Sir John Fowler, 1st Baronet, KCMG, LLD, FRSE was an English civil engineer specialising in the construction of railways and railway infrastructure. In the 1850s and 1860s, he was engineer for the world’s first underground railway, London’s Metropolitan Railway, built by the “cut-and-cover” method under city streets.
In 1860 he completed the Pimlico Bridge across the River Thames, one of the first railway bridges in the area. He worked on most of the extensions of the Metropolitan Railway (the early London Underground), which was the world’s first subway system. Its lines were excavated from the surface and permanently covered rather than tunneled. He also designed and built a locomotive known as “Fowler’s Ghost” for the railway. Later he was an engineer for the deep-tunneling “tube” system extensively adopted for London electric railways. He was also the engineer for the construction of Victoria Station,