A true moment of entente cordiale...

IT was a simple handshake but one that heralded a paradigm shift in the geography of Europe.

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British tunneller Graham Fagg shook the hand of French counterpart Phillippe Cozette through a two-inch hole 35 years ago yesterday, when Channel Tunnel contact was made under the middle of the Dover Strait.

As these joyful images show, the workers exchanged national flags in a true moment of entente cordiale.

The pair recreated the scene 10 years later in a stunt at Folkestone.

The breakthrough was the climax of years of tunnelling, using monster boring machines.

Teams of 16,000 men worked day and night to drive under the seabed - some from Shakespeare Cliffs, some from Sangatte on the Normandy shore, eventually meeting in the middle.

It was the biggest construction site of the century and, despite modern safety measures, the job took its toll: 10 workers, eight of them British, were killed in the first few months of boring.

But they had done what they set out to do, with the two tunnels meeting deep underground in mid-Channel only 14in offset a miracle of precision engineering.

Those men's efforts are today little appreciated or remembered by the travellers who pass through on sleek trains, in a 99mph sprint that once took hours on a storm-tossed ferry.

Completed for business in 1994, after six years of construction and costing £4.65billion (almost £12billion today) the Chunnel remains a world-beating showpiece that brings the Continent to London St Pancras International.

The longest undersea link in the world, at 31 miles, it was officially opened by the late Queen Elizabeth and French President Francois Mitterrand on May 6, 1994.

Since then there have been tens of millions of journeys, by goods and passenger trains through the twin-bore tunnel (there is a third, smaller one for service and emergency).