Shafts are typically employed in urban environments to provide access or ventilation to underground structures such as stations, railways or highways. The choice of design is determined, among other things, by the need to control settlements at the surface, often estimated during early design stages using empirical expressions. These have been shown to have limited accuracy, failing to account appropriately for the effect of shaft diameter on the ground movements associated with shaft excavation. This paper reviews empirical expressions available in the literature in the context of a large database of settlements induced by shaft excavation in London. A comprehensive set of detailed numerical analyses is performed to enable the development of a new set of expressions capable of predicting accurately the computed vertical and horizontal ground movements at the surface. The new expressions are shown to provide better predictions of the observed field data than predictive expressions available in the literature, establishing a new benchmark against which future proposals can be assessed.