Extending the Challenge

A couple of posts ago I wrote that I’ve completed the London Bridges challenge. If you were kind enough to follow what I wrote about drawing all of the stations on the London Underground, then you might remember how I went on to extend the challenge to include every station on the London Overground and the Docklands Light Railway. It’s okay if you didn’t, I can’t say that I blame you. Well, a similar thing has occurred to me that I should extend this challenge to include all of the tunnels beneath the Thames in the Greater London area.

Well, I say all of them. I don’t actually mean tunnels which have only ever carried utility cables. There are nine of these that I know of in the specified area. However there are 17 tunnels that have carried the public in one form of transport or another, only one of which no longer does so. These are the ones I want to work on.

Drawing tunnels, however, is by no means as straightforward as drawing bridges. So I’ve had to think about the ways I want to do it. The foot tunnels (and the tower subway) are easy enough, since I will draw the entrances. The road tunnels, ditto. The train tunnels, well, this calls for a little more thought. If you’ve ever travelled in a ube train you’ll know that there really ain’t a great deal to see in the tunnels themselves. So what I planned to do was to sketch the exterior of a station at either end of the tunnel, or the platform of the station. So far it’s tended to be he platforms. Which is not necessarily the best decision since I’ve been getting a bit bored with the constant drawing of platforms. Still, soldier on.

Victoria Line tunnel – Vauxhall to Pimlico

I once gave myself a challenge to draw every London Underground Station. This was before lockdown and it seems like a lifetime ago, even though I wasn’t much more than five or six years ago. One of the things that struck me during the challenge was how few stations there are south of the river. Even with Battersea Power station and Nine Elms opening since, there’s still only about 30. Maybe that sounds like quite a few. Not when you consider there’s about 240 north of the river. I guess that’s one reason why there’s relatively few bridges which carry the Underground across the river. However another reason is that there’s quite a few tunnels and the first transport tunnel that we encounter on a journey working downstream from west to east is  a London Underground tunnel. This carries the Victoria Line from Vauxhall to Pimlico.

Pimlico is interesting because it wasn’t on the original plans for the Victoria Line, which meant that it was the last to open. This may account for the fact that all of the other stations on the Victoria Line also connect with at least one other line, but Pimlico doesn’t. Pimlico does at least serve people visiting the original Tate Gallery, Tate Britain.

*Digression Warning* I grew up in the London Borough of Ealing and one of the things my home borough is renowned for is Ealing Film Studios. In the immediate post war period Ealing studios made a series of comedy films which were extremely successful and one of the most famous of these was called “Passport to Pimlico”. Basically the plot concerned the residents of Pimlico finding that Pimlico had been given to the Dukes of Burgundy in the middle ages and this had never been repealed. Said residents then throw away their ration books and assert their independence. Allowing for the way that a nation’s collective sense of humour can shift over the decades it’s a funny film, but one which also manages to make a point about post war austerity in the Britain in which my parents grew up.

At the other end of the tunnel is Vauxhall Station. Back in the good old days when I was cycling past the station on my way between home and university, old Vauxhall station really wasn’t a lot to write home about. It’s still there, but what has grown up around it is remarkable. Vauxhall has become a huge transport hub, and the entrances to the subterranean tube stations are visions of the future in chromium and glass. I’ll be honest, when work was going on a couple of years ago and I was visiting London with my daughter and grandson we took a double decker bus from Wimbledon to Vauxhall Bridge and I found the whole scale of the tube and bus station complex rather oppressive. That’s just a personal opinion and please feel free to disagree.

Jubilee Line Extension tunnel – Waterloo to Westminster

No fewer than three cross river tunnels serve Waterloo station, each of them bearing a London Underground line. The furthest upstream is the Jubilee Line tunnel to Westminster station.

The Jubilee Line section of Westminster station opened in 1999 and I visited it within a year of the opening. This was the London Underground Jim, but not as I knew it. Once you go through the entrance you are struck by the fact that this is by no means a beautiful station, but my goodness, it has a scale that inspires admiration. The elevators to the deep level Jubilee Line platforms are supported by columns and even today to ride them is to experience what early 20^th century visions of the city of the future thought it would be like.

In the original plans for the Jubilee Line it was never envisaged that the line would pass through Westminster. When the time came at the end of the 20^th century to make the Jubilee Line extension the decision was made to connect with Waterloo station, and a tunnel between a new deep level Westminster station and Waterloo seemed the best way of doing it.

I’ve used metros and subways in many European countries, and Westminster station reminds me quite a lot of an archetypal European Metro station. Only the Jubilee Line on the London Underground has automatic doors allowing passengers to access the trains and this is far more common in Europe.

Bakerloo and Northern Line Tunnel – Waterloo to Embankment

Strictly speaking the next transport tunnel downstream is actually two separate tunnels. I’m lumping them together because they both go from Waterloo Underground station to Embankment Underground Station. The Bakerloo line tunnel was built first in 1906, while the Northern Line tunnel was built 20 years later.

The Bakerloo Line of the London Underground began life as the Baker Street and Waterloo Railway. Accprding to various sources they had he devil’s own job raising finances, eventually selling out to Charles Tyson Yerkes Underground Electric Railways of London, laying the foundations for what would eventually become London Transport.

The tunnel benefited greatly from the experience of building deep level tube lines which had been gained by the engineers of the City and South London Railway, the world’s first deep level underground railway. Greathead adapted the tunnel shield invented by Marc Brunel (more on him later) for the Thames tunnel. Instead of having brick walls built up behind the shield as it was cut and pushed forward, the tunnel linings were made of cast iron rings bolted together. This had two benefits – the workers were at less risk of the tunnel collapsing, which is never a bad thing, and they could also progress much more quickly. Despite this there were still several blowouts during construction. The north tunnel was built first, and the southern one begun when it was completed.

As for the Northern Line, well this had its origins in two railways companies. The City and South London Railway, as already mentioned was the world’s first deep level tube line and originally ran between Stockwell and it’s first terminus in the City at King William Street. This was later abandoned. The Charing Cross, Euston and Hampstead Railway opened in 1907, running from Charing Cross north to Hampstead. It was soon extended to Embankment. The 1926 tunnels were built as part of a scheme to link the two sections of the Northern Line by making it possible to travel directly from Embankment to Kennington, ad it made sense to create an interchange with the Bakerloo Line at Waterloo in the process.

What do we know about Waterloo? Well, according to Abba at Waterloo is where Napoleon did surrender. Good song, although not historically accurate. Napoleon fled after the battle and didn’t actually surrender until he was on board HMS Bellerophon. Still, the station isn’t named after the Battle of Waterloo. The station is named after nearby Waterloo Bridge. THAT was named after the battle. In fact that station was originally called Waterloo Bridge, but the Bridge was shortly dropped from the name.

The station predates the underground by about 15 years, opening in 1848. I made the point earlier about the relative lack of Underground Stations south of the Thames and if you need any more proof of the way that the south of the river has always been the poor relation of the Underground network, try this. After the first Underground staions in London opened in 1863 it was 35 years before Waterloo got its first underground station, despite being one of the busiest railway station in the country. That was the Waterloo ad City Line, about which I’ll write more whe the time comes. The Bakerloo Line opened in 1906 and the station building was a rather nice Leslie Green job, with his trademark oxblood red tiles. This was demolished to make way for the Festival of Britain in 1951. The temporary station put in its place looked like a really interesting modern design, but it was replaced by a far less interesting station building incorporated into the Shell Mex Building. That too was more recently demolished. A couple of years ago as part of the development of the site a new station entrance opened. This is of a far more interesting appearance, a modern building with echoes of motifs occurring in the work of Leslie Green. I like it.

Embankment, then. As far as I know nobody ever claimed that Napoleon did surrender at Embankment, which is just as well because as we know, he didn’t. The station was opened as early as 1870, because its also on the District and Circle lines. Like the Metropolitan Railway, the Metropolitan District Railway was built as a sub-surface railway, with the underground stations being constructed by the cut and cover method. Dig a trench for the railway, make the tunnels and stations, cover them over, job’s a good ‘un. The first deep level platforms for the Bakerloo opeed in 1906, and for the Northern in 1914, several years before the tunnel under the river to Waterloo was built. Here’s a rather interesting fact. The Bakerloo called the station Embankment, while the District had always called it Charing Cross!

The railway tunnels between Waterloo and Embankment were lucky during the war. They were not damages, however a disused loop tunnel was struck by a bomb, breached and flooded. It had been sealed off when it was abandoned and caused no damage to the network when it was hit. Electrically powered flood gates were applied to either end of the tunnel in the early months of the war.

Waterloo and City Line – Waterloo to Bank/Monument

Put yourself in the position of the London and South Western Railway (LSWR).You’ve created your London terminus at Waterloo (Bridge). You are bringing huge numbers of workers from outside London into the capital every morning, and taking them home every evening. A very large number of your more affluent (hence desirable) customers work in the Square Mile of the City of London. And that is quite a step from Waterloo, believe you me, and they ain’t happy. It makes sense to connect somehow with the City.

However. Building railways and railway lines in the UK and especially London was not an easy business. Following the Railway mania of the late 1840’s investors had become a lot more cautious. So had Parliament. In 1846 alone, over 200 Acts of Parliament for new railways were passed. So a number of schemes were proposed and reached various stages of development but none of them came anywhere close to fruition. Finally the proposal for what became the Waterloo and City Line was put forward in 1891. The LSWR were very much in support although the line would be independent at least at the start. It took two years for the proposal to result in the necessary Act of Parliament.

Engineered using the Greathead Shield (James Greathead was one of the chief engineers on the project) the line reaches its deepest point beneath the Thames.

We’ve already said a bit about the Waterloo Underground stations. The Waterloo and City Line was the first o serve Bank Station. Only, it wasn’t called Bank station, it was called City station, which does actually make sense of calling the line the Waterloo and City line. At more or less the same time the Central London Railway – the core of the Central Line – were building into the station and they were the first ones to call it Bank Station. There you go.

Incidentally, at the time of writing and for large parts of its history, I think that the Waterloo and City Line is the only tunnel under the Thames that doesn’t work at weekends.

In the picture I’ve drawn a 1940 stock train, partly because these were the trains that ran along the ’Drain’, as the line was nicknamed when I was a kid in the 70s and 80s. As for the line itself, this was continually owned by mainline railway companies – the LSWR from 1906, the Southern Railway in 1921 and British Railways in 1948. It wasn’t until 1994 that it was bought by London Underground. Mind you, they only had to pay a quid for it, so fair’s fair. Coming back to the 1940s rolling stock, on the surface it really looked quite like a tube train. But there were things about I that were more like a British Railways train. On the odd occasions I’ve used the line since the 80s, that’s pretty much how I’ve felt about the whole line. It’s like the Tube. . . yet not quite. No, I can’t be much clearer than that.

Northern Line – London Bridge to Bank/Monument

We’ve already discussed the Northern line. So let’s start off by discussing London Bridge station. There’s quite a bit to say. London Bridge is the oldest ailway station in Central London. It was originally built by the London and Greenwich Railway and it opened in 1836. During the 19^th century it served a number of different railway companies before coming under the Southern Railway in 1921, and then British Railways in 1947.

There was no underground station at London Bridge until the year 1900. The unusual thing about this was that the tunnel which carried the City and South London Railway (C&SLR) beneath the Thames had already had opened 10 years earlier. For reasons best known to themselves the C&SLR did not create a station at London Bridge in their original line from King William Street to Stockwell. The station at the southern end of the tunnel underneath the river was Borough.

King William Street was proven to be unsuitable in the first years of the line’s operation. Trains had to face a steep incline up from the cross river tunnel into the station and the original electric locomotives used on the line were underpowered and could only reach King William Street with some difficulty. When the railway undertook to extend the line to Moorgate they also took the decision to abandon King William Street. The original tunnels were blocked up and a new pair constructed along with a new underground station at London Bridge.

Tower Subway

Alone of all the tunnels that I’ve included in my set of drawings, the Tower Subway is not open to the public. But it was when it was built and to my mind it is a special case. Or to put it another way, it’s my game and I make the rules.

So, hen, the Tower Subway. This is a tunnel running from Tower Hill on the north side to Vine Lane off Tooley Street on the south side. The Tower Subway was built using the Barlow-Greathead shield tunnelling method which would later be adopted for many deep level tube lines in London and elsewhere. Peter Barlow patented a shield design for digging out tunnels and applying cast iron rings to the walls, but it was Barlow’s former pupil James Greathead who patented the machine to apply the all-important grouting needed to make the tunnel safe and secure.

When the tunnel was complete the floor was lain with a narrow gauge railway. One railway car, carrying a maximum of 12 passengers was hauled across by stationary steam engines on either side, pulling the car along by cable. This was not a conspicuous or commercial success and the company went bankrupt before the end of the opening year, 1870. The railway was removed in December of the same year.

The tunnel reopened as a foot tunnel on Christmas Eve 1870, for the toll of a halfpenny. It was successful for a while, too. Around twenty thousand people a week used the tunnel at its height. However, this golden period of the tunnel subway’s life was curtailed with the opening of nearby Tower Bridge – which had no tolls - in 1894. By 1897 the subway’s days of being open to the public were over. It was sold to the London Hydraulic Power Company and served as a hydraulic mains.

A bomb exploded very close to the tunnel in 1940, but it did not penetrate the tunnel ad although some repair work was needed the tunnel was found to be in generally very good repair.

The former hydraulic tubes now carry fibre optic cables and the tunnel also carries water mains. The original northern entrance on Tower Hill still stands, but the southern one was demolished and replaced in the 90s.

Thames Tunnel – Rotherhithe to Wapping Overground

As we’ve seen, there are many tunnels beneath the Thames. However, there is only one Thames Tunnel. This was the first tunnel built beneath the Thames. In fact, it was the first tunnel built under a navigable river in Britain. In Europe. In fact it was the first in the whole world.

From the second half of the 18^th century there was an increasing need for cross river connections as London grew as a port. As a concept the appeal of a tunnel is that it causes no obstruction to the river and places no restriction on shipping. In reality, though, while it’s difficult and dangerous to built a bridge across a river such as the Thames, the danger and difficulty increase exponentially when you try to build a tunnel. As great an engineer as Richard Trevithick failed to do so between 1805 and 1809. He was using tried and tested tunneling methods he had developed in Cornish mines, but these were impractical for the soft clay and quicksand beneath the Thames.

Marc Brunel is probably most famous today for being the father of the illustrious Isambard Kingdom Brunel. Marc Brunel had first emigrated to New York during the French Revolution, then moved to London 1799, where he married Sarah Kingdom. During the Napoleonic Wars Brunel invented machinery which automated the production of pulley blocks for the Royal Navy. They dragged their heels over payment, and debt would be a problem for him for years to come.

As early as the second decade of the 19^th century Brunel had turned his genius towards the problems of tunnelling. He took inspiration from the teredo navalis – the common shipworm and the way that it lines its tunnels with excreted material. Brunel invented and in 1818 patented a tunneling shield device. His shield was a large, rectangular, scaffold-like iron structure with three levels and twelve sections per level and a solid weight-bearing top. The earth behind the face of the shield was kept in place by planks. One plank at a time could be removed, the earth behind it excavated, and then the plank removed and another replaced. Once the twelve sections had been completely excavated, then the shield could be pushed forward by hydraulic jacks, and the bare walls of the tunnel could be faced with bricks. 

The shield offered the real possibility that a tunnel could be built underneath the Thames. By 1824 Brunel had enough financial support, when the Thames Tunnel Company was formed.

The start of the work in 1825 was ingenious, at least. At the southern end in Rotherhithe, Brunel constructed a huge metal ring, rather like a gigantic pastry cutter. A brick tower was built on top, while earth was excavated from inside, thus sinking the shaft to the requisite depth. Actually, therein lay something of a problem. Brunel’s designs foresaw that the tunnel would never be more than 14 feet underneath the riverbed. Thus the construction of the tunnel was plagued by floods. Brunel decided that this was just the sort of project for his 18-year-old nipper Isambard to cut his teeth upon. The work was fraught with difficulties, and in one serious break-in Isambard was nearly drowned when the Thames broke in and flooded the tunnel. The money ran out in 1828 and the tunnel was sealed. Young Isambard went away and designed the original Hungerford Bridge and the Clifton Suspension Bridge. By 1834 the Company had made enough money to start work again, and the tunnel was finally completed in 1842. Brunel Snr. had been knighted on the instigation of Prince Albert the previous year. 

Prior to becoming a railway tunnel, it was never a success. It had been designed for both foot and horse drawn traffic. However, there was never the money to build the required approaches to the tunnel, and so the only entrances were through the stairways built into the access shafts at Rotherhithe and Wapping. The tunnel was finally bought by the East London Railway in 1865 and was opened to rail traffic in 1869. 

In 2006 the control of the East London line and therefore the tunnel was transferred to London Overground. 

When you stand on the platforms of Wapping Station, you just don’t tend to pay that much attention to the entrance to the Thames tunnel. No, what you can’t help noticing is how narrow the platforms are. Extremely narrow, in fact, I’d go so far as to say dangerous.

 

Advice for new older sketchers

I post in several Facebook sketching groups most days. At the moment I’m posting one of my bridges each day until I’ve posted them all. I had a lovely comment on one of my groups from a 63 year old chap who wants to learn how to sketch like me. This is what I told him - 

I hesitate to give you any advice because it would probably be wrong. I gave up Art at school when I was about 13 and haven’t had any lessons since. Whenever I’ve looked at online lessons and tutorials it fills me with the feeling that I do it all wrong. But I was always drawing as a kid and I found my own way of doing things, so much so that when I’ve had the opportunity to learn how to do it properly I just can’t get rid of my ‘bad habits’. But on the other hand, I do quite like the results I get much of the time, so I can’t complain. So, with that warning, here’s my advice.

By all means take classes. Just accept that if they don’t work for you it may just mean you have your own technique to develop, not that you’re no good.

Look at the work of people you like. Try to deconstruct it a little in your head. It’ll help you to develop your own sketching vocabulary. You see something you like? Take it and make it your own.

Draw, draw, draw. Try to draw every day. Join an urban sketchers group if there’s one near you. Like a lot of people who love their sketching I don’t tend to go out of the house without at least a basic pen set and a small sketchbook in case I get the opportunity to use them. There’s nothing like getting out in the open and drawing from life but even if you can’t get out there are loads of websites with free images like pixabay which you can copy.

Be self-critical in the true sense. That is, look at what you draw. Yes, think about what you could have done better, but more importantly ask yourself HOW you might have got better results. Just as importantly, think about what you’ve done well, and HOW you’ve done it well. If you know that then you’ll be able to reproduce the effect in other pictures. 

Share your work. Most Facebook drawing groups I’ve joined are really supportive. They are a great place to pick up inspiration and tips.

Start today. Start now!

Hope that this all helps at least a bit.

London Bridges Challenge Completed

So, the last time we met I’d completed all of the bridges working downstream from Hampton Court to Waterloo Bridge. Waterloo Bridge was the first I did during the weekend. Since recovering from tendonitis I’ve managed to draw four bridges on the weekends. Now, here’s a confession. I made this sketch of Blackfriars Bridge back in about 2020, but it just seemed to fit.

So, Blackfriars Bridge. You know, if you take the time to think a little about the names of various places you can learn a bit about their history. If we take a very simple one to start with, the name Hammersmith might lead you to think that it was originally a district where blacksmiths made tools. You’d be right to think so, although by the time my 3x great grandparents were living there it was nicknamed Laundry Island. I digress. So the area of Blackfriars derives from a Dominican Priory built there in the 1270s. The Dominican order of monks were nicknamed the Black Friars from the black robes they wore. This compares with the Grey Friars – the Franciscans and the White Friars - the Carmelites. The Black Friars were pretty much the Stormtroopers of the medieval Catholic Church.

The priory had gone a long time before the first Blackfriars Bridge was built. Yes, Blackfriars was one of the bridges built in the couple of decades following the original Westminster Bridge. Begun in 1760 it was opened 9 years later. This was a bridge of 9 arches made of Portland stone. Judging by paintings and engravings of the first bridge it was a rather attractive Italianate structure. Officially it was named the William Pitt Bridge after the Prime Minister, William Pitt the Elder, whose reputation was at its zenith in 1760 following the successful conclusion of the Seven Years War, but it was the informal name based on the district on the North bank that was served by the bridge that caught hold.

What happened to the bridge afterwards is a fairly familiar story. While the bridge may have looked elegant and classy, it’s construction was not made to stand the test of time. Any bridge built in the 18^th century faced a number of challenges. Britain was in the middle of the period known as the ‘little ice age’ during which the winters were more severe than they are now. During the life of the first Blackfriars Bridge the Thames froze over so badly in 1789 and 1814 that Frost Fairs were recorded as being held on the Thames. The 1814 frost, and the disastrous effects of its thawing sounded the death knell for Old London Bridge. Immediately following the opening of John Rennie’s London Bridge, old London Bridge with its 19 narrow arches was demolished. This had the effect of removing a huge obstacle to the river, which increased its flow and the scouring effect of the current on bridge foundations. This effect was noticeable on Blackfriars’ Bridge where extensive repair work was necessary from 1833 for the rest of the decade. The bridge was finally demolished in 1860.

Building of the replacement bridge was hampered when the company that won the contract had issues finding stable foundations, which led to financial issues which bankrupted their main supplier. It wasn’t until 1869 that the current five span wrought iron arched bridge was opened by Queen Victoria.

Blackfriars Bridge took on a certain amount of notoriety when the body of Italian banker Roberto Calvi was found hanging from one of its arches in 1982. Rumours and unconfirmed stories have since surfaced suggesting that Calvi was murdered by the Italian Mafia, to whom he allegedly owed a lot of money. An Italian court case in 2007 failed to convict men who were accused of carrying out the murder due to lack of evidence. 

The second bridge I drew on Saturday was Blackfriars Railway Bridge. Well, I say I drew it on Saturday. I drew most of it on Saturday evening but finished it off on Sunday morning. It’s difficult to think of many Thames bridges in London that have been demolished during my lifetime. There’s the granddaddy of them all, Rennie’s London Bridge. Other than that though there’s only Blackfriars Railway Bridge, which was removed and demolished in 1985.

This gets a little complicated. Because, you see, there were actually two Blackfriars Railway Bridges, one of which, the one in the picture, remains. The older of the two was the one which was demolished. It was opened in 1864 by the London, Chatham and Dover Railway. When the bridge was demolished the huge abutments on either side were preserved in place and these bear the arms of the company, They’re something to look out for any time you go to see the Thames bridges for yourself. After the company was subsumed into the Southern Railway in the 1920s, cross channel traffic was allocated to other routes. By the time of demolition the bridge was just too weak to bear the weight of modern trains. The columns that carried the bridge were left in place and can still be seen alongside the second Blackfriars Railway Bridge.

The second bridge opened in 1886 and was originally called the St. Paul’s railway bridge. This too was built for the London, Chatham and Dover Railway. It was designed by William Mills of the railway company, John Wolfe Barry who would later design Tower Bridge and Henry Marc Brunel (Isambard’s nipper). It was made with five arches constructed from wrought iron. The original design called for four tracks but this was increased to seven. The bridge served St. Paul’s station. This was renamed Blackfriars which became the name of the bridge from then onwards.

Following the demolition of the other Blackfriars Railway Bridge, the columns were partially used to support the extension of the platforms of Blackfriars Station across the bridge. The roofs of the platforms were installed with solar panels. It makes Blackfriars Railway Bridge the only ‘solar bridge’ in the UK, and the longest of only three in the whole world.

On Sunday morning I started this, the Millennium Bridge just before we went to the local for lunch, and I completed it as we were watching ‘The Importance of Being Earnest” Not that you need to know that, but at least it adds a little texture to the narrative.

At the time of writing we’re a year short of a quarter of a century passing since the turn of the Millennium, and it seems strange to think of how big a deal it seemed at the time. Remember the fears over the Y2K bug? Well, whether you’re old enough to remember or not, anything that came about in or around the year 2000 was always going to be doomed to bear the word Millennium somewhere in its name.

The competition to design the new footbridge took place in 1996. The winning design from Arup Group, Foster and partners and Sir Anthony Caro took its inspiration from a blade of light. And what an innovative design it is. When you look at the bridge you may be surprised to learn that it is a suspension bridge. A suspension bridge? But where are the cables? Ah, that’s one of the clever things. They are below the deck which means that the view from the deck itself is brilliantly unobstructed. Although possibly the finest view is looking across the bridge itself from the southern end, where the majestic bulk of St. Paul’s Cathedral in all its glory seems to beckon you forward. All of which makes the Millennium Bridge a structure which looks far better to my mind from on the deck of the bridge, than from the river, where I find that the blocky concrete supports are a little clunky looking, and the thin metal profile of the deck just a little underwhelming.

Okay, let’s get the W word on the table. That word is wobble. The Millennium Bridge was opened on 10h June 2000 and on that day many people walking across the bridge reported that they could feel it wobbling. I don’t want to get too technical (because I can’t) but basically suspension bridges, far from being absolutely rigid, have a capacity to sway slightly. The Millenium Bridge originally had a tendency to slightly sway from side to side, as opposed to a traditional suspension bridge having a tendency to move up and down slightly. The sway caused people unconsciously to start walking in time to the bridge’s swaying which had the effect of increasing the sway. This is related to, although not the same as the vertical sway that caused the Tacoma Narrows bridge to shake itself to pieces in a very famous piece of film.

The engineers at Arup solved the issue through the fitting of fluid dampers, which I guess are like shock absorbers to the bridge, and in more than two decades since there haven’t been any reports of any issues with wobble. I’ve walked across it myself many times, and although I was more than up for a bit of a wobble I didn’t feel anything. Still, give a dog a bad name. It’s still not unusual to hear it referred to as the Wobbly Bridge.

Knowing that I only had three bridges left to draw I was tempted to leave it at just the three bridges for the weekend. But the if I hadn’t have drawn this Southwark Bridge on Sunday Evening then I might well be tempted to have watched England in the final of the Euro which could only ever have ended in tears. So, Southwark Bridge it was. Southwark takes its name from the Anglo Saxon Suthringana weorc – literally the fortification (work) of the Men of the South (Surrey). Southwark is the oldest part of South London, developing around the southern end of London Bridge, itself dating back to c.50 AD, soon after the Roman conquest.

It wasn’t until 1811 that Parliament passed the bill for the building of the first Southwark Bridge, and work didn’t start until 1813. The bridge was designed by John Rennie who also had Waterloo Bridge on the go at the same time and would design the replacement for Old London Bridge. This first Southwark Bridge had three cast iron spans supported by granite piers. In Charles Dickens’ “Little Dorrit” there are several references to the Iron Bridge across the river and I had to do a little bit of research to find out that this was a reference to the original Southwark Bridge. The main purpose of the bridge was to relieve traffic upon Old London Bridge. Contemporary reports showed that it was pretty unsuccessful at attracting traffic away from Old London Bridge. There were a number of reasons why. Firstly there were tolls. Who was going to pay to use Southwark Bridge when Blackfriars and old London Bridge were free? Then the bridge itself was pretty narrow. The approach roads were steep and on the Southwark side very poorly made up.

Predictably enough the bridge company went bankrupt and the bridge was acquired by the Bridge House Estates which operated a number of bridges including London Bridge – we’ll talk more about Bridge House Estates when we get to London Bridge. The tolls were abolished in 1864. The bridge limped on into the 20^th century. To be fair judging by photographs showing the bridge it was not a bad looking thing at all. Still it was living on borrowed time and the new bridge, the current bridge, was constructed between 1913 and 1921.

Southwark Bridge has five steel arches supported by granite river piers. On top of the piers on each side of the bridge are alcoves for pedestrians to sit and take a break. This echoes a feature of the last phase of old London Bridge, which I’ll say a little more about when I get there. All in all the current Southwark Bridge is a perfectly decent river crossing, however it does hold the unenviable record of being the least used of all of the Thames bridges in London.

I started early yesterday since I knew that I had a couple of prior engagements. It’s the last week of the school year and although I’m off on sick I am retiring at the end of the week so I went in to small functions with my department and then with the whole staff. Nice. This one took a couple of hours only in the morning.

The last railway bridge downstream in London is this, Cannon Street Railway Bridge. Cannon Street station was built to give the South Eastern Railway a terminus within the City of London. This necessitated the building of a bridge to carry the railway. Designed by Sir John Hawkshaw and opened in 1866. It had five spans supported by cast iron pillars. It was originally called the Alexandra Bridge, the Prince of Wales having only recently married Alexandra of Denmark. It had two footpaths that were removed in the 1890s so that the bridge could be made wider.

The bridge was damaged during world war II and had to be partially rebuilt. Then in the 1980s British railways carried out an extensive renovation and removed much of the ornamentation on the superstructure. Thankfully they left the two original brick towers facing onto the waterfront on the City side. There it is, not a lot more that I think I can say about it.

Now, it isn’t the last bridge in London working downstream – that honour belongs to Tower Bridge. However I have depicted Tower Bridge in the past and I’m using a sketch from the back catalogue for that. Which meant that the last sketch to complete the challenge was London Bridge and I’ve finished it this afternoon.

Here I think I should declare an interest. A couple of decades ago I read Patricia Pierce’s excellent book about Old London Bridge and thought to myself – I bet that would make a good Mastermind subject -. In 2007 it did. I used it as my specialist subject in the grand final. So once I start going on about old London Bridge I find I really easy to get carried away with my subject. I will do my best to try to keep this relatively brief.

Nobody knows exactly how many wooden bridges were built here across the Thames after the Romans built the first around 50AD. During the reign of King Ethelred II (nicknamed the Unready) the story goes that one of his allies pulled down the then bridge to thwart the Danish armies. This was commemorated in a poem by skaldic poet Ottar Svarte, and some people believe that this poem, the first lines of which translate as

‘London Bridge is broken down,

Gold is won and bright renown’ – is actually the origin of the nursery rhyme London Bridge is Falling Down.

The decision to rebuild London Bridge in stone was taken during the reign of King Henry II and work began in 1176, under the direction of local parish priest Peter de Colechurch. It was completed in the reign of King John in 1209. Although we don’t have any images or written descriptions of the bridge at the time it’s most likely that it had buildings on the superstructure right from the start. Buildings on the bridge were demolished or destroyed and rebuilt for over 500 years until the extensive remodelling from 1758  - 1760 when all the buildings were removed. There was a fortified gateway at the southern end, where severed heads were displayed after the drawbridge gate was demolished. The drawbridge itself could be raised twice a day to let ships through, although it ceased to function and was made solid in the remodelling at the start of the fifteenth century. The most notable feature of the bridge until the 16th century was the Chapel of St. Thomas a Becket. Becket was the patron saint of the City of London and had actually been a parishioner of Peter de Colechurch. The chapel stood on the thickest pier, just over halfway across from the Southwark side. During the Tudor reformation Henry VIII had the chapel demolished. During the reign of Henry’s daughter Elizabeth I a partially prefabricated timber house, probably manufactured in the Netherlands, had large parts of it ferried to the bridge, where it was erected. It was called Nonesuch House and it stood in increasingly dilapidated condition until all the buildings were removed from the bridge.

A number of interesting events punctuate the bridge’s history. The current London Bridge and several other Thames bridges are cared for by the Bridge House estates. This is a charitable organisation and dates back more than 900 years, predating old London Bridge itself. There have been times when the old bridge was taken out of their care. Notably King Edward I gave over the care of the bridge to his mother, Eleanor of Provence –  who is believed to be the my fair lady of the nursery rhyme. She proved expert at gathering the tolls, but not so good at using them on the maintenance of the bridge. During her stewardship part of the bridge collapsed. Maintenance of the bridge was a problem throughout its 600+ year history. It had 19 narrow arches, which greatly reduced the width of the river in real terms and meant each pier was under huge hydraulic pressure.

If you were coming from the Continent the only way to get to Westminster or the City of London was by taking a water ferry, or by crossing London Bridge. So it was the scene of a great deal of pageantry, and not a little bloodshed. In 1381 the leaders of the Peasants Revolt threatened to set fire to the bridge if the citizens did not lower the drawbridge to let the ‘peasant army’ cross. Later on in Richard II’s reign it was also the scene of a magnificent joust between the champions of England and Scotland. (Scotland won 1-0)

The Chapel of Thomas Becket was often used as the starting point for pilgrimages to his tomb in Canterbury Cathedral and the chapel was rebuilt in about 1400 with money from the charitable bequest of the real Lord Mayor Dick Whittington. During Jack Cade’s rebellion in the reign of Henry VI the rebels were defeated in battle on London Bridge itself.

I’ve already mentioned the nineteen narrow arches. In the mid 18^th century remodelling when all of the houses were remove from the bridge the two central arches were combined to make one ‘great arch’. This did not prevent the Thames from freezing over during particularly cold winters and in 1814 it caused the last of London’s Frost Fairs. When the thaw came the large chunks of ice shooting through the arches caused a lot of damage to the bridge and within a few years it was accepted that the bridge would have to be replaced. Demolition didn’t actually start until after the replacement bridge opened slightly downstream in August 1831.

There are remnants of Old London Bridge you can see if you know where to find them. In the 18^th century remodelling, some of the piers were topped with curved alcoves. When his Dad was imprisoned in the Marshalsea Prison young Charles Dickens used to go and sit in these to watch the world go past him. You can find one of these in the grounds of nearby Guys’ Hospital and another 2 in Victoria Park in Hackney. The Museum of London has smaller remains on display too. The church of St. Magnus the Martyr on the Northern bank of the Thames was actually the start of the roadway onto the bridge and the churchyard has several blocks which were part of the bridge which were uncovered during work on a nearby building in the 1930s.

Right, that’s the old bridge, which is the longest lasting and for me the most interesting bridge ever to span the Thames. Now we come to Rennie’s Bridge. Rennie’s design was one of five that were considered, eventually winning approval. The foundation stone was laid in 1825. Rennie died four years earlier but work on the bridge of five stone arches was carried out under the direction of his son, another John Rennie. For the first few decades after its 1831 opening many people expressed admiration for the bridge and the way it dealt with traffic far better than the old bridge had ever done. Still, it was probably unrealistic to expect that John Rennie, designing the bridge in the second decade of the 19^th century could possibly foresee the exponential increase in traffic over the second half of the 19^th century. By the end of the century there was a desperate need for the capacity of the bridge to be increased and it was widened. Within a few years surveys revealed that the bridge was subsiding by an inch every eight years, with the east side subsiding more severely than the west side.

Hence the decision to replace the bridge. It was a man called Ivan Luckin who proposed the idea of selling the bridge. Despite initial scepticism from the City Council the bridge was put on the market in 1968. On the 18^th April it was bought by US oilman Robert P. McCullough who envisioned it could be the centrepiece of his Lake Havasu resort.

There is an urban myth that Robert McCullough thought he was actually buying Tower Bridge. There is a word for this. It’s cobblers. Mr. McCullough was fully aware of what he was buying. During negotiations there was even a scale model of London Bridge on the table in front of him. So the stones of the bridge were numbered, dismantled, shipped off to Lake Havasu and rebuilt there. Well, sort of. Some of the stones were certainly numbered and shipped off. Not until after they had been shaved so that they could be fitted as facing stones over the new concrete frame which had been built to hold them. A lot of stone was sold off and a lot was just let in an abandoned and flooded quarry. A very large number of souvenirs were made from discarded stones – I myself have a small block, an ash tray and a desk set.

The current bridge was built while Rennie’s was being demolished. They would work on for example the upstream side while the downstream side would continue to be open to traffic, then vice versa when that side as finished. Finally it was opened by Queen Elizabeth II in 1973.

So, the current bridge consists of three spans of prestressed concrete box girders. Nope, me neither. From the river side, well, it looks alright if you like concrete, I suppose. Its bland. On anything except the sunniest day its sides look grey and miserable. No, in order to get the best view of the bridge you need to get up on the walkways.

Wide, isn’t it? It carries 6 lanes of traffic across the river. I’ve seen a number of websites claiming that Wandsworth Bridge is London’s busiest but I wouldn’t be surprised if London Bridge gives it a fair old run for its metaphorical money. London Bridge at the time I’m writing this is only fifty one years old, and I reckon it will need to be at least double that age before we can really start to decide whether it has stood the test of time. But based on what we’ve seen since it opened, I’d say it scores highly for functionality. For aesthetics? Nah, not so much.

So our journey ends where my 1982 journey began, at Tower Bridge, with a drawing I made about four or five years ago. When you talk or you write about Tower Bridge as a bridge you’re up against the fact that Tower Bridge isn’t just a bridge. It’s a world landmark and it’s also a symbol. For many years as a teacher, in my first lesson with a new year 7 class I would draw several symbols on the board to show the kids things about me, if they could work them out. For example I would draw a stork with a bundle and ‘x5’ to show them that I have five children. To show them that I come from London I would draw a simplified outline of Tower Bridge. And to be fair, it nearly always worked. For Tower Bridge transcends its existence as a mere river crossing. It is nothing less than a symbol of London. There are two structures which evoke in me a feeling of pride in London and a nostalgia for growing up there. The dome of St. Paul’s is one, and Tower Bridge is the other.

Through the second half of the 19^th century the development of the East End led to increasing demand for a new bridge downstream of London Bridge. The opening of Rennie’s London Bridge in 1831 led to a huge increase in traffic, so much so that London Bridge would need to be widened in 1901, and the need for a new bridge to relieve the congestion became more pressing throughout the 1870s. An 1876 report recommended the building of either a new bridge or a new tunnel to the east of London Bridge. More than fifty designs were submitted, but in 8 years all that the committee of the Bridge House Estates had managed to do was to decide that the bridge would only be one of three designs of 2 types – either one of two designs of swing bridge, or a bascule bridge. A bascule bridge was decided upon, and an act of Parliament passed to the effect in 1885.

The Act imposed some stringent conditions on the design of the bridge. Boiling these down to essentials, the bridge would have to ensure that it was no obstacle to tall ships passing into the Pool of London to load and unload at the wharves on the Southwark side of the river. Also, the design of the Bridge had to match the architecture of the Tower of London. There was also a stipulation that the construction of the bridge had to be completed within four years. This necessitated a further two Acts of Parliament to extend the timescale of the construction.

Horace Jones as architect and Sir John Wolfe Barry as engineer designed the bridge in a way that fulfilled the conditions of the Act of Parliament. Jones died before the completion and Barry took over as architect as well as engineer. In Jones’ original design the façade was meant to be red brick but the changes to a more ornate Victorian Gothic style were thought to be more in keeping with the Tower of London.

Tower Bridge was a target for enemy bombing raids during the Second World War and although it was fortunate enough to escape a devastating direct hit it did suffer damage on a number of occasions.

There are few more archetypal London experiences for which there is no charge than standing by the river either a little upstream or downstream of the bridge and watching the bridge being raised and lowered. If you’re visiting London you have a pretty decent chance of being able to do so because the bridge currently is raised about a 1000 times a year. Which is considerably less than the first 12 months of its operation, when it was raised over 6000 times. To be fair at that time the Port of London was probably the busiest in the world so there was a lot more traffic on the river.

Coming back to the untrue urban myth about Robert P. McCullough believing he was buying Tower Bridge, which we discussed along with London Bridge, the origin of this possibly lies in the fact that many people other than Londoners, do actually think that Tower Bridge is London Bridge. I can sort of understand this. London Bridge has the history, the famous name, the song. But it really doesn’t look the business. Tower Bridge looks the part. So, not London Bridge, no. But London’s Bridge, yes, that I can get on board with. 

----------------------------------------

So that’s the challenge completed. Looking back now I have drawn every station on the London Underground, Overground and DLR. I have drawn every property, station and utility on the London Monopoly Board. Now I’ve drawn all of the bridges across the Thames in London. Whatever will the next challenge be? Answers on a postcard, please, since I have no idea. Watch this space.

London Bridges again

In the previous week I completed ten more bridges. I am delighted to say that my arm continued to improve – or at least, not to get any worse, and this week I added eleven more bridges to the total. Without further ado, here they are:-

Fulham Railway Bridge

Ladies and gentlemen, let me introduce you to the bridge with no name. Yes, we call it the Fulham Railway Bridge, but it has also been known as Putney Railway Bridge, and even The Iron Bridge. You can call it what you like since it doesn’t have any official name. For me, I’ll keep calling it Fulham Railway Bridge.

So, what have we got? Well, it’s a relatively unassuming lattice girder bridge built for the LSWR in 1889. You know from my comments about Kew Railway Bridge that I have something of a fondness for the unashamedly industrial appearance of this kind of railway bridge. Nowadays it carried the London Underground District line branch to Wimbledon.

Wandsworth Bridge

Well, what can we say about what is, to my mind, one of the least distinctive bridges to cross the Thames in Greater London? This is the second bridge on the site. The first was built in 1873, during one of the busier periods of bridge building in London. The expectation was that the Hammersmith and City Railway was going to build a terminal on the north bank of the Thames here. They didn’t, and this was one factor that contributed to the first bridge’s relative failure. There were others. The bridge was a lattice girder bridge and it looked a little like a railway bridge. Problems with the approach roads, weight and speed restrictions on the bridge all meant that it never made enough money from tolls even to keep up with the costs of maintenance.

The bridge couldn’t carry trams or buses and replacing it was first mooted in the 1920s. Replacing Putney Bridge was deemed more urgent, and so it wasn’t until 1935 that the Ministry of Transport agreed to the replacement. Demolition of the old bridge began in 1937, meaning it lasted a little more than 60 years.

The current bridge is a cantilever steel bridge that crosses the river in three spans. The outbreak of World War II caused a shortage of steel and meant that the bridge could not be completed and opened until September of 1940. I want to be kind about the bridge, or at the very least, I don’t want to be mean about it. It isn’t ugly – it’s a bit too nondescript to be ugly. But, and I want to stress this, it does the job which is all the more praiseworthy considering that it is one of the busiest bridges in London, carrying an estimated 50,000 vehicles a day.

Battersea Railway Bridge

It’s easy to dismiss Battersea Railway Bridge as just another railway bridge across the Thames. However, it’s really not without an interesting history.

For one thing, it’s not just one of the oldest railway bridges across the river, it’s one of the oldest bridges across the river full stop. Yes, a fair number of bridges were built across the Thames before this one was built in 1863, but most of them have long since been replaced. This is still substantially the same bridge. Today the bridge carries the West London line of the London Overground. Originally it linked railways in South London with the termini at Paddington and Euston. The link with Paddington meant that the bridge originally carried broad gauge lines as well as standard gauge. Trust me, that’s a big thing to a railway buff.

While we’re on the subject of railways, the bridge was used exclusively for freight throughout the 19^th century and the first passenger train didn’t cross it until 1904. The structure carries the railway across five wrought iron arches and is grade II* listed.

Battersea Bridge

Battersea was where my Scottish Clark Grandfather Thomas married my Nan Dorothy and it’s also where my father George was born. He was very little when Tom and Dorothy moved the family to Acton. As far as I know that had nothing to do with Battersea Bridge, mind you.

The current bridge is the second Battersea Bridge. The first was opened in 1771 and came to prove a popular subject with artists, despite the fact that it really wasn’t terribly good. It was planned as a stone bridge but there were problems with raising the investment to build it so a wooden bridge was built. If you look at paintings of the bridge, or old photographs it was certainly an eye catching structure. It had 19 spans and must surely have posed a challenge to river traffic. Old London Bridge itself had 19 spans, and this had the effect of creating a weir effect at certain times, so much so that at different times of the day passing downstream could be like shooting the rapids. For all that the bridge was not demolished until 1885.

So, the current Battersea Bridge was designed by our old hero, Sir Joseph Bazalgette. From a distance it doesn’t necessarily look that much to write home about. That’s possibly partly due to the predominantly dark green colour scheme, I would think. When you get closer though there’s enough decoration while the five cast iron arches give a feeling of strength and permanence.

Coming back to paintings of the old bridge, old Battersea Bridge was featured in Whistler’s “Nocturne in Black and Gold – The Falling Rocket’. The critic and know-all John Ruskin in his review accused him of ‘flinging a pot of paint in he public’s face.” Whistler sued, and was awarded damages of one farthing, which virtually ruined him.

Albert Bridge

I’m from Ealing in West London and I attended the University of London Goldsmiths College. Goldies is in New Cross in South East London and my student hall, where I stayed for three years, was situated in Lewisham, right on the edge of Blackheath. I didn’t used to come home every weekend, but I did do so fairly often. Now, if you know London you’ll know that it’s a place where travelling relatively short distances can take a long time. It’s just over 15 miles from Goldies to my old home and I googled it this morning. It informed me that the average duration of a car journey between the two at off peak times is just under an hour and a quarter. Using public transport it’s a little more than an hour and a quarter. I would cycle between the two and as I became fitter, I became a lot quicker, to the point where I could do the journey in a little less than forty minutes. My preferred route involved riding along the Chelsea Embankment just a little downstream of Battersea Bridge, past the Albert and Chelsea Bridges eventually crossing over Vauxhall Bridge. So it makes me happy that I’ve sketched this far now.

Of the bridges I’ve just mentioned I think that the Albert Bridge is the prettiest. I did think always think that the Albert Bridge was designed by Joseph Bazalgette, but no. It was actually designed by Rowland Mason Ordish in 1873. It’s an interesting design too. At first glance it looks like another suspension bridge, but it wasn’t. It was built according to the Ordish-Lefeuvre system, as a cable stayed bridge. Look, I’m not an expert on these things, but I do know that the design proved to be a bit unstable and this is where the Bazalgette connection comes in. It was Bazalgette who incorporated elements of suspension bridge design into it.

You can argue that the success this brought was limited. The bridge develop a reputation for instability, and like the first Wandsworth bridge it never reaped enough revenue from tolls to pay for maintenance and up keep of the bridge. Speaking of toll booths, these still exist on the bridge, in fact I’ve painted one of them once. They have signs warning troops to break step when crossing it.

One of the things that might strike you when you cross the bridge is how narrow the roadway is. So in practical terms, this is not a great success as a bridge, and although it is still open to traffic there are very strict restrictions on its use and it is one of London’s least used bridges. However on a clear evening, when it’s all lit up with LEDs, it’s undeniably very, very pretty.

One more trivia fact, Albert Bridge is one of only two bridges in the central London area which are the fist bridge to have bee built there. The other, you ask? Why, Tower Bridge of course!

Chelsea Bridge

Here’s a question for you. Why was the Albert Bridge named after Prince Albert? Well, just downstream was the original Chelsea Bridge and this one was officially called the Victoria Bridge. There you go.

The purpose of the Victoria Bridge/ Chelsea Bridge 1 was to facilitate the development of the new Battersea Park area. It was originally planned in the 1840s. However the work on the Chelsea Embankment caused over a decade of delays and the bridge was not actually opened until 1858. Photographs of this first Chelsea Bridge show it as a relatively stately looking suspension bridge, just a little reminiscent of the current Hammersmith Bridge,

Like a significant number of 18^th and 19^th century Thames Bridges this was a toll bridge – which was a bit of a cheek considering that it was built with public money. Like the majority of those toll bridges, it was not a commercial success. Which goes to prove the old adage – if you build it they will come, but they won’t pay to cross over it -. Tolls were finally abolished in 1879. There’s an interesting story as to why the bridge was renamed Chelsea Bridge. Basically the structure of the bridge was unsound and the authorities didn’t want the bridge being associated with the Queen in case it collapsed.

Even if it had been sound by the 1920s it was obvious that it could not cope with the amount of traffic wanting to use it which was only likely to increase. The bridge was finally demolished and replaced by the current bridge which opened in 1937. The current structure was apparently the first self-anchored suspension bridge in Britain – which I’m told means that it is anchored to its own deck rather than to the ground. Fills one with confidence.

It has always struck me as something of a plain jane of a bridge. It’s clean and unfussy but lacks adornment when compared with the other bridges on this section of the river. I don’t know if this is what was meant, but the pillars carrying the cables above the deck have always looked a bit like Egyptian obelisks to me.

Grosvenor Railway Bridge

I don’t know why but I always thought that this bridge was called the Victoria Railway Bridge. Maybe it’s because it carries rail traffic into Victoria station. The bridge was first built by Sir John Fowler, and in an era of great British engineers his was a name to conjure with. His lasting monuments, if you need any, are the Metropolitan Railway which was the very first underground railway in the world, and the Forth Bridge which he co-designed. Mind you, he did have a few failures along the way. Using steam locomotives in underground railway tunnels is not ideal because of the amount of smoke that they produce, so Fowler came up with a design for a ‘smokeless’ engine, nicknamed Fowler’s Ghost, Basically it relied on heat retaining bricks in the boiler to maintain the temperature and ensure a steady supply of steam. Its main drawback was that it didn’t work.

Still, the Grosvenor Railway Bridge was the first to be built in central London and here Sir John was on much firmer ground should you pardon the metaphor. His bridge originally carried just 2 tracks across five arches. Five years later it was widened to add a further four tracks which would accommodate increased traffic from the London, Brighton and South Coast Railway and the London, Chatham and Dover Railway. In 1907 the bridge was widened again to accommodate a further track for the LB&SCR.

Between 1967 and 1968 the bridge was completely renovated and modernised, and little remains of the materials Fowler originally used apart from the cores of the original piers. Within a year of the completion of this work Grosvenor Bridge was claimed to be the world’s busiest railway bridge, carrying in excess of 1000 trains each day.

Today it’s a perfectly pleasant, unfussy railway bridge, even if it does lack a little impact.

Vauxhall Bridge

I think I may have crossed Kew and Richmond bridges more times than I’ve crossed any other. However there’s no doubt in my mind which bridge I’ve cycled across more times than any other. That’s Vauxhall Bridge, hands down.

This is the second Vauxhall Bridge. The first had a complicated genesis. The purpose of the bridge was to open the South Bank of the Thames for development. There was opposition to the building of any bridge here from the proprietors of the original Battersea Bridge. In the end the Vauxhall Bridge Company was obliged to compensate them for any loss of revenue. The original design was rejected. Then the great John Rennie – don’t worry, we’ll get to him later – had a design accepted, but the developers ran out of money to build it. So Rennie submitted a cheaper design. This was rejected. Samuel Bentham submitted a design. Construction began but it wasn’t long before concern was expressed about the construction of the piers, and a report by engineer James Walker led to the design being abandoned. So Walker was appointed to design and build a bridge of 9 cast iron arches with stone piers, which would be the first cast iron bridge over the Thames. So, finally the bridge opened in 1816. It was named the Regent Bridge after the future George IV, but pretty soon afterwards was renamed Vauxhall Bridge.

The developers believed that the areas either side of the bridge would become well to do suburbs, so they set high tolls at the start. Instead the area became home to poor factory workers in the Doulton factory, and also to the Millbank Penitentiary. Despite this though revenue did improve from the tolls, until the Metropolitan Board of Works (the Government department at the time responsible for public infrastructure works) had an Act of Parliament passed enabling it to buy all of the bridges across the Thames from Hammersmith Bridge to Waterloo Bridge and abolish the tolls. Vauxhall Bridge was bought in 1879 and tolls were lifted. Not long after this, though, a report into the bridge established it was in poor condition and in 1895 an Act of Parliament was passed allowing the bridge to be replaced.

The original design for the new bridge by London County Council chief engineer Sir Alexander Binnie was for a steel bridge. Asked to think again he came up with a five span concrete bridge to be faced with granite. After the piers had been built it was discovered that the clay of the riverbed could not support the weight of a concrete bridge, and so the long suffering Binnie and civil engineer Maurice Fitzmaurice designed a steel superstructure to fit the piers. During the construction many influential people commented with dismay about the very functional design and so sculptors Frederick Pomeroy and Alfred Drury were commissioned to make large, personificational statues which would eventually be attached to the sides of the bridge. Upstream there are Pomeroy’s Agriculture, Architecture, Engineering and Pottery, while Drury’s Science, Fine Arts, Local Government and Education adorn the downstream side.

Vauxhall Bridge was the first bridge to carry trams across the river. Sadly the tracks were ripped up when trams ceased operating in London in 1951. There’s been a lot of development in the last 40 years particularly on the south bank here, and in 2008 the bridge was give a grade II* listing.

Lambeth Bridge

Red is used prominently in the colour scheme of Lambeth Bridge. Why do you think that should be? Well it’s all to do with the Houses of Parliament, which lie on the north bank of the Thames between Lambeth Bridge and Westminster Bridge. To the west, on the Lambeth Bridge end is the House of Lords, and the benches within the Lords chamber are red. At the east end, the Westminster Bridge end, is the House of Commons, with its green benches. Which is why green is the main colour of Westminster Bridge.

Back to Lambeth Bridge, then. On the north bank there’s a road called Horseferry Road on the approach to Lambeth bridge, which shows that this was originally the site of a horse drawn ferry. Remember, there was no other bridge than London Bridge in central London until the 18^th century. The first Lambeth Bridge wasn’t opened until 1862, and it was a plain and austere suspension bridge. Yes, it was a toll bridge and no, the tolls didn’t raise the expected revenue. This is a story we’ve heard before. The LCC bought it in 1879 and abolished the tolls. The Metropolitan Board of Works found that the bridge – less than two decades old at this point – was badly corroded, and vehicles were banned from it in 1910.

Parliamentary approval for a replacement road bridge was granted in the 1920s, but a flood in the area before work had begun delayed the building of the bridge. Finally the current five span steel arch bridge opened in 1932.

Westminster Bridge

Now, as pleasant as the current Westminster Bridge is, I doubt that many people would be moved to describe it as the most beautiful thing on Earth. Yet its predecessor, whose shortcomings we shall discuss very shortly, moved the great William Wordsworth to describe it with the words “Earth has not anything to show more fair.” And this, mind you, from a man famous for his association with the Lake District.

A bridge at Westminster was first proposed during the Restoration period, but the opposition of the Corporation of London and the waterman’s lobby proved a tough obstacle to shift. It wasn’t until after London’s second bridge was built at Putney that Parliament approved the building of a bridge at Westminster, and even then it took 11 years to build, finally opening in 1750. Wordsworth wrote his poem about the bridge in 1802, but even then it was being undermined by the design flaws that would see it suffering from incurable subsidence by the time it reached its centenary. Like London Bridge the original Westminster Bridge consisted of many narrow arches, and the narrowness of the arches contributed to the current scouring the river bed which led to the subsidence.

The bridge was then demolished and the current Westminster Bridge was built to replace it. It was opened in 1862. The bridge has 7 cast iron arches, and much of the ornamentation was designed by Charles Barry, which was the architect of the Palace of Westminster which was in the middle of the long process of being built at the time. The current Westminster Bridge might not be the most beautiful on the river, although it’s perfectly inoffensive. However, it has to be said that if you’re standing on the Southern end of the bridge the view to the northern end, taking in the Palace of Westminster and in particular the Elizabeth Tower – commonly known as Big Ben – is one of the finest on any bridge across the Thames.

Trying to be a little less damning of the original bridge, it did at least have the effect of opening the door to development of more bridges in London. Prior to the building of Westminster bridge, only 1 new bridge, Putney, had been built in the previous 500 years. In less than 30 years four more had been built.

Currently, Westminster Bridge is the oldest road bridge across the Thames in central London, albeit that Richmond Bridge is many decades older.

Hungerford Bridge and Golden Jubilee Bridges

Do you count these as one bridge or as separate bridges? Well, they are listed as separate structures, even though the two Golden Jubilee footbridges share the same pier as the Hungerford Railway Bridge. I’m depicting them as one for a simpler reason than that. It’s very difficult to do a picture of one without the others. So I’m not.

Right, here’s a question for you. If you asked people the question, can you name a Victorian Engineer?, whose would be the name that name up more than any other? Chances are it would be Isambard Kingdom Brunel. Brunel was the chief supervising engineer of the Thames Tunnel from Wapping to Rotherhithe that had been designed by his father Marc Brunel. He didn’t design or build any of the current bridges across the Thames in London, however he did design and build the original Hungerford Bridge.

This was a suspension bridge opened in 1845 carrying railway lines across the river from Hungerford market to what would become the Waterloo area. In 1859 the bridge was bought by the South Eastern Railway, to extend the line into the new Charing Cross station. The decision was made to replace the bridge. It’s a bit of a shame since Brunel’s bridge was actually rather picturesque. Contemporary pictures show that a pair of rather fetching Italianate red brick towers supported the central span. These were demolished but the new bridge did use the buttresses of Brunel’s bridge. You might well have seen or even passed over a bridge held up by the chains from Brunel’s Hungerford Bridge since these were reused in Brunel’s Clifton suspension bridge in Bristol. (Yes, I know it's increasingly contentious to call it Brunel's Clifton Bridge. He died before it was finished, and the engineers who did finish the bridge made important changes to Brunel's design. However, that doesn't affect Hungerford Bridge.)

The new bridge, which is the current bridge, was a nine-span wrought iron steel truss bridge, made of lattice girders. You have to look quite closely to see the details from some angles, mind you. The bridge was originally built with walkways on either side, but the western one was removed when the railway bridge was widened. In 1996 a competition was held to design new footbridges either side of the railway bridge, since the lone walkway had become dilapidated and was felt to be too narrow.

Not claims you could make about the new bridges which are both four metres wide. I have to say that the large white slanting pylons from which the deck is suspended seem to enter into a rather unsettling dialogue with the Victorian appearance of the railway bridge sandwiched between them, but on a sunny day I find the bridges very pleasant to walk across. As for the name, well with them opening in 2002, the year of Queen Elizabeth II’s Golden Jubilee, it’s a bit of a no-brainer.

Waterloo Bridge

Trivia question – which bridge across the Thames has a Hollywood movie named after it? Waterloo Bridge, and it had two films named after it, the original 1930 film, and the 1940 remake, which starred Vivien Leigh, who’d only just received her first Oscar for Gone With the Wind. Which is pretty appropriate considering that the original bridge was gone with the wind by this time, while it would be two years before the new bridge opened partially, and five years until it opened completely.

Let’s talk about the old bridge for a while, though. My favourite bridge ever to cross the Thames is Old London Bridge. We’ll come to my favourite existing bridge in the fullness of time. Still, I do also have a soft spot for old Waterloo Bridge. This was originally designed by the Scottish engineer John Rennie as the Strand Bridge, for the obvious reason it could be accessed from The Strand. Before it was complete the Battle of Waterloo had been fought and won and the bridge was renamed Waterloo Bridge. John Rennie would go on to design the new London Bridge which would be opened in 1831, and there were certainly similarities in the design of the two bridges. Like people, some bridges are naturally more photogenic than others, or should I say, more picturesque. Waterloo Bridge scored highly on this scale. Constable painted its opening, and Claude Monet painted it no fewer than 41times.

The same scour from the river flow which had earlier done for the first Westminster Bridge was found to be damaging the foundations of Waterloo Bridge by the mid-1880s. Urgent remedial work had to be carried out during the 1920s, but this was only ever a temporary solution and in the 1930s the London County Council made the decision to demolish it and replace it, despite some opposition from early proponents of architectural conservation.

Right, what links both Waterloo Bridge and the traditional British red telephone box? Yes, both were designed by Sir Giles Gilbert Scott. Scott freely admitted that he was an architect and not an engineer, which is perhaps why you get to see so little of the actual engineering of the bridge from the outside. Look, I’ve put on record that I don’t like looking at large amounts of concrete on the exterior of a structure. However the first time I really looked at Waterloo Bridge I was impressed by how modern it looked. To me at that time in the mid 70s it looked every bit as modern as the recently opened London Bridge. Well, you live and learn, I suppose. For some time after it was opened it was known as the Ladies’ Bridge because of the large numbers of women who worked on its construction during the Second World War. Waterloo Bridge was, I believe, the only bridge across the Thames in Central London to suffer damage from an air strike during the war.

Since World War II Waterloo Bridge has had a fairly uneventful history, with the exception of the Georgy Markov incident. Georgy Markov was a Bulgarian dissident who worked for the BBC world service, and a vocal critic of the Soviet bloc. In 1978 he walked across Waterloo Bridge, and when he had crossed it he was injected with a poisoned micro pellet, probably by the tip of an umbrella. He died four days later.

Coming back to the original bridge when it was demolished blocks of granite from it were sent to Commonwealth countries across the world. The silver grey beech piles were also cut up and used to make thousands of boxes, many of which were sold during the Festival of Britain. I have several of these boxes in my own small collection.