Sketchpedition through Time and Relative Dimensions: 2nd destination

 2) Old London Bridge

This one really wasn’t a near miss. Old London Bridge, the first London Bridge to be built out of stone, was begun in 1176, and finally finished in 1209. For long periods during this time England’s wealth was being directed to fund Richard the Lionheart’s crusade and his wars.

I don’t remember when I first learned anything bout the bridge with the houses on it. However I do remember that in 1982 I first walked over the high walkways on Tower Bridge, which at he time held an exhibition which said quite a bit about Old London Bridge, and filing it away in the corner of my brain earmarked for interesting stuff to find out about in the future.

I latched onto the fact that there were houses on the bridge, as far as we can tell right from the start. This really wasn’t so uncommon when the bridge was built. Many bridges had buildings on heir superstructure. In fact a great many medieval bridges had chapels on them. The building of London Bridge itself was directed by the parish priest of St. Mary Colechurch, one Peter de Colechurch. The chapel, not quite halfway across the bridge from the City side was dedicated to Thomas Becket, who had been canonized in 1173. Peter de Colechurch had been the Beckets’ parish priest.

Wary of earning the displeasure of King Henry VIII, the chapel would be rededicated to St. Thomas the Apostle. It didn’t change much – Henry had it completely rebuilt and it remained as residential and commercial premises until all the buildings were demolished in the mid 18^th century.

London Bridge certainly saw life in its more than 6 centuries of existence. In the reign of Richard II the revolting peasants of the Peasants Revolt threatened to burn it down unless they were allowed to pass over it. In the same reign the Bridge saw a joust between the champion knights of England and Scotland. And yes I’m afraid that it’s true that the heads of ‘traitors’ were often displayed on poles on the bridge. The first person to receive this honour, as far as we know, was William Wallace, the subject of the film ‘Braveheart’. A little way from the Southwark end of the bridge there used to be a drawbridge, which only worked for very brief periods in the early years of the bridge. This had its own fortified gateway where heads used to be displayed – if you look on the sketch you can just about see this in the bottom right hand corner.

The sketch shows the bridge as it would have been around about the middle of the 17^th century. The building in the middle with the distinctive onion domes if Nonesuch House, a prefabricated building whose constituent pieces were floated down the Thames before being erected on the bridge.

The city end of the bridge was gutted by fire more than once. The most serious wasn’t actually the Great Fire of London in 1666, which left the bridge relatively intact, but it was badly damaged in the fire of 1633.

And still there’s more to say about the bridge. It was decided to remove the houses from the superstructure of the bridge and this happened by 1761. Incidentally, the tradition of driving to the left in the UK supposedly began at this time on London Bridge. The two central arches were combined into one great arch, and in the last years of the Bridge’s existence HMS Beagle, minus masts, was floated through it to participate in William IV’s coronation celebrations. Then there’s the Frost Fairs. The narrow arches, 19 in total, made it possible for sections of the Thames above and below it to freeze over in severe cold weather. The last of these occurred in 1814, and the damage caused to the Bridge by blocks of fast moving ice when the thaw came hastened the bridge’s end. Although it took a long time for the design and details of the new bridge to be decided upon, work eventually began a little downstream on the replacement in 1824. The new bridge, nicknamed Rennie’s Bridge after the architect who designed it, John Rennis, opened in 1831, and Old London Bridge was immediately closed and demolition took place.

Hailed as a masterpiece in 1831, Rennie’s Bridge was overwhelmed by the amount of traffic it had to cope with in just a few decades and was showing signs of subsidence by he early 1900s. Even the construction of nearby Tower Bridge in the 1890s didn’t solve the problems. Eventually the decision was taken to replace the bridge with the current London Bridge, and Rennie’s Bridge was sold to Robert P. McCullough, and eventually shipped to Lake Havasu, USA where it remains to this day. Well, bits of the original bridge do.

When I was about five or six my Mum and Dad took me and my two brothers on a sightseeing bus trip, and we went over London Bridge. Now, I was 8 when the current bridge opened in 1972, so I can confidently state that I crossed London Bridge while the previous one was being demolished and the current one being built. So I did experience Rennie’s Bridge.

I have to finish on a personal note. Remember that I said I had filed away old London Bridge as something I would learn more about in the future? Well I did in the early noughties when I read Patricia Pierce’s wonderful book “Old London Bridge”. Being an obsessive quizzer, I filed it away in my mind as a potential Mastermind subject. I 2007 I reached the final of the series, and my specialist subject was Old London Bridge. Yes, I won, and that’s why this is an incredibly special place to me, and would be the place I’d visit if I did invent a Time Machine but it was only good for one return trip.