workhouse.

Despite thousands in local taxes and 4 years of hand-digging, at 1200ft deep and only 4ft wide, it's still dry.

Why proceed? Who gains and who loses?

The grim story of the world's deepest hand-dug well. 

More...

 

Spring 1858: The Woodingdean Well ("the Warren") is started.

 September 1859: Brunel dies.

 December 1860 to August 1861: Great Expectations is published as a serial.

 October 1861: HMS Warrior  (by far the largest, fastest, most heavily-armed and most heavily-armoured warship the world had ever seen) is completed.

1862: Work on the Clifton Suspension Bridge recommences and was completed in 1864, five years after Brunel's death. The Clifton Suspension Bridge still stands, and over 4 million vehicles traverse it every year.     

1862: The Woodingdean Well is completed. The well still remains, but not a drop of water is drawn from it today.

1868: Transportation to Australia finally ends.

1878: The Well is abandoned in favour of the Brighton corporation's piped water supply.

---------------

November 1861: Jack Tomkins, a former Brighton workhouse inmate, is now an experienced steiner, a man who digs and lines wells. For 7 years he had been apprenticed to the deeply intuitive Mark Tap, helping him restore Britain's hundreds of Sacred Wells. 

Now, with his mentor dead, Jack has returned to Brighton, and labours at the foot of a 1200 ft, as yet dry, well. It is a well as deep as the (yet-to-be-built) Empire State Building is high.

For nearly 4 years Jack has been one of the 45+ men digging daily in the (still today) world's deepest hand-dug well, as ordered by the town's Guardians, to supply water to their brand new workhouse.
Jack's uneasiness at the irony of his work is many-fold... something is wrong. Why is the project taking so long? Why has so much in local taxes (equivalent to approx. £160,000 per week today) been spent when, using many workhouse labourers, the task is run so cheaply?

And deeper, personal questions also haunt him. Who are these men, that bid him dig so deep on their behalf, who take the credit for success, but who treat him so low? Why did his mother, a street-walker who "worked" the upper echelons of the town, disappear one fateful day when he was a child? Who can tell him why she came to be found hanging dead from the wet twisted metal under the celebrated Chain Pier?

------------------

 

Lyrics: The Well Song

 

Round as an apple

Deep as a cup,

and all the kings horses

Cannot fill it up.

 

I gave it my heart, boy

I gave it my soul,

Oh, when will I ever

Get out of this hole.

 

Round as an apple,

deep as my soul.

Oh, when will I ever

Get out of this hole.

 

Deep as the night

Round as a bowl,

In my dreams I'm always digging

and it's taking it's toll.

 

Round as an apple,

deep as a cup.

And all our tears together

Are filling it up.

And all our tears together

Are filling it up.