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.