Crossing the River: The History of London's Thames River Bridges From Richmond to the Tower

by Brian Cookson

  In 1656, Cromwell, who as leader of the victorious Parliamentarian forces had become Lord Protector of England, suffered a similar accident to that which had befallen Archbishop Laud. Cromwell’s coach and horses were crossing the river on the ferry from Westminster to Lambeth Palace when the boat sank with his coach and horses, three of which drowned. Remembering what had happened to Laud, the public speculated as to whether this could be a warning of Cromwell’s impending fall. Two years later, Cromwell died in Whitehall Palace and in 1660 the monarchy was restored in the person of Charles II, the son of Charles I.

  Later, in 1688, the ferry was used by Mary of Modena to make a dramatic escape to France when her husband, James II, was about to be deposed. She left Whitehall Palace by coach with her baby son on the night of 9 December and drove to Millbank, where she crossed safely to Lambeth on the ferry. She stayed the night at an inn in Lambeth before driving to Gravesend and exile in France. James II himself left Whitehall two days later and threw the Great Seal of England into the river as he crossed over to Vauxhall, where a coach awaited him. Fortunately, a fisherman found the seal soon afterwards, by which time William and Mary were on the throne. James II’s son survived and later tried to reclaim the throne in the unsuccessful invasion of 1715.

  As we will see in the next chapter, from the late seventeenth century various attempts were made to obtain approval for a bridge at Westminster or Lambeth. Finally, in 1736, an Act was passed authorising the construction of a bridge at Westminster. This resulted in the closure of the Lambeth horse ferry and payment of compensation of £3,780 to the Archbishop and his lessees. From then on, vehicles crossed the river over Westminster Bridge, while foot passengers could cross by wherry from the stairs outside Lambeth Palace to the stairs in front of Market Street, today’s Horseferry Road. Apart from the name of the road, nothing is left of the old horse ferry. However, the old ferry house survived well into the nineteenth century. Charles Dickens mentions it in David Copperfield, during the journey to Smith Square:

  There was, and is when I write, at the end of that low-lying street, a dilapidated little wooden building, probably an obsolete old ferry-house. Its position is just at that point where the street ceases, and the road begins to lie between a row of houses and the river.

  The first serious proposal for a bridge at Lambeth was in 1809, but it was not successful, partly because preference was given to Vauxhall Bridge. In 1829, two proposals were put forward. One was for a stone bridge, to be called the Royal Clarence Bridge, and the other for an iron suspension bridge. The architect and civil engineer Charles Hollis argued strongly in favour of his proposal for a suspension bridge because iron was by then a well-tried material for bridge building and was considerably cheaper than stone. He suggested that ‘the connecting of these two immediate neighbourhoods, and the facility which will be given for an intercourse between each other, as well as remoter parts of the town, must of necessity greatly increase the value of the property’.20 The local historian Thomas Allen also expressed the hope that construction of the bridge would ‘do away with several streets, filthy garrets and alleys, and various nuisances that exist in no part or neighbourhood of the metropolis in a greater degree than in this part of the parish of Lambeth’.21 Although the Metropolis Suspension Bridge Act was passed in 1836, the project did not proceed.

  In 1854, the Select Committee on Metropolitan Bridges recommended that four new bridges, including one at Lambeth, were necessary for ‘providing further means of communication across the river’. The other recommended locations were at the Tower of London, St Paul’s and Charing Cross. The men who put forward these ideas would be amazed that these schemes, which seemed essential in their day, took so long and were in two cases realised merely as footbridges. Tower Bridge was not completed until 1894; the bridge at St Paul’s was never built as a vehicular crossing but finally appeared in 2001 as the Millennium Bridge; and the many proposals for a vehicular crossing at Charing Cross were never completed. Instead, the railway bridge at Charing Cross was enhanced by the Golden Jubilee Bridge in 2003. Lambeth Bridge was, however, approved and an Act was passed in 1861 ‘to build a bridge from Church Street, Lambeth, to Market Street on Millbank’. Market Street ran along the same line as today’s Horseferry Road and the new bridge was to cross the river somewhat to the north of the former horse ferry. Finance was raised by the proprietors, who aimed to profit from the tolls. They had great hopes in this direction, since the £49,000 cost was much lower than that of other Thames bridges of the time.

  Lambeth Bridge was designed by P.W. Barlow (1809–85), who had studied suspension bridges in America and Switzerland. Barlow’s bridge used a system of diagonal bracing which was supposed to overcome the problems of instability often encountered with suspension bridges. He also adopted the American method of twisted wire cables instead of the eye-bar cables used in British bridges such as those at the Menai Straits and Hammersmith. The bridge underwent a stress test to demonstrate that it could handle weights of up to 800 tons, which was 6 times the maximum expected load. It was opened in November 1862 when a local entrepreneur, Mr Hodges, crossed in his new fire engine, followed by a mad rush of people, who caused much less vibration than at the opening of Brunel’s Hungerford Bridge in 1845.

  The great hopes for Lambeth Bridge were not realised. Tolls were much lower than expected because the road connections were not convenient for carriages and it was mainly used by pedestrians, who paid only one penny to cross. The bridge also deteriorated, and by 1877 when the MBW took it over the proprietors received only £35,974 compensation, which was considerably less than it had cost. Much rust was found in the twisted wire cables and in the wrought-iron girders. Even more worrying was the report on the state of the bridge produced by Sir Benjamin Baker, the engineer responsible for the recently completed Forth Bridge. He identified a significant tilt in the abutment tower on the Millbank side, which had resulted from the strain of the cables. Remedial work was undertaken, but in 1905 the LCC set a weight limit of 2.5 tons and a speed limit of 5 mph. In 1910, the bridge was closed to vehicles and all traffic had to be diverted to Westminster or Vauxhall bridges.

  1866 view of the old Lambeth Bridge looking towards Millbank

  Nothing was done to the emasculated Lambeth Bridge until the LCC Improvements Committee produced a report in 1923 in which London was compared unfavourably with Paris with regard to its river crossings. With Lambeth Bridge out of action, London had just three river crossings between Blackfriars and Vauxhall – a distance of about two miles. In Paris, there were twelve bridges over the River Seine covering a similar distance. An Act of Parliament was passed the following year authorising the demolition of the old suspension bridge and the construction of a new bridge, on a line slightly further upstream in order not to impinge on the ancient Lambeth Palace and St Mary’s Church on the Lambeth side of the river. The contract was signed and work started in 1929, by which time two severe neo-classical office blocks had risen on the Westminster embankment on either side of Horseferry Road. They were London’s largest at the time. The northern block was built for the new conglomerate ICI, and it is no longer a secret that the southern block is now occupied by the security service, MI5.

  Considerable effort was put into the design of the bridge, which was to provide a link between the seat of the head of the Church at Lambeth and the powers of the state and big business on the Westminster side of the river. Sir George W. Humphreys, the LCC chief engineer, was responsible for the engineering design, and he collaborated closely with Mr G. Topham Forrest, the LCC chief architect, and with the eminent architect Sir Reginald Blomfield. The first design, which was strongly supported by Blomfield, was for a reinforced concrete bridge with elliptical arches faced with granite. However, a large-scale model constructed on wasteland near by indicated that this design would be difficult to realise in view of the gradient required to provide sufficient headroom for passing river traffic. The final design was for a steel bridge of five arches ca
rrying a 60-foot-wide roadway. Blomfield’s main contributions were to disguise the steel skeleton of the bridge arches by covering them with flat steel panels, and to install obelisks topped with carved pineapples on either side of the approaches.

  The Houses of Parliament viewed through the arches of Lambeth Bridge of 1932

  There was much speculation about the significance of the pineapples. Some thought that they might refer to the famous seventeenth-century gardener John Tradescant, who had a house in Lambeth and today is commemorated in the Museum of Garden History which occupies the former church of St Mary at Lambeth. However, there is no evidence that pineapples were grown in this country until the eighteenth century. The South London Press decided to investigate, and in the issue of 15 July 1932 a spokesman for Sir Reginald stated that ‘they have no name, they do not symbolise anything and they are put there for no reason except to decorate the bridge’. According to an article in Country Life of 18 February 1965, this sort of pineapple finial is quite common, but it really resembles a pine cone more than a true pineapple, which has saw-edge leaves branching out from its apex. Similar pine cone finials have been found on Roman sites, as they were a fertility symbol of the rather bloodthirsty and warlike cult of Mithras. Today, it is generally accepted that pineapples are a sign of welcome arising from the Jamaican custom of placing a pineapple on a house as a symbol of friendship to travellers.

  The total cost for building the bridge and its approaches amounted to £936,365, of which the bridge itself cost £555,029. Finance was provided by the LCC with a 50 per cent grant from the MOT. The contract was awarded to Dorman, Long & Co. Ltd in December 1928. The project was completed in July 1932. On 19 July, the new bridge was opened by George V and Queen Mary to the accompaniment of the bands of the Life Guards and Grenadier Guards, as massed crowds lined the nearby streets and the pavements of the bridge.

  Pineapple obelisk at the approach to Lambeth Bridge

  Twenty years later, another royal occasion gave rise to a very different scene. George VI, whose reign spanned the Second World War, had just died and lay in state in Westminster Hall. Thousands queued silently in the bitter February weather to pay homage to the King, who had been almost as much a figure of hope to the British people during the war years as Sir Winston Churchill. The line stretched for over four miles, from Westminster, along Millbank, across Lambeth Bridge and along the Albert Embankment on the other side of the river. It is said that his daughters, the present Queen and the late Princess Margaret, stood for several minutes in Westminster Hall mourning in the background while members of the public paid their last respects to the dead king.

  By the 1990s, concerns were being expressed about the state of Lambeth Bridge. Westminster Borough Council, which is today responsible for maintenance, asked Kumar Associates to do a load-capacity assessment and to design any necessary strengthening works. In his paper to the Institution of Civil Engineers, recorded in their Proceedings for May 2003, Mr A. Kumar stated that Lambeth Bridge represents one of the finest examples of workmanship in the country. However, the survey had identified one design problem, as well as corrosion resulting from continual tidal submersion of the steel arches near the abutments. It was agreed that the necessary repairs should be carried out and the bridge repainted without any disruption to traffic.

  The project lasted two years and cost two and a half million pounds. All corroded parts were replaced from underneath the bridge, using temporary braced frames for support. Repainting proved difficult because it was found that up to 19 layers of paint had bonded too strongly to the steel frame for them to be removed without great expense. Therefore it was decided to remove loose paint by grit-blasting and apply five coats of modern spray paint to match the original colours as far as possible.

  The red colour scheme of Lambeth Bridge contrasts with the light-green colour scheme of Westminster Bridge. The reason for this arises from the internal layout of the Houses of Parliament. The House of Lords, with its predominantly red decor, is located to the south of the building, near Lambeth Bridge, while the House of Commons, with its green benches, is located to the north, near Westminster Bridge. Just as the Commons has much more power than the Lords, so it must be admitted that Westminster Bridge is far more important than Lambeth Bridge as a Thames crossing. However, Lambeth Bridge, with its historical association with the ancient horse ferry and Archbishop’s palace, provides an elegant viewpoint for one of London’s greatest sights – the Houses of Parliament.

  CHAPTER 8

  Westminster

  The present Westminster Bridge, with its seven iron spans supported by granite piers, was opened in 1862. It replaced an earlier stone bridge of 1750, which had been the first bridge to be built over the river in central London since the construction of Old London Bridge in the thirteenth century.

  For a thousand years, Westminster has been the centre of government, at first of England and then of the whole of the United Kingdom. A more unlikely place for such a centre of power would have been hard to imagine when in the eighth-century Benedictine monks first set up an abbey there. A purported charter of King Offa of Mercia granted the monks lands on the ‘isle of Thorney in the terrible place that is called Westminster’. The lands were a desolate swamp surrounded by two forks of the River Tyburn, which used to flow into the Thames here from its source in the hills of Hampstead. One fork entered the Thames to the south of the abbey gardens by today’s Great College Street, and the other flowed along an almost direct line from today’s St James’s Park to the site of Westminster Bridge. The River Tyburn has long since disappeared in Westminster, but another branch of this river which flowed further west through Pimlico still exists as an overflow sewer.

  In the eleventh century, Westminster was chosen by Edward the Confessor as the location for his royal palace and a massive new abbey church, images of which can be seen in the Bayeux Tapestry. From the time of the Norman Conquest in 1066, all royal coronations have taken place in Westminster Abbey, and Parliament has sat at Westminster since it was first established by Edward I in 1295. Even today, the Houses of Parliament are called ‘the Palace of Westminster’ in recognition of their original function as a royal palace. In the sixteenth century, Henry VIII moved his palace from Westminster to Whitehall and when Whitehall Palace was destroyed by fire in 1698 the area became the site of many new government offices, including the home of the first prime minister, Robert Walpole, in Downing Street.

  By the eighteenth century, London stretched along the banks of the Thames as far as Horseferry Road, and new estates were developed further north in Piccadilly, St James and Bond Street by wealthy aristocrats such as the Earl of St Albans and Sir Thomas Bond. Many great aristocratic mansions, including Burlington House (later converted into the Royal Academy), Devonshire House and Berkeley House, were located in these areas, but the vicinity of the Palace of Westminster was also popular with politically minded aristocrats. The Earl of Pembroke, who like Lord Burlington was an amateur architect, had a house constructed there in 1724 in the Palladian manner to the design of Colen Campbell. Pembroke later became heavily involved in the promotion and execution of the project to build Westminster Bridge.

  The story of a river crossing at Westminster begins in Roman times. At the time of Caesar’s invasion of Britain in 55 BC, the tide did not reach as far as Westminster. The river was wider and the water level much lower than today, and this is one of the sites which might have been used by Caesar to cross over on his way to attack the Iceni, the important British tribe based in East Anglia. Once Roman rule was established after Claudius’s invasion in AD 44, Watling Street, the main road from the south, may have run along the south bank of the river to a ford at Westminster, on its way up the Edgware Road and on to Chester. Archaeologists have long disputed this matter, and even if there was a ford here in Roman times, it did not last long. There is a medieval legend that the first church at Westminster was consecrated by St Peter himself in the seventh century. He arrived incognito
on the south bank and asked a fisherman named Edricus to ferry him across the swollen river for the ceremony. On the return journey he commanded Edricus to cast his nets into the Thames and they were immediately filled with a vast quantity of salmon, proving St Peter’s identity. Until 1382, the event was celebrated by an annual offering of salmon at the high altar on the anniversary of the Abbey’s consecration. The figures of salmon inlaid into the tiles on the Chapter House floor are also believed to commemorate this occasion.

  It seems incredible that no permanent river crossing was built at Westminster until 1750. Until then, Old London Bridge was the only permanent river crossing in the central London area. Until the construction of Fulham Bridge in 1729, travellers had to go all the way to Kingston to avoid the horrendous congestion on London Bridge. By 1700, London had grown into the largest city in the world, with a population of 600,000, many of whom lived in the area of today’s City of Westminster. Having crossed London Bridge with difficulty, the traveller was confronted by daunting traffic jams along Fleet Street and through Temple Bar on the route to Westminster, as well as uneven and dangerous road surfaces. Lord Tyrconnel, commenting on the state of the road from the City of London in a House of Lords debate, declared that ‘the passenger is everywhere surprised or endangered by unexpected chasms, or offended or obstructed by mountains of filth’.22