Sketchpedition through Time and Relative Dimensions 4: Waterloo Bridge

We stay in 1890’s London for our next sketch. In fact, if Sydenham wasn’t such a beggar to get to and from I would probably have ditched my time machine of the imagination just for today. However as it is I make a short hop of just a few miles, to the Strand. From here we can easily walk to our next objective, the original Waterloo Bridge. I freely admit that I have a thing about bridges, and after Old London Bridge and Tower Bridge, I think that this is possibly the most beautiful ever to span the Thames in central London.

The Bridge was designed by John Rennie, who would also design the 1831 London Bridge which now stands (sort of) across Lake Havasu in the USA. (I say sort of because the original stones of the bridge are actually a facing over a modern concrete base structure.)

Waterloo Bridge was built between 1807 and 1810. Since the battle of Waterloo didn’t actually take place until 5 years after it was opened, its original name was the Strand Bridge.

I was tempted to bring the time machine forward to 1900, in order to possibly catch the impressionist painter Claude Monet painting the bridge. He loved it and made forty one paintings of it. Mind you, by the time he painted it Waterloo Bridge it was showing signs of wear and tear. 80 years of being scoured by the fast flowing river caused damage to the piers which saw subsidence which needed some hasty repair work in the 1920s. In the early 1930s the London County Council decided that the bridge had to be replaced. It was closed in 1934, and demolished by 1936. It was replaced by the current nondescript concrete bridge designed by Sir Giles Gilbert Scott, although this was not completed until after he end of World War 2.

I think that you have to see the demolition of Waterloo Bridge in context. I’ve seen it cited as an act which first began to bring the whole issue of London’s architectural heritage to public consciousness. The context was different to the context in which the Euston Arch was demolished, though. That was shown not to be necessary. The fact is that Waterloo Bridge, as beautiful as it was, was designed and built more than a century before motorised traffic became a factor in cross-river traffic. It simply wasn’t designed to cope, and even if it had been repaired this would not have made it any more suitable. Remember too that this was in the middle of the Great Depression as well.