Vauxhall Bridge
Vauxhall and Lambeth have been closely linked for centuries and today are both controlled by the London Borough of Lambeth. The first mention of Lambeth appears in a charter granting the manor to the monks of Waltham Abbey in 1062. In 1197, the manor came into the hands of the Archbishop of Canterbury, who, in exchange, gave the current owner, the Bishop of Rochester, some lands in Kent. Since then, Lambeth has been the London residence of the archbishops of Canterbury, who built and extended Lambeth Palace in order to keep close to the monarch and the seat of government across the river in Westminster. Until the seventeenth century, Lambeth Palace stood alone on the marshy south bank of the Thames and few buildings were to be found between it and Southwark to the east or Battersea to the west.
One man who did have a house in Lambeth was Robert Catesby. In 1605, he used his house to store the gunpowder which, with Guy Fawkes and his other co-conspirators, he took across the river to deposit in the cellars under the House of Lords with the aim of blowing up Parliament and installing a Roman Catholic government. One of the conspirators warned his brother-in-law, Lord Monteagle, not to attend the House of Lords on 5 November. Monteagle informed the Government, and the gunpowder plot collapsed when Guy Fawkes, together with several barrels of gunpowder, was discovered that night in the House of Lords cellars.
As London expanded westwards towards the end of the seventeenth century, various industries were set up on the south bank at Lambeth to service the increasingly affluent inhabitants of Westminster. Venetian glass artists and Dutch potters were among the first to arrive. In 1815, John Doulton, who had been apprenticed to John Dwight’s Fulham Pottery, set up his factory on the riverside. Soon the firm of Doulton and Watts was producing sanitary ware including stoneware pipes which disgorged vast quantities of sewage into the Thames and thus contributed to its pollution. By this time, the green fields around Lambeth Palace were being replaced by a whole range of industrial enterprises belching forth fumes and shattering nature’s calm with the cacophony of the Industrial Revolution. This resulted in a growing, mainly working-class, population, housed in tenements in narrow streets.
Amazingly, next to all this industry a number of pleasure gardens were developed. The most famous was the Vauxhall Gardens, located in Nine Elms on part of the site of today’s New Covent Garden Market. The site was to the west of the developed area, and these gardens continued to function until 1859. However, the smaller Cumberland Gardens did not survive so long. They were near the end of the Vauxhall Turnpike, which ran to the south of the river, and this was the most convenient place for building a bridge to provide a crossing to the growing neighbourhoods of Pimlico, Belgravia and Knightsbridge on the north bank.
Recent excavations of the river-bed at Vauxhall by the Museum of London Archaeology Society (MoLAS) have established that a bridge or at least a long jetty existed here in prehistoric times. In 1993, remains of substantial wooden piled foundations were found to the west of today’s Vauxhall Bridge. The sand and silt had been washed away to reveal their blackened tops, and today they can be seen emerging from the south side of the river-bed at low tide. Radiocarbon measurements were taken and these dated the structure to no later than 300 BC, making this much the earliest bridge over the Thames. Since no mention was made by Julius Caesar of such a bridge when he crossed the river during his conquest of Britain, we must assume that it had not survived or had been destroyed by that time.
The first proposal for a bridge at Vauxhall in historic times was put forward in 1806. At that time, the nearest bridges were a mile downstream at Westminster and nearly two miles upstream at Battersea. Apart from these bridges, the horse ferry at Lambeth provided a permanent service from near Lambeth Palace to the site of today’s Horseferry Road, and there was a Sunday ferry for visitors to Vauxhall Gardens.
The 1806 proposal for a bridge at Vauxhall was sponsored by Ralph Dodd. This was successfully opposed by the proprietors of Battersea Bridge, as described in Chapter 6. Another proposal in 1807 also failed, but in 1809 an Act was finally passed incorporating the Vauxhall Bridge Company with the authority to ‘build a bridge across the Thames from the bank or shore thereof at or near a certain place on the south side of the said river called Cumberland Gardens, near Vauxhall Turnpike, to the opposite shore called Millbank’. Millbank was hardly more salubrious than Lambeth at the time. Like Lambeth, the area was marshy and although close to Westminster, it was still rural to the south of Horseferry Road. Part of the land was being bought up in order to construct the massive Millbank Penitentiary, which was to become one of the most unhealthy of London’s prisons. However, further to the north lay the prosperous and fashionable developments at Knightsbridge and Belgravia; a bridge here would allow more direct access to the West End from the south than that provided by Battersea Bridge. The Act stipulated that the Battersea proprietors should continue to receive tolls at a level as if the new bridge did not exist. As described in Chapter 5, this led to a lengthy court case when the Vauxhall Bridge Company failed to pay adequate compensation.
The Act of 1809 enabled the company to raise up to £300,000 by the sale of shares or by a mortgage and to take all the profits from the tolls. The tolls were set at between two shillings and sixpence for vehicles drawn by six horses and one penny for pedestrians. There were exemptions for mail coaches, soldiers on duty and parliamentary candidates during election campaigns. The company was obliged to pay compensation not only to the Battersea proprietors but also to the watermen who ran the Sunday Vauxhall Gardens ferry. If agreement could not be reached, the amount was to be decided by a jury of ‘24 honest, sufficient and indifferent men’. Such men may have been hard to find given the level of corruption prevalent in public life at the time. Anyone convicted of damaging the bridge had to pay a fine of 40 shillings, and if they failed to do so, would be committed ‘to the nearest Bridewell or House of Correction to be kept for hard labour for 10 days’.
The old Vauxhall Bridge of 1816 with Millbank Penitentiary on the north bank
John Rennie was asked to design a bridge of stone as stipulated in the Act. Unfortunately, the estimated cost of a stone bridge was more than the £300,000 allowed for in the Act. Consequently, a new Act was passed in 1812 to enable the company to build an iron bridge. The company engineer was Sir Samuel Bentham, the brother of the philosopher Jeremy Bentham, and he started the design of an iron bridge. However, it seems there was a disagreement and Bentham was replaced by James Walker. Walker’s bridge became the first iron bridge to cross the River Thames. It had taken over 30 years since the world’s first iron bridge was constructed at Coalbrookdale for the new material of the Industrial Revolution to be used for bridging London’s river. The bridge consisted of nine 78-foot cast-iron arches which stretched a total length of 809 feet, with a width of 36 feet. The bridge itself cost £175,000, but with all the approach roads and compensation payments the total cost was £297,000. At the opening ceremony on 25 July 1816, the chairman of the Vauxhall Bridge Company named the structure Regent’s Bridge and expressed the hope that it would ‘henceforth and for ever bear that designation’. This hope was not realised, and the bridge was henceforth known as Vauxhall Bridge because it was the most convenient crossing to Vauxhall Gardens.
James Walker (1781–1862)
James Walker was born in Falkirk, Scotland. After obtaining a degree at Glasgow University, he went to live in London, where he was apprenticed to his uncle, Ralph Walker, who was working on the engineering design of the East India Docks. On his uncle’s death, he took over as chief engineer of the East India Dock Company. The design of Vauxhall Bridge was his first essay into bridge engineering. Following this, he won contracts for the maintenance of Westminster and Blackfriars bridges and was consulted by the several select committees set up to examine the question of whether to rebuild Westminster Bridge. When Thomas Telford died in 1834, Walker was elected the second president of the Institution of Civil Engineers. His other main achievements were in th
e design of lighthouses. As consulting engineer to Trinity House, he was responsible for building all the important English lighthouses of the time, including the famous Bishop Rock Lighthouse in the Scilly Isles.
The company was profitable despite having to pay compensation to so many interested parties and despite the construction of three other bridges, Lambeth, Chelsea and Albert, in the vicinity. By 1877, the annual income from tolls had risen from £4,977 in the first year to £62,392. The 1877 Metropolis Toll Bridges Act enabled the Metropolitan Board of Works to purchase all the privately owned bridges between Hammersmith and Waterloo in order to free them from tolls. The MBW paid £255,000 for Vauxhall Bridge, which was considerably less than its original cost. However, the bridge was no longer in good condition and soon afterwards the MBW discovered that the scour induced by the swift current through the narrow arches had exposed the timber cradles on which the pier foundations rested. Hundreds of cement bags were laid around the wooden cradles as a temporary measure to protect them. Not surprisingly, when London County Council took over from the MBW in 1889, it was found that the cement bags were also being washed away and the piers were in danger of collapsing.
Since traffic across the bridge had nearly doubled since the MBW had taken it into public ownership, the LCC decided to build the replacement bridge much broader, with a roadway 80 feet wide. In 1895, an Act was passed enabling the estimated £484,000 to be raised from the rates of the whole LCC area rather than from local ratepayers alone, because the wider bridge was considered of benefit to the whole of London. Out of the total cost, £38,000 was required for the building of a temporary wooden bridge to allow traffic to cross the river while the new bridge was being constructed. The temporary bridge was opened in August 1898, allowing work to proceed on the demolition of the old bridge.
The new permanent bridge was designed by the LCC chief engineer, Maurice Fitzmaurice, with advice from the LCC chief architect, W.E. Riley. It consists of five steel arched spans with a total length of 759 feet. The plain design is enhanced by bronze figures of heroic size, which are located on both faces of each of the river-piers. These figures were designed by Alfred Drury and F.W. Pomeroy, who also designed the statue of Justice which stands on top of the Old Bailey. They represent Local Government, Education, Science, Fine Arts, Pottery, Engineering, Agriculture and Architecture. Unfortunately, the figures are little noticed because they are visible only from the river or the riverbank. On close inspection, the figures can be identified by what they hold. For instance, Agriculture clasps a scythe to her ample bosom, Science carries a primitive form of electric motor and Architecture holds a model of St Paul’s Cathedral which is known by Thames watermen as ‘Little St Paul’s-upon-the-Water’.
The new bridge was not completed until 1906 because of a number of unforeseen difficulties. One problem arose during the construction of the south bank abutment when it was found that the River Effra, by now a storm relief sewer, flowed into the Thames at this point. The outflow was diverted to the north side of the bridge and today can be seen in front of Terry Farrell’s MI6 building. On the north bank, the River Tyburn, which is also a storm relief sewer, flows into the Thames about 200 yards upstream of the bridge, but this caused no problems. Seemingly, neither of these outflows causes much pollution, since the Thames Marine Mammal Survey records that a porpoise was spotted off Vauxhall Bridge in 2004.
Vauxhall Bridge of 1906, showing the statue of Architecture
The bridge was finally opened on 26 May 1906 by the chairman of the LCC, Mr Evan Spicer, to the accompaniment of music by the Battersea Borough Prize Band, which played popular favourites of the period, including excerpts from Wagner’s Tannhäuser, Sullivan’s Pirates of Penzance and Suppé’s Light Cavalry, and ending with ‘God Save the King’. Shortly after its opening, the bridge was crossed by trams on the double tramway in the middle of the carriageway. This was the first bridge to carry electrically powered trams across the Thames.
Once the bridge was completed, the temporary bridge could be demolished. The LCC advertised the sale of 40,000 cubic feet of good pinewood by tender for anyone willing to remove the whole of the structure which also contained 580 tons of scrap metal. Mr Charles Wall, who had won the contract for building the superstructure of the new bridge for £143,000, put in the highest bid at £50. Most other contenders offered no money or even demanded payment from the LCC. Therefore Mr Wall was awarded the contract to remove the now useless temporary bridge at a profit of £50 to the public purse.
During the Second World War, another temporary bridge was constructed about 200 yards downstream of Vauxhall Bridge. This was one of several temporary bridges built across the Thames in London because the Government feared that the Luftwaffe would target London’s bridges and create transport havoc. The bridge looked precarious, with its steel girders supported by wooden stakes, but was in fact strong enough to carry tanks and guns. Fortunately, none of London’s Thames bridges were severely damaged. Millbank Bridge was the first of the temporary bridges to be dismantled in 1948. Its steel girders were transported to Africa, where they were used to span a tributary of the Zambezi River.
Vauxhall Bridge has lasted 100 years with relatively few problems. However, no one could claim it is the most handsome of London’s river crossings. In 1963, the Glass Age Development Committee commissioned a design for a more exciting structure, called the Crystal Span. This was to be a modern version of the old, inhabited London Bridge consisting of a seven-storey building enclosed in an air-conditioned glass envelope. The structure was to provide two three-lane carriageways for vehicles on the ground floor, with travelators for pedestrian access to shops, a hotel and a skating rink. There was also to be additional space for use by the nearby Tate Gallery, which was looking to expand its display area. This ambitious scheme was never executed, partly because of the estimated cost of seven million pounds.
The only major change to Vauxhall Bridge since its opening occurred in 1973, when the Greater London Council, which had recently taken over from the LCC, decided to introduce an extra traffic lane by reducing the width of the pavement. The GLC engineers needed to reduce the load on the bridge to balance the increased traffic volumes. They proposed to achieve this by replacing the heavy, tall cast-iron balustrades with a lower and rather ugly box-girder structure. Lambeth and Westminster councils, which would not normally be expected to agree on anything, both objected. However, as reported in the South London Press of 22 June 1973, the GLC ignored their objections. Lambeth Council voiced its displeasure at what it saw as the high-handed approach of the GLC on the grounds that: ‘Vauxhall Bridge is hardly in the top league as London bridges go and the parapet was its only redeeming feature. Our suggestion of a light-weight replica would have served the purpose just as well.’ The GLC’s parapet as seen today does not enhance the bridge’s appearance and, despite being lower than the original one, still does not allow a view of the bronze statues standing at the face of the river-piers below.
Vauxhall Bridge overlooked by the MI6 building
Lambeth Bridge
In view of the great power of the archbishops of Canterbury, who in medieval times were second only to the monarch, it is perhaps surprising that until the 1860s there was no bridge between their palace on the south bank of the river at Lambeth and Westminster on the north bank. At Fulham, the bishops of London had helped initiate the building of a bridge as early as 1729, but it seems that the archbishops preferred their privacy and the income obtained from their ownership of the Lambeth horse ferry to the extra convenience of a bridge crossing to Westminster.
The first mention of the Lambeth horse ferry occurs in 1513 when the Archbishop granted the lease to Humphrey Trevilyan, with the proviso that the Archbishop, his officers, servants, goods and chattels should be transported free of charge. In contrast, the monarch was obliged to pay £100 a year for this privilege. The ferry was in a location so close to the seats of power of church and state that it was inevitably often used by some o
f the highest in the land, more than once with unhappy consequences.
In the reign of James I, many thought that Lady Arabella Stuart, the great-great-granddaughter of Henry VII, had at least as good a claim to the throne as did the King. In 1610, rumours spread that she was intending to marry William Seymour, who was the great-nephew of Lady Jane Grey, the successor to Edward VI as Queen of England, albeit for just nine days. James I was worried that this would enhance her claim to the throne and forbade the marriage. Nevertheless, they married in secret in July 1610. James was furious when he found out, and he ordered that she should be committed to the custody of Sir James Parry, who had a house in Lambeth. Next year, James decided to transfer her to the safer keeping of the Bishop of Durham, and it is recorded in the minutes of the Privy Council that he received her at Lambeth ferry and then took her to Durham in the north of England. She was later imprisoned in the Tower of London, where she died insane in 1615.
A tragic fate also awaited William Laud in 1633 when his party crossed the Thames via the horse ferry to Lambeth Palace on his appointment as Archbishop of Canterbury. The overladen boat capsized, throwing his servants and horses into the river. There was no loss of life, but Laud was a superstitious man and must have seen this accident as a bad omen. His fears were justified when in 1641 Parliament impeached him for blasphemy and forced Charles I to sign his death warrant. He was taken by river to the Tower of London, where he was imprisoned; shortly afterwards, he was executed on Tower Hill. In the ensuing Civil War, the Parliamentarians, under Oliver Cromwell, defeated the Royalists, and in 1649 Charles I himself was executed.
Crossing the River: The History of London's Thames River Bridges From Richmond to the Tower Page 13
