Tunstall presented a Bill in Parliament for the building of a wooden bridge along the route of the King’s Ferry. This was passed, and the Act received Royal Assent on 28 June 1757. The inhabitants were clearly agreed on the need for a bridge and, unlike at Richmond, raised no strong objections to its being made of wood. They did, however, present a petition that the site of the bridge should be changed to where the foot ferry operated, as this would provide less disruption to navigation. Consequently, a new Bill was introduced and the subsequent Act received Royal Assent on 23 March 1758. This was a relatively speedy process compared with the multiple delays met by most bridge proposals to Parliament. The resulting construction project was also amazingly quick and the bridge was completed in just over one year. John Barnard, who had been the master carpenter for Westminster Bridge, was chosen to design the bridge, which consisted of eleven arches. The two piers and their arches at either end were built of brick and stone, while the other seven arches were built entirely of wood.
The year in which the bridge was opened, 1759, was also the year of the public openings of both Kew Gardens and the British Museum. Frederick’s elder son, Prince George, conducted the bridge’s opening ceremony on 4 June, which happened to be his birthday. George’s mother, the Dowager Princess Augusta, who had devoted so much of her time to Kew, accompanied him. It seems fitting that her name as well as his appeared on the dedication inscribed on the original design of the bridge.
Robert Tunstall’s wooden Kew Bridge of 1759, viewed from the north
Prince George is known to have used the bridge frequently after it opened, as he often visited his childhood home, the White House. On 25 October 1760, as he was riding across the bridge from the White House, he was met by a messenger from London who brought the news of the death of his grandfather, George II, and hence his own accession to the throne. Horace Walpole records the event as follows:
Without surprise or emotion, without dropping a word that indicated what had happened, he said his horse was lame and turned back to Kew. At dismounting, he said to the groom, ‘I have said that this horse is lame; I forbid you to say to the contrary.’5
This cool-headed reaction from the man we now know as mad King George III may seem surprising. However, it is well known that George II and his elder son, Prince Frederick, who predeceased him, felt a strong mutual hatred towards each other, and Prince George is unlikely to have felt any sadness at the death of his grandfather.
The relationship between George III and his son, the future George IV, was as bad as that between George II and Prince Frederick. Mrs Papendiek, a lady-in-waiting to Queen Charlotte, provides a fascinating insight into the life of the court in Kew at this time in her diaries.6 She directs her venom at George III’s son, who showed no concern for his father when he suffered from his spells of madness. She records the Prince’s disappointment when the King recovered from his first illness just before the Lords were to give assent to the first Regency Bill which would have made him Prince Regent some years before this actually happened. She also records one occasion when she and her party were crossing Kew Bridge in 1780 during the Gordon Riots. She noted fires coming from no fewer than 11 places in London. She does not mention the payment of any toll on this occasion.
Robert Tunstall had provided the finance for the bridge himself and hoped to make a large profit from tolls. These were set as follows:
For every coach drawn by six or more horses, 2 s.
For the same drawn by two horses, 1 s.
Drawn by one horse, 8 d.
For every baker’s cart drawn by one horse, 6 d.
For every led horse or ass, 2 d.
For every foot passenger, ½ d.7
At first, he must have thought he had made a profitable investment. On the first day alone, 3,000 people crossed the bridge. Robert Tunstall’s initial success, however, proved short-lived, as the costs of maintaining a wooden bridge over the fast-flowing Thames soon ate into any profits he made from the tolls. The bridge did outlast him, but his son, who was also called Robert, decided in 1782 that he could no longer afford to maintain the old bridge and presented another Bill to Parliament to allow him to pull down the wooden bridge and build a new one with seven arches made of stone. The Diary; or Woodfall’s Register of 24 September 1789 commented on the removal of the wooden bridge at Kew: ‘There will be no more wooden bridges over the Thames. Those of Battersea, Putney &c., which are hastily decaying, will be rebuilt at some future period with stone in every way more beautiful and lasting.’ This prediction proved only partially correct, as the writer had ignored the possibilities of an even stronger although perhaps less beautiful material – iron. Abraham Darby had just constructed his Iron Bridge over the Severn Valley at Coalbrookdale, in 1779, but this pioneering project had no successors until the beginning of the next century.
The second Robert Tunstall had formed a business partnership for the rebuilding of the bridge with a carpenter, Charles Brown, and with his brother-in-law, John Haverfield. Haverfield was the son of the chief gardener at Kew Gardens, who had been appointed by Augusta in 1759, making the connection between Kew Bridge and the Botanic Gardens now even closer. The estimated cost of £16,500 was raised by a tontine, as at Richmond. Again as at Richmond, James Paine was the architect.
Work started on 4 June 1783 and the project lasted six years. The Gentleman’s Magazine of November 1789 reported that the project was completed with no loss of life, which is remarkable considering the circumstances of the time and the length of the project. One advantage for the builders was that the old bridge was retained about 100 yards upstream until the new bridge was completed, thus obviating the need for putting up a temporary structure. Various cost-saving measures were introduced as the estimate of £16,500 proved too low. Brick was used instead of stone for the land arches and the foundations were not dug deep enough. Nevertheless the architecture of the bridge was admired almost as much as that of Richmond Bridge, and J.M.W. Turner, who had lived in Brentford as a young boy, painted a watercolour of it which is now in Tate Britain. This shows the steep curve of the bridge as it arches over the river. The curve gave it a picturesque appearance but was much criticised by the people who used it.
James Paine’s stone Kew Bridge of 1789
The new stone Kew Bridge was finally opened by George III on 22 September 1789, almost exactly 30 years after he had opened the first bridge as Prince of Wales. The storming of the Bastille had occurred in July of that year and George III had already survived an assassination attempt shortly before this, but he always felt at home in Kew and clearly wanted to be associated with its opening. The King insisted it should not be opened until he had crossed it himself and even proposed to purchase it and relieve the public of having to pay tolls. This never happened, though, and the tolls continued to be collected. After the opening ceremony, a celebration dinner was held at the Star and Garter but James Paine was too ill to attend and sadly died soon afterwards.
Unlike the first bridge, the second proved very profitable for Robert Tunstall, as usage increased with the growing popularity of Kew Gardens and maintenance costs did not escalate so dramatically. Even royalty were not exempt from the tolls, although it is recorded that both Queen Charlotte and the Prince Regent ran up considerable debts. However, in 1824, Tunstall sold the bridge to a Mr Thomas Robinson for £20,000. This may well have been because he feared that the projected suspension bridge at Hammersmith, which was to be opened in 1827, would divert traffic from Kew Bridge, as it provided a more direct route to London via the new road through Barnes.
Had he lived until 1874, Robert Tunstall might have come to regret his decision to sell the bridge, because in that year a joint committee of the Metropolitan Board of Works (MBW) and the Corporation of London purchased it from the new owners for £57,300. This happened after many years of public pressure to free London’s Thames bridges from tolls, which had become almost as unpopular as the Poll Tax. There were several reports of attacks on toll-keepers
and often the attackers were let off lightly. However, on one occasion, after a fight between the toll-keeper on Kew Bridge and a cabman called Thomas Johnson, it was the toll-keeper who came off better. When Johnson died from his injuries in St Bartholomew’s Hospital, the toll-keeper was tried for manslaughter but acquitted by the jury.
Matters came to a head in 1868 when a government Bill was presented to allow duties on coal and wine to continue until 1889. These duties were supposed to end in 1869, but the Government hoped to earmark them to fund the Thames Embankment. Strenuous opposition resulted in a compromise that allowed the duties to continue on the condition that a clause was inserted into the Bill which stipulated that the revenues should first be applied to the freeing from toll of Kew, Kingston, Staines, Walton and Hampton bridges. In 1869, an Act was passed to empower the MBW and the Corporation of London to purchase all these bridges and remove all tolls from them. Tolls on Richmond Bridge had already been ended by the commissioners, as mentioned in Chapter 1. The days of privately owned toll bridges were numbered.
Staines, Walton and Kingston bridges removed tolls soon after the Act of 1869, but the freeing of Kew Bridge from tolls was delayed because the proprietors demanded compensation of £70,000, which was far more than the £39,000 estimated by the county councils. In the end, a compromise was reached, and at the ceremony commemorating the removal of the tolls, the Lord Mayor first asked the proprietors if they had received the agreed sum of £57,300. When they answered in the affirmative, the Lord Mayor unlocked the toll-gates to rounds of cheering from the massed crowds and the booming of cannon. Firemen rushed forward, raised the gates from their hinges and bore them in triumph to a brewer’s dray drawn by two white horses and driven by a man in a red cap. The Lord Mayor’s party proceeded off the bridge and round Kew Green and ended back at the Star and Garter on the north end of the bridge for luncheon. The watchword in the surrounding districts had been ‘Free bridges for a free people’, and this was displayed on banners all around the area. On a more trivial note, the tolls had provoked a series of jokes, including, ‘Why is the toll payable at Kew Bridge like a clergyman’s deputy? Because it is a Kew rate [curate].’
The year 1869 was a significant one for the inhabitants of Kew. Not only did it see the Act passed to remove the tolls on Kew Bridge, but it was also the year when the railways came to Kew. This required the construction of a railway bridge over the Thames, described later in this chapter. The result was to change Kew from a riverside village into a suburb of London and to increase the accessibility of Kew Gardens to such an extent that by the 1880s over a million visitors a year were recorded. As Charles Dickens wrote in his Dictionary of the Thames, ‘Kew is losing most of its distinctive features. But for the quaint old Green with its picturesque surroundings, there is little to remind us of the Kew of even 20 years ago.’ By the 1890s, with the rise in population and following the abolition of tolls, Kew Bridge could no longer handle the heavy increase of traffic. It was too narrow for new modes of transport such as horse-drawn omnibuses and the steep ascent to the middle made the crossing difficult and dangerous for heavy vehicles. The Daily Graphic of 25 July 1896 described the frequently chaotic traffic conditions on the bridge: ‘Heavy drays and wagons charge down from the high road by Kew Bridge Station in order to gather sufficient momentum to carry the struggling horses to the crown of the bridge.’ The writer expressed amazement that no serious accident had yet occurred.
Middlesex County Council was in favour of rebuilding the bridge in stone, but Surrey County Council, which was jointly responsible, was not convinced that a new bridge was needed and anyway preferred an iron bridge because it did not want to incur the extra expense a stone one would involve. Eventually, Middlesex obtained agreement that they would pay for the cost of a report to establish whether the existing bridge was safe and which material should be used if a new one was required. Sir John Wolfe Barry, who had done the engineering design for Tower Bridge, was asked to report on the state of the bridge with regard to both traffic conditions and structural safety, and to recommend which type of bridge should be built. His report of 1892 concluded that the bridge was not only inconvenient but also in a dangerous condition, not least because of inadequate foundations. He also recommended that a new bridge should be constructed in stone. Sad as it would be to lose Paine’s picturesque stone structure, the only solution was to pull it down and erect a new bridge.
The Kew Bridge Act received Royal Assent on 25 July 1898, empowering Surrey and Middlesex county councils to rebuild Kew Bridge and make the necessary new approaches. The cost was £250,000, paid for out of council taxation. John Wolfe Barry and Cuthbert A. Brereton were appointed engineers, and the contract was awarded to Mr Easton Gibbs of Skipton following a competitive tender. The project lasted five years, during which a temporary wooden bridge was used to provide for a limited amount of traffic to cross the river. The old bridge was removed in an ingenious manner. A cableway technically known as a Blondin was stretched across the river. This allowed the workmen to remove large chunks of the bridge and carry them away at the rate of 750 cubic feet a minute, which was much faster than was possible with the use of barges.
The new bridge was constructed mainly of Cornish granite. It consisted of three spans and had a 56-foot-wide roadway, compared with the seven spans and 18-foot-wide roadway of Paine’s bridge. While the piers of the old bridge were supported on wooden platforms which were sunk only a few feet below the river-bed, the foundations of the new bridge were carried down 18 feet into the London clay under the river. Viewed from the river, it is a handsome structure with its three remarkably flat elliptical arches. The solid roughness of the granite is relieved by several ornamental elements, including four shields bearing the arms of Middlesex and Surrey carved into the walls. The Art Journal of 1899 was ambivalent and regretted the passing of the old stone bridge. Writing at the start of the construction project, it stated that the new granite structure struck a false note in the traditional riverside landscape where
the quaint old houses of Strand on the Green will still be standing and groups of barges and lighters will still cluster at the north end, and busy carts ply to and from them as they lie high and dry when the tide is down. The workers in the market gardens, the market carts with their gaily painted chamfering will cross and re-cross as before.
The writer would have been even more horrified if he could have imagined modern traffic over the bridge. However, he did admit that the new bridge was more convenient for the visitors who crossed the river on their way to Kew Gardens and was less trying for the horses.
The opening ceremony on 20 May 1903 was conducted by Edward VII and Queen Alexandra, who had recently been crowned following the death of Queen Victoria in 1901. In deference to the King, the bridge was named the Edward VII Bridge, although it has always been known as Kew Bridge, just like its predecessors. The King and Queen went in procession from Buckingham Palace to Kew through London’s western suburbs of Kensington, Hammersmith, Chiswick and Brentford. As The Times reported:
enthusiastic crowds lined the route from the Palace as the King and Queen drove in an open landau drawn by four horses. All along the route it seems people decked their houses and streets with flags and banners with such loyal greetings as ‘Our worthy King, God Bless him. In thy right hand carry gentle peace.’
The trowel used by the King at the ceremony was made out of wood from the old wooden bridge, which had by now become a collector’s item. A number of gifts were presented, including a prehistoric axe found during the excavations for the foundations of the new piers and a chair with representations of the three Kew Bridges carved into the ladders in its back. The whereabouts of these gifts today are not known, but a replica of the chair can be seen at Middlesex Old Guildhall in Parliament Square.
As far as artistic representations of Kew Bridge are concerned, although there are several engravings, mainly of the second bridge, and a watercolour by J.M.W. Turner, it has not received the atte
ntion accorded to Richmond Bridge, which is set in a more dramatically beautiful stretch of the river. It has, however, made a few appearances in literature. Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist crossed the bridge in the company of Bill Sikes on his way to the bungled robbery in Hampton. It also features in Jerome K. Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat when one of the heroes, George, first tries his hand at rowing in an eight-oared boat at Kew. After a disastrous start:
The solid granite structure of John Wolfe Barry’s Kew Bridge, opened in 1903
They passed under Kew Bridge, broadside, at the rate of eight miles an hour … How they got back George never knew, but it took them just 40 minutes. A dense crowd watched the entertainment from Kew Bridge with much interest, and everybody shouted out to them different directions. Three times they managed to get the boat back through the arch, and three times they were carried under it again, and every time ‘cox’ looked up and saw the bridge above him he broke out into renewed sobs. George said he little thought that afternoon that he should ever come to like boating.
The book was written in 1889, when much of the traffic across James Paine’s stone bridge would have been pedestrian.
Most of the traffic over the 1903 bridge is now motorised, so reckless rowers would not receive the same attention today. Although designed for horse-drawn vehicles, it has proved perfectly suitable for modern traffic and is in good shape after more than 100 years. Kew Bridge had been high on the German hit list during the Second World War, as shown on a map found by the Allied Forces. Bombs did cause splintering on the stonework, but the bridge survived and the centenary was celebrated on 20 May 2003. When the bridge was built in 1903, many local inhabitants were concerned that it would transform the character of Kew, which prided itself on remaining a village, something it had achieved partly due to the rural appearance of the old stone bridge. All agreed that it would bring enormous improvements in communications to the north but it would also bring Kew into the mainstream of metropolitan growth. Although all this has happened, the area around Kew Green, with its Georgian houses, cricket pitch, pubs and St Anne’s Church, still conjures up an old-fashioned village atmosphere both for local people and visitors who cross the Green to the ornate wrought-iron entrance gates to Kew Gardens.
Crossing the River: The History of London's Thames River Bridges From Richmond to the Tower Page 5
