Lower Thames Crossing enabling works expected to start in late 2025

Enabling works on the £10bn Lower Thames Crossing scheme – a 4.2km twin bore road tunnel under the river between Kent and Essex – could begin in October of this year, delegates heard at the GE Piling and Foundations conference.

The long-awaited development consent order (DCO) for National Highways' Lower Thames Crossing project arrived on 25 March, after several years of delays. However, this time it came two months earlier than the project teams expected.

“Now we have a project, and it’s just a case of how fast we can hit the accelerator, really,” Bouygues Murphy joint venture (JV) technical director Alan Price said at the conference earlier this week.

“We’re expected to start enabling works, if we can get through the consents, by the end of this year.”

This means construction on the critical part of the project – the caterpillar launch structure for the tunnel boring machine (TBM) at the north portal – could start in autumn 2026, with a view of launching the machine in spring 2028.

The target date for opening the road to traffic is 2032.

This article originally appeared: https://www.geplus.co.uk/news/lower-thames-crossing-enabling-works-expected-to-start-in-late-2025-24-04-2025/