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

by Brian Cookson

  The first serious attempt to obtain authority for the construction of a bridge at Westminster was made in 1664, when Charles II presided over a meeting of the Privy Council to discuss the matter. Strong reasons were put forward in favour of a new bridge, quite apart from its obvious convenience in terms of the lack of alternative crossings in the area: it would benefit the King in his travels between his several riverside palaces between Hampton Court and Greenwich; it would bring extra trade to Westminster, which, despite the presence of the court, had a large number of poor inhabitants; and it would provide an alternative crossing for troops in case of a possible rebellion in the unruly district of Southwark. The arguments against the bridge were put forward by the City Corporation, the watermen and other vested interests. They claimed that London Bridge was perfectly adequate but that if a new bridge were built at Westminster, London Bridge would fall into decay through loss of toll revenue, and the inhabitants of Southwark would be thrown into poverty. The water level in the river would rise and cause flooding along the riverbanks from Whitehall to Chelsea, and many watermen would lose their jobs, thus depriving the navy of a ready supply of sailors in time of war.

  None of these suppositions was credible, but the opponents of the bridge came up with one argument that finally clinched the matter, in the form of an unsecured and interest-free loan of £100,000 to the King from the City Corporation for his help. They also offered

  most humble thanks for the great Instance of His Majesty’s goodness and favour towards them as expressed in preventing of the new Bridge proposed to be built over the River of Thames betwixt Lambeth and Westminster which is considered would have been of dangerous Consequence to the State of the City.23

  Charles II accepted the flattery and the bribe with grace, and the proposal was rejected, although soon afterwards the City did introduce a rule to improve traffic flow on London Bridge, insisting that all vehicles should keep to the left.

  No further serious proposals for building a bridge at Westminster were put forward until 1721, but again opponents managed to defeat the Bill in Parliament. However, in 1734 a new group called a ‘Society of Gentlemen’ was formed with the aim of promoting the new bridge, for which Nicholas Hawksmoor (1661–1736) produced a design. Hawksmoor was at the time working on the design of the two western towers of Westminster Abbey, which were completed in 1745, and it was his design that was initially put forward when a Bill was finally presented on 23 February 1736. With the growing prosperity of Georgian London and the expansion in foreign travel, the reactionary attitudes of the bridge’s opponents were increasingly seen to be unreasonable and antagonistic to progress. Patriotic fervour was aroused by the knowledge that London was far behind other European capital cities, most of which had several bridges while London had just one.

  Hogenberg’s sixteenth-century map of London with the single river crossing at London Bridge. A second central London crossing, at Westminster, was not constructed until 1750, despite London’s massive expansion westwards during the following 200 years.

  For a brief moment, one of the points raised against the bridge, that it would cause flooding along the riverbanks, did seem to have some merit. During the debate on the Bill, the river did overflow its banks, and Westminster Hall, where judges were sitting in court in their ermine robes, was inundated with water two feet deep. The judges had to be carried out to safety. Westminster Hall had endured flooding on a number of occasions in the past, but the 1736 flood was the last one recorded and despite the indignities suffered by the judges it did not affect the outcome of the debates. The Act for ‘Building a Bridge across the River Thames from the New Palace Yard in the City of Westminster to the opposite Shore in the County of Surrey’ received Royal Assent on 20 May 1736.

  The Act appointed a distinguished body of commissioners, among them the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Lord Chancellor, with powers to decide on the design of the bridge and what materials were to be used, as well as to purchase land for building approach roads and to pull down houses as necessary. As was usual with the early bridges, punishments were laid down for anyone who attempted to destroy the bridge or endanger the lives of passengers. In this case ‘they should be treated as felons and suffer death without benefit of clergy’. Compensation was to be paid to the Archbishop and his lessees for the loss of the Lambeth horse ferry, and to the watermen who ran a Sunday ferry across the river at Westminster. The Sunday ferry crossed from stairs by New Palace Yard which are marked on early maps with the confusing name of ‘Westminster Bridge’. It seems that landing stages that had sizeable jetties built out into the river were called ‘bridges’ rather than the normal name, ‘stairs’.

  The most intriguing part of the Act was devoted to the method of finance. Since the bridge was promoted as of national importance and not just for the convenience of the inhabitants of Westminster, it was out of the question to raise the finance by local taxation. The usual method of involving private enterprise and charging tolls was also rejected in favour of a lottery. Lotteries were in vogue at the time and had been used for various enterprises including fighting wars. However, lotteries were often subject to abuse and fraud, and some considered them immoral and a danger to society. Many people had suffered huge losses from the collapse of the South Sea Company, which became known as the South Sea Bubble, and although this involved investing in a business enterprise, such an investment seemed much more like a lottery. William Hogarth certainly thought so, and two of his earliest engravings, entitled The South Sea Bubble and The Lottery, mock the greed and chicanery involved.

  The first Westminster Bridge lottery was a failure, and further Acts of Parliament were required to set up four additional annual lotteries. One most unusual prize was offered in the 1738 lottery, with the aim of encouraging more people to buy tickets. This was the largest-ever silver wine cooler, designed by the famous sculptor John Michael Rysbrack. The winner sold it immediately to the Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg, but before it went out of the country a silver-plated copy was made and this can be seen today in the Victoria and Albert Museum Silver Galleries. After the fifth lottery, additional finance was provided by government grants. The final cost of the whole project has been estimated at £389,500, which was considerably more than any other eighteenth-century Thames bridge. The use of the lottery to finance Westminster Bridge prompted Sir Henry Fielding to call it ‘the bridge of fools’ and this name stuck when the project later dragged on for much longer than was forecast.

  Decisions about how to design and build a bridge in such an important location took up much of the commissioners’ time and caused considerable controversy. Although British architects had shown themselves able to handle great buildings, especially after Sir Christopher Wren’s masterpiece, St Paul’s Cathedral, there was no body of expertise in the construction of bridges over major rivers. It is true that Old London Bridge, built over 600 years before, had been considered one of the wonders of the world, but it was by now hopelessly old-fashioned. The wooden bridge at Fulham was not considered a sufficiently imposing model for Westminster either. The situation in France was more advanced. Specialist bridge engineers, including the great Jean Perronet, who would design the Pont de Neuilly over the Seine in Paris, were establishing standards for bridge construction and disseminating these through the Département des Ponts et Chausées. The Westminster Bridge commissioners must have been tempted to request French expertise, but in the end it was the Swiss Charles Labelye who in 1738 was appointed chief engineer.

  Charles Labelye (1705–81)

  Charles Labelye was born in Vevey in Switzerland, although his father was French. In 1721, he came to England without one word of English, as he wrote in 1751 in his A Description of Westminster Bridge. He became heavily involved with Freemasonry and presumably used his time in gathering building experience as well as being a leading member of the French Masonic Lodge. Little is known of his career during the years up to his involvement with the Westminster Bridge project. He di
d some work on harbour design and on drainage of the Fens. His only successful bridge design had been for a small stone bridge over the River Brent. In 1736, he produced one of several plans to improve navigation through London Bridge. Labelye’s proposal was to halve the number of piers by removing every alternate arch, thus doubling the free waterway under the bridge. However, none of these plans was implemented.

  Westminster Bridge was Labelye’s greatest achievement, which he liked to compare with Wren’s St Paul’s Cathedral as a triumph of British architecture. Labelye fell ill soon after the bridge was opened, possibly from the tremendous strain of the 12-year construction project, and moved to the south of France to improve his health. He was never to return to England and died in Paris in 1781.

  It is something of a mystery why the relatively inexperienced Labelye was chosen as chief engineer for so important a project, but at the time he was no less qualified than the other possible contenders. To judge from Labelye’s writings about the Westminster Bridge project, he had boundless confidence in the correctness of his own engineering decisions, and the only sign of modesty he showed was in his apology for his poor English. What seems to have impressed the commissioners was his detailed calculations about the effect of the tide on the stone piers of Hawksmoor’s Westminster Bridge design. The calculations showed that with only eight river-piers, as compared with the nineteen piers of London Bridge, the tide would hardly create any disturbance for navigation or cause much scouring of the foundations.

  Labelye was also involved in discussions about exactly where the new bridge should be built and what materials should be used. Although the 1736 Act had stipulated that the bridge should cross the river from New Palace Yard, which is about 50 yards south of today’s Westminster Bridge, some, among them Charles Labelye, still preferred a crossing at the site of the Lambeth horse ferry, where the river was 300 feet narrower. Others wanted the bridge to be sited further downstream, at Whitehall or even Charing Cross. Since New Palace Yard was most convenient for members of both houses of Parliament, it was always likely that this site would be chosen, but for some reason it was eventually decided to build the bridge 50 yards downstream at the Woolstaple. There had been a wool market there from medieval times, and although this was discontinued in the fourteenth century, the name was preserved until the construction of Westminster Bridge.

  Having finally agreed the location, the commissioners had to decide on the design of the bridge. Several proposals for bridges of wood, stone or a combination of the two were submitted. Many of the commissioners favoured a wooden bridge because of the far lower cost. This resulted in much protest in the press and, as Labelye wrote later, ‘the public were highly disgusted at the thoughts of having a Wooden Bridge in the Metropolis of the British Empire’. Nicholas Hawksmoor put it more pithily: ‘We are striving to have it in stone, but there are some wooden-headed fellows endeavouring to have a wooden one.’ In 1738, the initial decision was taken to build the piers and abutments of stone, but for the superstructure to be constructed of wood. The Earl of Pembroke, who by now was one of the most influential of the commissioners, insisted that the stone piers should be built in such a way that they could support a stone superstructure in case it was later decided that this was preferable, and it was he who later laid the first stone, on 29 January 1739.

  The contract for the wooden superstructure was awarded to James King and his partner John Barnard, who later constructed the first Kew Bridge. It must have seemed that Westminster was to have a cheap wooden bridge after all, but King and Barnard were never given the chance to go ahead. A major reason for the abandonment of the wooden bridge design was the damage caused by the severe winter of 1739–40 to the wooden piles which had been driven into the river-bed to support the construction of the two centre piers. The Thames froze solid from Boxing Day to the middle of February, and, as on previous such occasions, Londoners took to the ice to set up a variety of entertainments for a Frost Fair. One popular activity was to walk over the river to the recently constructed centre piers of Westminster Bridge, where ladders allowed sightseers to climb on top. It is unthinkable today that the public would be permitted access to a partially completed building site, but it seems the sightseers came to no harm. When the ice finally melted, it was found that all 140 wooden piles had been broken or carried away by ice floes. This confirmed the opinion that wood was not the right material. Labelye produced his design for a stone bridge of 13 semicircular arches. This was accepted by the commissioners, who now gave him responsibility for the superstructure as well as for the foundations.

  The commissioners paid compensation to King and Barnard for the loss of the construction contract and appointed Andrews Jelfe and Samuel Tuffnell as contractors for the stonework, under Labelye’s supervision. The most innovative and, as it turned out, controversial decision made by Labelye was to build the river-piers within reusable wooden caissons rather than in the more traditional cofferdams. The caissons were enormous wooden boxes which were constructed on the side of the river and floated out to the location of a pier. After the river-bed had been dredged to the shape of the pier foundations, the caisson was sunk into the cavity and building work could then be carried out in the dry. Once the level of the pier reached above the water level, the sides of the caisson were detached from the bottom and raised up so that they could be reused for another pier. Caissons had been used before, and Labelye admitted he did not invent them, but no one had built caissons so large or had thought of the technique of reusing them. However, Batty Langley, one of Labelye’s competitors for the design contract, did claim with some justification that he had thought of this idea first in his proposal of 1736. Batty Langley was a prolific eighteenth-century architect-builder who produced pattern books for the design of houses which ordinary builders could use in the vast number of housing developments undertaken at the time, especially in London. He was not pleased to have lost out to an upstart foreigner and complained bitterly that Labelye had stolen his idea for the caissons. He later used every opportunity to attack Labelye’s methods.

  Unfortunately, Labelye did make a critical error in his evaluation of the river-bed, which he thought consisted of a firm layer of gravel but which turned out to be clay. Because of this, he decided it was not necessary to drive piles into the river-bed to support the foundations and just sank his caissons a few feet into the dredged clay bottom. The Earl of Pembroke laid the last stone in October 1746, but the very next year one of the piers showed signs of settlement. When a massive stone block fell down from one of the arches supported by this pier, it seemed that the whole bridge might collapse. Labelye had been criticised by a number of people, including Batty Langley, for not taking enough care with the pier foundations. He had attacked these critics with vigour in a letter of 1743 for spreading rumours that were ‘fake, malicious and scandalous’, so it is not surprising that his critics hit back with equal vigour when they were proved to have been right. The fiercest invective came from Batty Langley in a pamphlet entitled A Survey of Westminster Bridge as ’tis now sinking into ruin. Langley lived in a house by Parliament Stairs and had a good view of the construction of Westminster Bridge by his rival. He must have been overjoyed at the sight of the sinking pier, but many thought his criticism went too far when he wrote about Labelye: ‘It would have been happy for the public had you been hanged before Westminster Bridge was thought on.’

  The commissioners were clearly embarrassed by the sinking pier, but the Earl of Pembroke helped ensure that Labelye kept his job, and eventually the pier and two affected arches were removed and rebuilt with stronger foundations. Labelye, always strong on self-justification, pointed out that it was possible to remove just the two arches without affecting the rest of the bridge because of his forethought in ensuring that each arch could stand up independently without needing the lateral support of an adjacent arch, as would have been the case if the arches were elliptical rather than semicircular. Labelye’s reputation received an unexpected boos
t when in 1749 two earthquakes caused havoc in Westminster but left his bridge standing despite the incomplete work on the failing pier, ‘to the great Amazement of many, and the no less Confusion and Disappointment of not a few malicious and ignorant People, who had confidently asserted that upon unkeying any one of the Arches the whole Bridge would fall’.24

  The Westminster Bridge project had dragged on much longer than had originally been forecast, but Labelye pointed out that there were many special circumstances. From 1740 to 1748, England had been at war with France and Spain in the War of the Austrian Succession. This war was ostensibly about Maria Theresa’s claim to the Austrian throne but really concerned which European power was to be dominant on the world stage. The impact of the war on Westminster Bridge was considerable, because the vast amount of Portland stone required had to be transported by sea from Dorset. Labelye claimed that since Westminster Bridge was constructed of solid stone rather than the normal mixture of rubble faced with stone, the quantity of stone needed was nearly double that used for St Paul’s Cathedral. Press-gangs were on the lookout for healthy seamen to enrol in the navy, and Labelye’s men were reluctant to risk the long voyage along the Channel and up the Thames without escort, thus delaying the supply of stone.

  Another, potentially even more dangerous situation arose with the Jacobite invasion of 1745. The leader of the Jacobites was Bonnie Prince Charlie, known as the Young Pretender. His grandparents, James II and Mary of Modena, had escaped from Westminster to France via the Lambeth horse ferry after being deposed by William and Mary, as described in Chapter 7. The Jacobite army consisted mainly of Scottish Highlanders, who met little resistance as they swiftly advanced as far south as Derby, inducing panic in London. However, the Jacobites found little support in England for their cause of replacing the Protestant George II with the Roman Catholic Bonnie Prince Charlie. English patriotism was aroused by the newly composed anthem, ‘God Save the King’, and the Jacobite army had to retreat northwards and were soon defeated with great cruelty by George II’s son, the Duke of Cumberland, at the Battle of Culloden. The effect of the Jacobite threat on Westminster Bridge therefore turned out to be minimal.