Strangely enough, the shares could be sold, although the purchaser relied on the survival of the original investor to receive the dividend. In 1833, an advertisement appeared for sale to the highest bidder of a £100 share ‘currently paying £14 per annum. The nominee is a lady of 69 years of age and in good health.’
Construction of Richmond Bridge started in August 1774 and the commissioners asked if the Prince of Wales would perform the ceremony of laying the first stone. Whether for lack of interest or because the Prince had another engagement, the request was turned down, so it was agreed that Henry Hobart, the leading active member of the Commission, should lay the first stone. Work progressed without notable incident apart from some complaints that the solid abutments at each end of the bridge would impede navigation and the general feeling among the commissioners that the contractor, Thomas Kerr, was proceeding too slowly. However, money was running out and a second tontine for an additional £5,000 was raised on 4 November 1776.
By the autumn of 1776, the bridge was far enough completed for foot passengers to cross. The commissioners were able to declare it open for carriages on 12 January 1777, although the contractors had yet to finish the parapets, kerbs and tollhouse. The commissioners’ dissatisfaction with Thomas Kerr resulted in acrimony, especially when he demanded extra money for additional work he had done which was not in the original contract. Arbitrators were appointed and Kerr was represented by Robert Mylne, the eminent architect who had recently designed the first Blackfriars Bridge. The matter was settled when the jury, presided over by Lord Chief Justice Mansfield, decided that the sum of £89 3 s. 11 d. offered by the commissioners was fair.
The final touch to the construction work was to erect in December 1777 on the Surrey side of the bridge an obelisk, which still stands today. It is inscribed with the words, ‘The first stone of this bridge was laid 23 August 1774 and the bridge was completed December 1777.’ The obelisk also lists mileage to places in London, Middlesex and Surrey, including XI miles to London Bridge, X miles to Westminster and XV miles to Staines. It also warns, ‘Persons who damage or deface the bridge will be prosecuted.’ No mention is made of the original punishment set down in the Act of Parliament of transportation to one of the colonies in America.
1780 view of Richmond Bridge with tollhouse on Richmond side of bridge
Surprisingly, there was no official opening ceremony and initial public reaction was muted. However, by 1779 articles appeared in the press praising its aesthetic merits. The author of an article in the London Magazine of September 1779 wrote: ‘it presents the spectator with one of the richest landscapes nature and art ever produced by their joint efforts, and connoisseurs in painting will instantly be reminded of some of the best performances of Claude Lorraine.’ This was high praise indeed, as Claude was one of the most important inspirations for the great renaissance of English landscape gardening during the eighteenth century. J.M.W. Turner admired Claude greatly and insisted in his will that his paintings should be displayed in the National Gallery only if two of his sunrises were in the same room as two paintings by Claude. In the 1820s, Turner produced about twenty sketches of the bridge from various viewpoints as well as one finished watercolour, which can be seen in Tate Britain. Constable also painted Richmond Bridge, as have innumerable other artists right up to the present day.
The bridge soon became popular with local inhabitants and also with travellers to and from London. Boswell tells the story of an evening visit by himself, Dr Johnson and Sir Joshua Reynolds to a mutual friend, Richard Owen Cambridge, who lived in a beautiful villa in Twickenham. They were travelling from London but, as Boswell wrote:
Dr Johnson’s tardiness was such, that Sir Joshua, who had an appointment at Richmond earlier in the day, was obliged to go by himself on horseback, leaving his own coach to Johnson and me. Johnson was in such good spirits that everything seemed to please him as we drove along.3
Reynolds himself had a house on Richmond Hill. Wick House, which still stands today, was built for him by Sir William Chambers. It was from here that he painted the famous view from Richmond Hill, but he seldom did landscapes and never painted Richmond Bridge itself. It is strange to think of the great man, the first president of the Royal Academy, galloping on horseback over Richmond Bridge while his less distinguished friends travelled in relative comfort in his coach. However, he will have saved himself money on the toll, as it cost twopence to cross the bridge on a horse, while Boswell and Johnson will have had to pay two shillings. The tolls were not at all popular. Even David Garrick, who was one of the commissioners, explained to a friend whom he had invited to dinner that he should cross the bridge by foot and a coach would then pick him up. This device was probably common for local inhabitants as the pedestrian toll was one halfpenny, compared with the coach toll of two shillings. By 1822, the bridge finances were in such a good state that all tolls were reduced to one penny. When the last survivor of the first tontine died in 1859, all tolls ceased and the tollhouses were later replaced by iron seats, dated 1868, which are still situated in the recesses of the bridge on the Richmond side. Sufficient funds were left to pay the last survivor of the second tontine until his death in 1865, nearly 90 years after the bridge was opened. Unlike at the unceremonious bridge opening, the closing of the tolls was greeted with enthusiastic shouts from the large crowds which had gathered to see the toll gates removed. Tolls were reintroduced once more for one day only on 30 May 1964 by students of St Mary’s College, which is housed at Strawberry Hill, the former home of Horace Walpole. They set up a private toll by holding a long pole across the bridge and collected money from motorists for their annual Strawberry Fair charity day until the police moved them on.
Richmond Bridge with boats on the annual Trafalgar Day cavalcade
During the early years of the twentieth century, there were many arguments about how to solve the problem of increasing congestion on the bridge. Omnibuses posed a particular difficulty as they were nearly as wide as the bridge itself. The main alternatives were to build a totally new bridge or to widen the existing one. Needless to say, the inhabitants of Richmond and the press were not short of proposals, forcefully argued and equally forcefully opposed. One picture held in Richmond Local Studies Collection shows an artist’s impression of how a new bridge crossing the river downstream of Richmond Bridge would entirely spoil the famous view painted by Turner. In the end, a new bridge was in fact constructed in 1933 to the north of the town to take the Chertsey arterial road over the river to Twickenham and beyond. By then, Surrey and Middlesex county councils had finally agreed that the old bridge should be widened, and its control was transferred to public ownership on 31 March 1931. The 160-year-old Commission had constructed and maintained an aesthetic masterpiece, but it was for the county councils to make it suitable for modern traffic conditions.
In 1933, Sir Harley H. Dalrymple-Hay produced a report on the condition of the bridge and how it could be widened. He suggested four alternatives. The first was to extend the footways out on either side of the bridge by supporting them on projecting stone corbels so that motor vehicles had use of the whole width of the existing bridge. The second was to extend the whole bridge equally on both sides. The third and fourth were to extend the bridge on the downstream or the upstream side only. The corbelling scheme was the cheapest, but considered aesthetically unacceptable. It clearly made sense to widen the bridge on one side only if possible, and Dalrymple-Hay concluded that the best solution was to do this on the upstream side, as this would cause the least disruption to the nearby houses. The councils approved his estimate of £73,000 and appointed the Cleveland Bridge and Engineering Co. Ltd of Darlington to run the project. Work proceeded to number each of the facing stones before taking them down so that the inner portion of the bridge structure could be widened and subsequently refaced with the original Portland stone. The result was a bridge which was widened from 24 feet 9 inches to 36 feet but looked exactly the same as before. The effect of the widening
can be noted only by looking up from underneath the arches, where the newer bricks on the upstream side are clearly differentiated from the original brickwork. The work took two years and was completed in the summer of 1939 just before the outbreak of the Second World War. It caused considerable disruption, although a single line of traffic was always kept open. During the project, it was found that the original foundations, which had lasted over 160 years, were hardly state of the art. The piers were built on wooden platforms sunk only a little way beneath the river-bed, surrounded by wooden piles, some of which had rotted away. Nevertheless, the bridge was considered safe enough after sheet-steel piling was driven into the river-bed and cofferdams constructed to lay concrete foundations.
There was one further opportunity for the inhabitants of Richmond to club together in protest concerning the bridge, using what was now a permanent pressure group known as the Richmond Society. That was when the Council decided that the gaslights on the bridge would have to be converted to electricity. Various modern lamp-post designs were put forward, but the Richmond Society succeeded in forcing the Council to reject them in favour of converting the existing gas lamp-posts to electricity. There is no doubt that the old gas lamps do add to the atmosphere of times past on the eighteenth-century bridge. However, strictly speaking, they are an anachronism, as gas lighting was not invented until early in the nineteenth century, well after the bridge was completed.
The Richmond and Twickenham Times has reported a number of incidents involving Richmond Bridge over the past years, two of them involving potentially dangerous collisions with boats. On 20 March 1964, three pleasure boats were tied together at moorings at Eel Pie Island about one and a half miles upstream. It was a stormy night and the tide was in flood, causing all three to break their moorings and be swept down to Richmond, where they crashed into the bridge. No serious damage was done to the bridge and two of the boats were in good enough condition to be towed back to Eel Pie Island and repaired. However, the Princess Beatrice, a historic pleasure steamer built in 1896 and once used by Gilbert and Sullivan, was damaged beyond repair and had to be scrapped.
Flooded towpath by Richmond Bridge
Another incident, which must have engendered a certain amount of schadenfreude among the less wealthy inhabitants of Richmond, occurred on the evening of 30 January 1987. The Brave Goose, the largest motor yacht to be built at the famous Tough Brothers’ yard on the upper reaches of the Thames at Teddington, got stuck under the central arch of Richmond Bridge on its way downstream to its moorings at Tower Pier. The owner, the chairman of NCP car parks, Sir Donald Gosling, had paid £3,500,000 for the boat. The tallest part of the yacht was 25 feet high while the central arch of the bridge was 33 feet above low water mark at its highest point. Sir Donald must have spent an anxious night, and been considerably relieved when the boat was freed the next morning.
A more cheerful report concerned the sighting of a dolphin under the bridge on 29 October 1999. Several people reported seeing it and informed the RSPCA, who failed to locate it. However, it was later spotted swimming past the Thames Barrier, and would have completed a journey of nearly 100 miles from the North Sea up to Richmond and back. Since the Thames now contains many fish, the dolphin may well have had a pleasant journey.
Richmond Bridge is now over 200 years old. Its bicentenary was celebrated on 7 May 1977; this was exactly four months later than it should have been, but the organisers wanted to avoid the inclement weather common in January, the month in which the bridge was opened in 1777. Unfortunately, the ceremony was dampened somewhat by rain anyway. But a good show was put on by minstrels and groups in eighteenth-century dress. Today, when passing the obelisk on the Richmond side to cross the river or when viewing the elegantly proportioned arched structure from the riverside, it is not hard to imagine the scene as it would have been over 200 years ago, as Dr Johnson and Boswell paid their tolls to cross the bridge in pursuit of Sir Joshua Reynolds on horseback on their way to their friend’s house in Twickenham.
Richmond Railway Bridge
Built in 1848, this was the first railway bridge to cross the River Thames in London. Up until then, the London termini served only stations on the same side of the river. The first trains had in fact come into London as early as 1836, when London Bridge Station was constructed with its short railway line to Deptford. To the west, Isambard Kingdom Brunel constructed his Great Western Railway (GWR), with its London terminus at Paddington, and the London and South Western Railway (LSWR) extended their line from their Nine Elms terminus to Southampton.
Before the coming of the railways, steam had been used from 1816 for steamboat services, which had burgeoned in a totally unregulated manner. Steamboats were much faster than the wherries and ferries rowed by watermen, which had been the favourite method of transport up until the eighteenth century, as the roads were bad and highwaymen presented a constant danger. By 1843, steamboats were running six times a day to and from Richmond. But their popularity was much shorter-lived than that of the watermen before them, as the railways soon provided an even faster and more secure service. Moreover, they were not entirely safe, as evidenced by the explosion on board the Richmond steamboat near Westminster Bridge in 1817. A cartoon was published at the time showing the steamboat exploding and its fashionably dressed passengers flying up in the air in a cloud of black smoke.
The railways received a tremendous publicity boost in 1840 when Queen Victoria herself agreed to travel from Windsor to London by train. In fact, her cavalcade drove from Windsor to Slough station, where she was greeted by Isambard Kingdom Brunel. She travelled in a specially constructed royal carriage from Slough to Paddington, accompanied by Brunel, who stood on the footplate. The journey from London to Windsor Castle, the Queen’s favourite country retreat, was considerably shortened, and she expressed her approval, much to the delight of Brunel.
In 1846, a rival company to the LSWR built an extension from the LSWR station at Falcon Bridge (today’s Clapham Junction) to Richmond. The opening ceremony took place on 24 July. A train took the ceremonial party from Nine Elms to Richmond in 32 minutes. According to the Illustrated London News of 21 October 1848, the railway ‘pursues a pretty course through the villas, orchards and nursery gardens which stud that locality until it reaches Wandsworth. The River Wandle and the valley are crossed by a splendid viaduct of 23 arches.’ Today’s traveller between Nine Elms and Wandsworth would not recognise this idyllic description of what is now unrelenting urban sprawl. The aim of the railway was to capture most of the river traffic as well as passengers using public coaches and the new horse-driven omnibuses. The railway proved a success and by 1847, when the LSWR took over the service, it was handling 25,000 passengers a month.
The following year, the company made the momentous decision to extend the line across the river and run trains to Windsor, providing an alternative route to that taken by Queen Victoria on the GWR. Richmond Railway Bridge consisted of stone-faced land arches and two stone-faced piers supporting three 100-foot spans of cast-iron girders. Although not universally admired, the bridge was one of the more decorative railway crossings built over the Thames in London and was praised in the Illustrated London News of 21 October 1848 as a ‘handsome structure’. The bridge was designed by Joseph Locke, the LSWR’s head engineer.
Joseph Locke (1805–60)
Joseph Locke was born in Yorkshire in 1805 and worked as an apprentice to George Stephenson on the Stockton and Darlington as well as the Liverpool and Manchester railways. It has been suggested Locke was driving Stephenson’s famous steam engine, the Rocket, when the first fatal railway accident occurred as it crushed the local MP William Huskisson on 15 September 1830. If so, it did not deter him from working on many other railway projects, including the world’s first long-distance railway, linking Birmingham to the Liverpool and Manchester Railway, in 1837. Most of his early railway commissions were in the north of England and Scotland. He later joined the London and Southampton Railway, which became
the London and South Western Railway, for whom he designed the Richmond Railway Bridge and also Barnes Railway Bridge. During his time at the LSWR, he stood for Parliament and was elected Liberal MP for Honiton in Devon. In 1857, he was elected president of the Institute of Civil Engineers. Together with Robert Stephenson and Isambard Kingdom Brunel, Locke is considered to be one of the great triumvirate of Victorian civil engineers who pioneered the Railway Age in Great Britain. Unlike the more famous Brunel and Stephenson, he left behind no spectacular monuments, but many believe he exerted a greater long-term influence on railway engineering than either of them.
One predictable result of the new rail link to Windsor was an increase in demand for visits to the castle. To avoid inconvenience to Queen Victoria, the State Rooms themselves were open only at specified times. Entry tickets were free at the Queen’s insistence, while guidebooks cost one penny.
The cast-iron girders of the bridge were replaced by steel ones in 1907 with little change to its appearance. The bridge, like all the others over the Thames, is inspected by divers about every five years. It is still in good condition, despite having to survive the impact of a 120-ton barge, which crashed into it at 3 p.m. on 28 December 1996. Part of the barge was ripped off. However, Railtrack reported that ‘there was only superficial damage to the bridge and the line was opened at 4.05 p.m. These Victorian structures really are pretty solid.’
Richmond Railway Bridge
Twickenham Bridge
Twickenham Bridge was completed in 1933 as one of the three bridges needed to take the Chertsey arterial road across the Thames to improve the traffic flow from London to the Portsmouth road and thereby relieve increasing congestion on Richmond Bridge, which had not yet been widened. The other bridges built at the same time were Chiswick Bridge and a replacement Hampton Court Bridge. The scheme had first been put forward in 1909 but, because of the 1914–18 war and arguments between the various interested groups about the exact route and financing, it was not until the report of the Royal Commission on Cross-river Traffic of 1926 that the Ministry of Transport (MOT) decided to go ahead. The MOT agreed to contribute 75 per cent of the cost of the bridges and their approaches. Middlesex and Surrey county councils then put forward a Bill and Royal Assent was given on 3 August 1928.
Crossing the River: The History of London's Thames River Bridges From Richmond to the Tower Page 3
