Apart from wars, earthquakes and the disaster with the sinking pier, there were many accidents and even acts of sabotage which caused further delays. It was not uncommon for large and unwieldy barges, carrying cargoes of 100 tons or more, to lose control and crash into the construction works. Some of these accidents were undoubtedly deliberately caused by disgruntled watermen who had always opposed Westminster Bridge and would do anything to abort or delay a project which they considered, with some justification, was injurious to their livelihood. One such act of sabotage occurred in 1739 when someone pulled out the plug of the barge which was being used to dredge the river-bed in preparation for laying the caissons, causing the vessel to sink. The designated punishment of death, as laid down in the Act of 1736, does not seem to have been a deterrent, probably because offenders did not expect to be caught by the ineffective watchmen. There was no official police force in London until 1829 when Robert Peel, then Home Secretary, set up the Metropolitan Police. In the eighteenth century, policing was done mainly by elderly or infirm men who could not obtain other paid employment and who were mocked in a famous cartoon by Thomas Rowlandson and given the nickname of ‘Charleys’. The saboteurs of 1739 therefore seemingly went undetected and unpunished.
Injuries to workers and passers-by were not uncommon. The local Westminster Infirmary, where most of the injured people were treated, claimed that they handled up to three patients a day, including some fatalities. The commissioners normally paid compensation in the case of disabling injuries or death.
Westminster Bridge was finally opened on Sunday, 18 November 1750, nearly 12 years after the laying of the first stone. Sadly, the Earl of Pembroke, who had been such a strong supporter of the bridge and of its designer, had died just before. It was strange that the commissioners chose a Sunday to open the bridge, since many held strong views on the strict observance of the Sabbath. Consequently, it was decided to conduct the ceremony at midnight on the Saturday. However, since the ceremony lasted a full two hours after many attendees had participated in a convivial dinner at the nearby Bear Inn, this particular Sunday went off with a bang as the new national anthem was sung to loud applause.
Comments on the new bridge were mostly favourable. Labelye’s own assessment was typically adulatory:
The Bridge has certainly nothing of the Kind in Europe, and perhaps in the whole world, that can be brought into Competition, and much less exceed it … The Bridge will want no considerable Repairs for a long Course of Years.25
Although the prediction regarding its longevity proved overoptimistic, Old Westminster Bridge was a beautiful structure, as can be seen from the numerous paintings by Canaletto, Samuel Scott, Antonio Jolli and others. One of the most dramatic views of the bridge was painted much later by J.M.W. Turner, who watched the catastrophic fire which burnt down the old Palace of Westminster in 1834. Turner’s viewpoint is on the Lambeth side of the Thames, from where he captures both the raging inferno that engulfed the palace buildings in the background and the massive structure of Westminster Bridge defiantly looming out of the fire to cross the river in the foreground. Turner exaggerates the slope of the bridge, which is impossibly steep in the painting, but it is true that there were many complaints about the difficulty of crossing the bridge in horse-drawn vehicles, especially in wet weather, because of its sharp incline.
Charles Labelye’s 1750 engraving of his Westminster Bridge
The most famous literary reference to Westminster Bridge is contained in the title of William Wordsworth’s famous sonnet ‘Composed upon Westminster Bridge’, although the actual poem is about the view of London and the Thames, and does not mention the bridge itself:
Earth has not anything to show more fair:
Dull would he be of soul who could pass by
A sight so touching in its majesty:
This City now doth, like a garment, wear
The beauty of the morning; silent, bare,
Ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples lie
Open to the fields, and to the sky;
All bright and glittering in the smokeless air.
Never did sun more beautifully steep
In his first splendour valley, rock, or hill;
Ne’er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep!
The river glideth at his own sweet will:
Dear God! The very houses seem asleep;
And all that mighty heart is lying still!
It is perhaps surprising that this patriotic eulogy to England’s capital city should have been written by Wordsworth, the great poet of nature and Romanticism, and one-time supporter of the French Revolution. However, the sonnet was written in 1802, by which time Wordsworth, like many other English radicals, had become disillusioned with the Revolution. It is not so likely that Wordsworth would have been inspired to write these lines later in the nineteenth century, when Claude Monet painted his famous view of the new Westminster Bridge through a variegated filter of fog, which had replaced Wordsworth’s ‘smokeless air’.
Although so near to the centre of government, Westminster Bridge had an unsavoury reputation for crime in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This was partly because of the domed octagonal recesses which Labelye had thoughtfully installed over each of the piers to provide shelter for pedestrians in wet weather. Unfortunately, they also provided a hiding place for robbers, who, as already mentioned, were unlikely to be caught by the elderly and frail watchmen. As well as the problems with robberies, numerous cases of suicide occurred. One near-suicide was recorded in the magazine City Limits of 11 February 1888. Casanova had come to London in 1763, but it seems that for once his charms had let him down, and he became depressed. He was close to bankruptcy and was threatened with incarceration in Newgate Prison. Moreover, he hated London, where inns served bitter beer rather than wine and people pissed in the streets. He went to Westminster Bridge, having loaded his pockets with weights, and was gazing mournfully into the Thames when the well-known fop Sir Wellbone Agar, returning over the bridge from a night out in the red-light district in Southwark, persuaded Casanova to accompany him to a strip show at an inn near Trafalgar Square. This banished all further thoughts of suicide, and Casanova left England surreptitiously soon afterwards to restart his amorous career on the Continent.
Concerns were raised about the safety of Labelye’s beautiful bridge as early as 1759, when the two central arches of Old London Bridge were replaced by a wider single arch, thus increasing the flow of the tide towards Westminster. Later reports commissioned from the eminent engineers John Rennie, Thomas Telford, Isambard Kingdom Brunel and James Walker all confirmed that the foundations were being eroded, especially after the effect of the tide was magnified by the removal of Old London Bridge in 1832. No fewer than seven select committees were set up to examine the state of Westminster Bridge and to decide what action to take.
The conclusion of the 1844 committee was that ‘on a review of the Evidence, no case has been made out to justify the Committee in recommending to the House the pulling down of the present Bridge, and the constructing of a new one’. However, the chairman, Sir R.H. Inglis, stated his opinion that the opposite conclusion should have been drawn, since all the expert witnesses had in fact concurred that ‘the foundations of Westminster Bridge having been originally vicious, the bridge can never be sound’. The majority decision was to continue propping up the old bridge rather than incur the expense of constructing a new one. When, eventually, in 1853 a new select committee finally decided that it was essential to rebuild Westminster Bridge, the total cost of repairs to the old bridge between 1810 and 1853 had amounted to £200,000, which was about half the cost of reconstruction.
Labelye’s bridge had been built when Britain was vying with France and Spain for domination in Europe and the acquisition of colonies in America, Africa and Asia. The predominant architectural style was classical and Westminster Bridge, with its 13 semicircular arches of Portland stone, was eminently classical in design. Since that time, despi
te the loss of the American colonies, Britain had grown into the greatest international power, with an empire that covered a quarter of the globe. When the ramshackle Palace of Westminster was burnt down in 1834, Charles Barry and Augustus Pugin won the commission to rebuild it in the newly fashionable Gothic style, which was seen to represent the true spirit and glories of Elizabethan England, as opposed to the classical style, which was viewed as a foreign import.
Barry (1795–1860) cooperated with Thomas Page, the architect of Chelsea Bridge, in the design of the new Westminster Bridge to ensure that it accorded with the new Houses of Parliament. Page’s Westminster Bridge has seven elliptical iron arches supported by piers consisting of massive 30-ton granite blocks. Barry inserted Gothic quatrefoils in the spandrels of the arches and attached ornamental shields emblazoned with the arms of England and Westminster. The central arch has a span of 120 feet, and the side arches reduce in width to 94 feet at the abutments. The use of elliptical arches gave the bridge a much flatter gradient than Labelye could achieve with his semicircular arches. Vehicles benefited not only from the gentler slope, but also from the vastly increased width of the roadway, which provided an unprecedented 55-foot carriageway and two 15-foot footpaths. Page even installed a kerb in the centre of the carriageway to ensure that the two lines of traffic would not interfere with each other, as happened in so many London streets at the time despite the ‘keep left’ rule which had first been introduced on London Bridge in 1722. The kerb was later replaced by a central tramway, which was removed in the 1930s to leave the widest carriageway of any of London’s remaining Victorian bridges.
The construction project suffered considerable delays, partly due to the bankruptcy of the initial contractor, Messrs Mare & Co. Thomas Page then took over the contract himself and received much praise for completing the work without any significant interruption of traffic. This he achieved by removing only one half of the old bridge in order to construct the first part of the new structure while allowing traffic to cross via the remaining half of the old one. Most of the vast quantity of Portland stone from the old bridge was sold off, but Page used some of it to construct the abutments. The new bridge was opened in 1862 on 24 May, which was Queen Victoria’s birthday. The Queen had originally agreed to perform the opening ceremony herself, but went into prolonged mourning after the death of Prince Albert and so the rather muted celebrations went ahead without her.
Westminster Bridge of 1862 with Big Ben
The 1962 centenary was equally lacklustre. As reported in The Times of 25 May 1962, the only celebrations consisted of a lunch at County Hall, presided over by the chairman of the LCC, and the application of a new coat of battleship-grey paint, which was the standard colour of all of London’s Thames bridges in the post-war period. In 1970, the bridge was repainted in the present green colour to match the colour scheme of the House of Commons.
After the construction of County Hall in 1922, Westminster Bridge provided a link over the Thames between the home of the national government and that of London’s government, until the abolition of the GLC in 1986. At either end of the bridge are sited two distinctive sculptures. On the County Hall side stands a 13-ton lion made in 1837 of Coade stone. Coade stone is an artificial stone made of terracotta mixed with ground quartz and glass to make it extremely long-lasting and waterproof. The firm which made it was located on the site of County Hall until it closed down in 1840. The so-called Coade Lion was originally painted red and stood over the entrance arch of the Red Lion Brewery, which was located by Hungerford Bridge near today’s Festival Hall. The brewery was demolished in 1949, but the lion reappeared at the Festival of Britain in 1951. When the festival closed, the lion was saved by the personal intervention of George VI, and it was moved to Waterloo Station. In 1966, when Waterloo Station was redeveloped, it was decided to re-erect the lion on the empty pedestal by County Hall. Its present colour is white, although the real colour of Coade stone is tawny yellow. Unseen to the public is a small room underneath where security guards can make themselves a cup of tea.
The bronze sculptural group on the opposite side of the bridge is of Queen Boudicca with her two bare-breasted daughters, driving a scythed chariot in full battle cry. The sculptor was Sir Hamo Thorneycroft, who specialised in heroic sculptures of famous Britons. His statue of Oliver Cromwell stands near by outside Westminster Hall. Strictly speaking, Boudicca should be driving her chariot through the City rather than through Westminster, since it was there that she slaughtered the Romans before her final defeat and death at their hands. This happened long before Westminster was founded. An amusing letter appeared in The Times of 25 August 1964 concerning a court case in which a young woman was charged with indecency for wearing a topless dress on Westminster Bridge. The writer pointed out that: ‘The Magistrate failed to take account of two other women in topless dresses seen hanging about on the north bank of the bridge for some little time now in a chariot driven by their mother.’
Westminster Bridge’s Coade stone lion
Old Westminster Bridge, completed in 1750 in the classical style, with its 13 Portland stone arches, was a fitting embellishment to London’s Georgian Age. The present bridge has stood the test of time much better, although the scour protection for the central piers had to be renewed in 2005. Unlike the old bridge, it could never quite aspire to be an emblem of London, since it is dominated by the Houses of Parliament, whereas its predecessor had only to compete with the ramshackle collection of buildings that comprised the Palace of Westminster in the eighteenth century. Over the past two and a half centuries of their joint existence, the two bridges have witnessed many colourful events. Until 1882, the Lord Mayor’s procession came by river, and the state barge landed at Westminster Bridge for the swearing-in ceremony in Westminster Hall. The pageant inspired many artists, including John Constable, to paint the scene. The annual London-to-Brighton veteran car race crosses the river at Westminster Bridge from its starting point in Hyde Park. The race was initiated in 1896 to celebrate the abolition of the law compelling motorists to be preceded by a man with a red flag, and the raising of the speed limit from 4 mph to 14 mph. On the night of 31 December 1999, the crowds on Westminster Bridge watched in anticipation as the hands of Big Ben moved inexorably towards twelve midnight GMT, and the clock’s massive bell chimed in the new millennium.
Today, crowds mass on the bridge to see a very different skyline from that which inspired Wordsworth’s sonnet. Although the open fields are long gone, the view is still inspiring, with the massive circle of the London Eye downstream and the Houses of Parliament upstream. About the only structure remaining from Wordsworth’s time is the Portland stone of the bridge’s abutments, but sadly this is faced with brick, so no one ever sees it.
CHAPTER 9
Charing Cross
A combined railway and pedestrian bridge crosses the river today from Charing Cross on the north bank to the Royal Festival Hall on the south. The railway bridge was constructed in 1864, replacing an earlier suspension bridge of 1845 which catered only for pedestrians. There was a rather forbidding footpath right next to the railway on the downstream side, but in 2002 this was replaced by two new cable-stayed footpaths which are attached at a comfortable distance from the railway bridge. It has always been known as Hungerford Bridge after the family who owned a mansion and founded a market here on the north bank. The new footbridges were given the collective name Golden Jubilee Bridge in honour of the Queen’s Jubilee in 2002.
Charing Cross is considered to be the centre of London, from where all mileages to remote towns in Britain are measured. It is therefore surprising that no bridge was built here until 1845. One of the reasons for this is its location on the greatest curvature of the sharp bend at this point on the river. Indeed, the name Charing Cross comes from the Saxon word ‘char’, which means ‘bend in a river’. There is no truth in the more romantic idea that the name comes from ‘Chère Reine’, referring to Eleanor of Castile, the beloved wife of Edward I, for wh
om he erected crosses at the 12 places where her funeral cortège stayed on its way from Harby in Nottinghamshire to Westminster Abbey. The last cross was sited where today there is a plaque indicating the exact spot from where all mileages are measured, close to the equestrian statue of Charles I in Trafalgar Square.
The place has been at the centre of events crucial to the nation’s history, one of which involved the Earl of Pembroke, an ancestor of the earl who had supported Labelye throughout the Westminster Bridge project. The Earl commanded the royal troops in opposition to the rebel forces of Sir Thomas Wyatt, who in 1554 tried to overthrow the Roman Catholic Mary I. After a confused battle in what was then the small village of Charing, today the area around Trafalgar Square, the rebels surrendered and Sir Thomas was executed after implicating Mary’s sister, Elizabeth, in the rebellion. Elizabeth herself survived imprisonment in the Tower and became Queen of England after Mary’s death.
A century later, the reigning monarch, Charles I, was not so fortunate. He was defeated in the Civil War and executed on a balcony outside the Banqueting House in Whitehall in 1649. His bronze equestrian statue, which was designed by Hubert Le Sueur and now stands at the Trafalgar Square end of Whitehall, was cast in 1633. After the King’s execution, the statue was sold to a brazier named Rivers to be broken up. Rivers evidently carried on a brisk trade in bronze cutlery which he claimed was part of the melted-down statue. However, he had in fact buried the statue and it was re-erected at its current location after the restoration of the monarchy in the person of Charles II in 1660. Several of the people responsible for the execution of Charles I, the new king’s father, were themselves executed on this spot, as recorded by Samuel Pepys in his diary entry for 13 October 1660:
Crossing the River: The History of London's Thames River Bridges From Richmond to the Tower Page 16
