London’s Bridges

One of the marvelous things about London is the Thames, that great sluggish gray-brown river. And one of the best things about the Thames is the fine array of bridges, old and new, that cross it.

It wasn’t always like that. In the Middle Ages, London had a single bridge; London Bridge, leading from the City to Southwark. It wasn’t so much a bridge as a city-on-water, with high gate towers, houses and shops, some jettied out overhanging the water. (That bridge disappeared, and was replaced by a rather nice classical work, now in Arizona somewhere; and that was replaced by today’s concrete work.)

Only in the eighteenth century – an age of reason, but also the beginning of the great age of British engineering – were new bridges built; but it was the Victorians who really brought London up to date, spanning the river in numerous places. (Some of those bridges replaced eighteenth century bridges which were beginning to show their age, and in some cases had become downright dangerous.) Suddenly London was full of new bridges. Some were for the railways, some were for roads;  some were elegant, others fantastic, others rather functional.

Then Modernism arrived, and with it the concrete bridges that almost no one loves; Waterloo Bridge, for instance, which actually isn’t a bad bit of architecture in its way, but doesn’t have the character of the Albert Bridge or Tower Bridge. And then, just as you thought that was going to be it, and London had all the bridges it needed, we got a new one – the Millennium Bridge between St Paul’s and Bankside.

Here’s a rundown of the Thames bridges in central London. I’ve started at Battersea – and we’ll go all the way downriver.

Battersea has two bridges – the road bridge of 1890 and the railway bridge dating from 1863. Battersea Bridge was originally a wooden bridge- it was replaced with this fine cantilevered structure by Sir Joseph Bazalgette, the man who built the Embankment and created London’s modern sewer system. It’s great engineering, with cast iron arches on granite piers, but it’s also got aesthetic appeal – the footpaths are cantilevered out over the river, the balustrade is a Moorish style design, and the spandrels have gilded foliage ornamentation.

Albert Bridge  is one of my favourites, a beautiful cable-stayed bridge of 1873. It’s particularly interesting because it still has its original octagonal toll-houses – though you can go over it for free these days. It’s bad engineering though – a very weak bridge, it’s been fixed up by Bazalgette (who added the steel chain suspension), and by the GLC in 1972 (which added the concrete pier in the middle). It still has a notice asking troops (from Chelsea Barracks) to break step as they go over the bridge – get a couple of hundred men marching in step, and the bridge apparently wobbled quite alarmingly. Best of all, at night it’s lit up with hundreds of tiny bulbs – a really lovely spectacle.

Chelsea Bridge is another bridge that’s lit beautifully at night – now using LEDs. It was put up in 1937 to replace the previous Victorian bridge, and is an elegant self-anchoring suspension bridge – the first of this kind to be built in Britain. It’s quite a restrained work, not ornamented at all – except for the rather fine lamps that flank each end.

Grosvenor Bridge carries the railway from Battersea in to Victoria Station, past the Battersea Power Station. In fact, it’s two bridges, not one – British railways at the time it was built were divided into separate regional companies, so the Victoria Station and Pimlico Railway built the eastern (downstream) side, and the London, Brighton and South Coast railway built the other.

Next comes Vauxhall Bridge, a steel arched work of 1906, brightly painted. Statues ornament the piers – but you can’t see them from the bridge itself! Lambeth Bridge is a five-arched steel bridge of 1932, again smartly painted in red.

A bird's eye view of Westminster Bridge shows just how wide the Thames is

The first Westminster Bridge was built in the 1740s, and was painted by Canaletto, but what you’ll see today is a replacement of 1862 by Charles Barry, who was also the architect of the Houses of Parliament. It has fine gothic detailing, and the green paint is slightly less garish than the red of Lambeth Bridge.

Hungerford Bridge is a steel truss railway bridge dating from the 1860s – but it’s been transformed by the addition of the Golden Jubilee footbridges on each side, with their elegant pylons. I remember going to the South Bank on the original footbridge – it was dark, dilapidated, and when it rained, filled up with puddles. The new footbridges are a massive improvement!

Waterloo Bridge is a 1945 replacement for the original bridge; it’s a svelte work using cantilevered concrete beams, designed by Sir Giles Gilbert Scott (designer of Battersea Power Station and the red telephone box).  Most people never give this bridge a second glance – but I think that’s a pity. However, its appeal as a piece of architecture is definitely secondary to the excellent views of the river that you get from the bridge – it’s a superb place to go at sunrise or sunset, in particular. Also interesting for its footnote in the history of espionage – this is where Bulgarian emigré Georgi Markov was assassinated with a poisoned umbrella in the 1970s.

On we go to Blackfriars, where there’s a railway bridge of 1886 and a road bridge of 1869. The road bridge, by Thomas Cubitt, is another place conspiracy theorists will love – this is where Italian banker Roberto Calvi was found hanging in 1982. Suicide? murdered by the Vatican? by Freemasons? It’s still an unsolved mystery. The railway bridge is the second on the site – but you can still see the huge piers that supported the original, and the insignia of the railway company (on the south side).

And now we come to another of my favourites, the Millennium Bridge or ‘wobbly bridge’ of 2000 – it had to be closed and reworked after it was found to wobble quite noticeably as people crossed. It’s a pedestrian suspension bridge, designed as a ‘blade of light’, and hides the suspension cable below the deck in order to give the best possible views to both sides. It’s clean, elegant, and fun to use, and with St Paul’s on one end and Bankside on the other, it happens to link two destinations that are well worth visiting.

Even the rather dull London Bridge looks beautiful when illuminated

Southwark Bridge is another of the rather anonymous bridges of London – a 1921 work – and the Cannon Street Railway Bridge is another rather utilitarian work . London Bridge comes next, a big disappointment for many tourists – the current bridge only dates from 1973.  So let’s move on to the most amazing bridge of them all: Tower Bridge.

Splendidly lit at night, Tower Bridge looks like a fairytale castle with a twist

This is High Victorian engineering and architecture at its most impressive. It dates from 1894, and it’s a combination of a suspension bridge (hence the two great towers) and a bascule bridge (which opens up in the middle of the bridge, allowing large ships to pass). The Gothic design was intended to help the bridge harmonise with the architecture of the Tower of London – in the process it also made the bridge into an iconic symbol of the city. (In fact it was originally intended to have a much less impressive and less ornate finish in red brick.)

So far, you could have walked all the way – it’s possible, though it would be a pretty long trek. But the next bridge is far, far out of London; the Dartford Crossing, or to be exact, the Queen Elizabeth II Bridge. It was built in 1991 and carries the M25 London orbital motorway over the river. It’s a cable stayed suspension bridge, which when it opened was Europe’s biggest – the elevated road, including the approach roads, is nearly 3 km in length, and the road deck rises 65 metres above the river. The views from up here are impressive, but of course you don’t have time to appreciate them…

London’s bridges are a superb collection of work. I just have one regret. John Rennie designed a number of lovely bridges for London in the early nineteenth century – the original Waterloo Bridge, a new London Bridge, and Southwark Bridge. Not one of them is still standing – not in London, anyway.

PHOTO CREDITS: Tower Bridge from Bitterlikeacoffee on flickr: London Bridge by Burge5000 on flickr: Millennium Bridge by Jon Hanson on flickr: Westminster Bridge by Rob Unreal on flickr: Albert Bridge by Monica Arellano-Ongpin on flickr: