Work on the St Anna tunnel began on 28 June 1931 and finished on 14 August 1933. On 10 September that year King Albert I and the mayor of Antwerp, Camille Huysmans, walked through it with 20,000 schoolchildren. The tube runs 572 metres under the Scheldt, from Sint-Jansvliet on the edge of the old town to Linkeroever, the left bank, at 31.57 metres below ground, and it is 4.30 metres wide inside. It cost 40 million Belgian francs, about €21.5 million in today’s money. Locals call it the voetgangerstunnel, the pedestrian tunnel, and nearly 100 years on it is still free and open day and night.

Two ferries and a hand shield

Before the tunnel, people crossed by boat. Two ferries worked the river: the Sint-Annekensboot and a train ferry called Land van Waas, known locally as Pietje Waas. The tunnel replaced the crossing with a tube dug by hand shield through the Boom clay under the riverbed and lined with cast-iron segments sealed with lead. Its walls were tiled in art deco ceramics by the Hemiksem firm Manufactures Céramiques d’Hemixem, Gilliot et Cie, and the architect Emiel Van Averbeke designed both access buildings. The tube was also sized for ambulances and police cars, to reach accidents in the Waasland road tunnel nearby, a job that lapsed once the Kennedy tunnel was finished.

The tunnel did not get through the war intact. In 1944 the retreating German army blew up the left-bank access building with its lifts and escalators, and the nearby Waasland tunnel was put out of use as well, so for a while the crossing went back to the ferry. The repairs took several years.

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The wooden escalators

The way down is as old as the tunnel. Each bank has two wooden escalators, four in all, made by the Jaspar company of Liège. Together they have 1,600 wooden steps of about 40 kilograms each, they move at half a metre a second, and they descend 31.5 metres. They were designed to carry 16,000 people an hour. Between 3.5 and 4 million people use the tunnel each year, and according to Kris Henau, the former coordinator of its maintenance at the Flemish roads agency, 85 per cent of them take the escalators and 15 per cent the lifts. In his view no other public lifts in the city are used as hard, not even those at Antwerp Central Station.

The tunnel, its access buildings and its machinery, wooden escalators included, have been a protected monument since 1997. That has practical consequences. The escalators close for maintenance every Thursday from 7:00 until about 19:00, and when the steps come out for repair, each goes back into its exact position. One lift at each end, for 40 people or 3,000 kilograms, takes the rest; the lifts were renovated from 2022, and the one at Sint-Jansvliet returned to service in January 2023.

Keeping it running

Since 1995 cyclists have been allowed to ride through at walking pace, and the agency that runs it, Agentschap Wegen en Verkeer, keeps adjusting the rules. From 16 September 2024 cargo bikes were banned from the escalators and sent to the lifts. “Our escalators are not designed for such very heavy loads,” said Stefanie Nagels of the agency. From 20 January to 17 March 2025 the whole right-bank stairwell closed to repair a cracked drive shaft and renovate the hall, a closure the Fietsersbond, the cyclists’ union, protested against as too long.

The tunnel’s own decoration has been restored too. Advertising painted on the walls when it opened was removed in a restoration in 1992 and 1993; in 2024 two of the murals came back, halfway along, one of Neptune with two mermaids and one telling walkers that they are halfway. In August 2026 a British series, Bookish, set in London after the Second World War, turned the tunnel into a metro tunnel for a night of filming. “Nowhere in our country will you find such old escalators that still work,” said Dries Milbou of the production company Happy Duck Films.

The 2023 version of this article called it Europe’s oldest pedestrian tunnel. It is not. Hamburg’s Old Elbe Tunnel opened on 7 September 1911, 22 years earlier; it is 426 metres long and 24 metres deep, and six large lifts carry pedestrians and vehicles down to it. Antwerp’s tunnel is longer, deeper and still moves most of its users on wooden steps. Take the escalators rather than the lift: they are the part of the tunnel that is the monument, and most of the people who cross already know it.

Halfway along, a mural says so.