I went out to Charing Cross to see Major-General Harrison hanged, drawn and quartered … Thus it was my chance to see the king beheaded at Whitehall and to see the first blood shed in revenge for the king at Charing Cross.
It was Charles II who in 1679 gave permission to Sir Edward Hungerford to hold a market at Charing Cross. From medieval times, bishops and aristocrats built mansions on the riverside with their fronts facing the Strand and with gardens running down to the riverside where watergates provided access for their private barges. One of these mansions, located on the site of today’s Charing Cross Station, belonged to the Hungerford family. According to The Survey of London, ‘the family record for dishonesty, vice and violence seems to have been exceptional even in the unsqueamish age in which they flourished’.26 The record of violence was begun in the fourteenth century by Agnes Hungerford, who had been married to John Cotell, the steward of one of Sir Edward Hungerford’s ancestors, also called Edward. Agnes decided to better herself when she realised that Sir Edward could not keep his eyes off her. She persuaded a couple of yeomen to strangle her husband and hide the crime by throwing his body on to the hearth of the kitchen at Farleigh Castle, the Hungerford’s country estate. Sir Edward then married her but died soon afterwards, having bequeathed her the majority of his inheritance. Unfortunately for her, Sir Edward’s son by his first wife was so furious at being excluded from his father’s will that he informed on his stepmother and this resulted in her execution at Tyburn in 1523.
The later Sir Edward, who founded the market in his family name, was the last in line of the Hungerfords. He died in 1711 at a great age, having squandered the family fortune. It is said that the original market building was designed by Sir Christopher Wren. By the nineteenth century, the market had lost out to Covent Garden and fallen into disuse. According to the Survey, Hungerford Market was ‘little better than a monster dust-heap and a cemetery for the dead dogs and cats of the neighbourhood’. Near by was sited the blacking factory where Charles Dickens worked as a boy, putting labels on tins of boot polish. His experiences there are described in his semi-autobiographical novel David Copperfield, in which he wrote: ‘No words can express the agony of my soul as I sank into this companionship and felt my hopes of growing up to be a learned and distinguished man crushed in my breast.’
In 1830, a new Hungerford Market Company was set up to take advantage of the waterfront location, which provided cheap river transport for fish and other commodities. Charles Fowler, who had just constructed the new market buildings at Covent Garden, was commissioned to design a large hall to house the market stalls. Fowler’s new hall had an impressive porticoed frontage facing the river, and the roof was raised on tiers of open arches which provided light and air to the inside of the building. The market was opened in 1833 with great ceremony, including the ascent of a hot-air balloon.
With every expectation that the exciting Italianate architecture and riverside location would lead to the success of the market, a private Act of Parliament was obtained authorising the construction of a suspension footbridge from Hungerford Market to Lambeth, to provide access for the inhabitants of the south bank, where there was no fish market. The bridge was designed by Isambard Kingdom Brunel. The river was 1,350 feet wide at this point, and the bridge provided a 14-foot-wide footway suspended from two campanile towers supported by solid masonry river-piers clad in ornamental red brickwork. The central span of 670 feet was longer than any other bridge in Britain, including Telford’s Menai Bridge, and was only exceeded by the suspension bridge at Fribourg in Switzerland. The bridge was officially opened as the Charing Cross Bridge in 1845, but has always been known as Hungerford Bridge because of its association with the market. The total cost was £100,000, and the company aimed to make a profit from its investment by charging a halfpenny toll. Unfortunately, as stated in the Illustrated London News of 3 December 1842, the impressive bridge provided communication to the ‘worst parts of Lambeth’, and the profits never materialised. Moreover, Fowler’s market hall was burnt down by a fire in 1854, resulting in the demise of the market.
Brunel’s Hungerford Suspension Bridge of 1845
Isambard Kingdom Brunel (1806–59)
Isambard Kingdom Brunel was born in Portsmouth, the eldest son of Marc Isambard Brunel and Sophie Kingdom, from whom he inherited his distinctive first names. In 1823, he was apprenticed to his father, who had started constructing the first-ever tunnel under a major river, between Wapping and Rotherhithe. He was appointed resident engineer for the project in 1826, but the following year almost proved fatal when one of several inundations occurred. Brunel, who was working in the partly excavated tunnel at the time, was swept away by the rushing water and only just managed to escape drowning. During his convalescence from his injuries in Clifton, he entered a competition for the design of a bridge over the Avon Gorge. Despite opposition from the doyen of British bridge builders, Thomas Telford, Brunel was awarded the contract for the Clifton Suspension Bridge.
In 1833, the Great Western Railway appointed Brunel as chief engineer at the young age of 26, and he devoted the next 15 years to the massive project of constructing the railway from Paddington to Bristol Temple Meads Station. During his work on the railway, he persuaded the GWR to extend its route to New York by building the SS Great Western, which was the largest steamship of its day. He followed this by constructing the SS Great Britain, which was the largest iron ship and the first large screw-propelled ship in the world, and then the massive SS Great Eastern, which at 32,000 tons was so large that it required several attempts to launch it. This last project exhausted Brunel, who had a seizure on deck shortly before the maiden voyage and died a few days later.
Both Brunel’s achievements and disasters were on an epic scale. He is widely acknowledged to have been the greatest of the many outstanding Victorian engineers and was voted second-greatest Briton after Sir Winston Churchill in a BBC poll in 2002. He is buried in Kensal Green Cemetery, and his statue by Marochetti stands on the Victoria Embankment next to Somerset House.
Isambard Kingdom Brunel statue, located near to Somerset House
In 1854, a proposal was made to widen Hungerford Bridge so that it could be used for the transport of vehicles, but this was rejected in favour of the South Eastern Railway (SER) plan to run its trains across the river to a station at Charing Cross. The SER obtained authorisation by an Act of Parliament in 1859 to purchase Brunel’s suspension bridge and replace it with a railway bridge linking a new station at Charing Cross to the existing station at Waterloo.
There was fierce competition between the rival railway companies for access from the south to termini on the north bank. The London, Brighton and South Coast Railway had already crossed the river to Victoria Station, and the London, Chatham and Dover Railway was about to do the same at Blackfriars. Not everyone approved of these schemes. As pointed out in the Illustrated London News of 21 February 1863:
The first Railway Acts stipulated that no locomotives should come into the streets of London proper. Now this is to be changed. Locomotives are to be allowed to career about and under the thoroughfares of London pretty much at the discretion of engineers and directors.
The strongest opposition came from St Thomas’s Hospital, which demanded and received £250,000 compensation because the railway line to Charing Cross passed too close to its site near London Bridge. The hospital was forced to relocate to its present site opposite the Houses of Parliament.
Sir John Hawkshaw designed the new Charing Cross Bridge and the station. The bridge was formed of wrought-iron lattice girders, providing four railway lines across the Thames, which was then 1,350 feet wide at this point. To support the bridge girders, Hawkshaw used the bases of Brunel’s original brick-clad river-piers, as well as pairs of massive cast-iron cylinders sunk 30 feet into the clay bed of the river and then filled with concrete. The result, according to the Institution of Civil Engineers Proceedings of 1862–3, was the strongest and cheapest bridge of its kind
in the world: ‘Hawkshaw succeeded in designing a bridge that is well adapted to the situation where it is placed and for the purpose intended and its comparatively small cost proves that no outlay has been incurred beyond what was needed.’ Mr Hemans, one of the members present at the meeting, stated that he ‘regarded this bridge as one of the most perfect pieces of ironwork of the kind ever produced’.
Hungerford Railway Bridge of 1864 with one of Brunel’s old river-piers
John Hawkshaw (1811–91)
Hawkshaw was born in Leeds, the son of a publisher. He became interested in railways at an early age and worked on many railway and canal projects in the north of England. He achieved notoriety when in 1838 he attacked the broad gauge used by Brunel for the formidable GWR, and in this he was proved right. In 1850, he came to London to set up his own practice as a consulting engineer. Although he worked as chief engineer for the SER from 1861 to 1881, he did not confine himself to railway engineering. His knighthood in 1873 resulted from his design of Holyhead Harbour, and his many other schemes included sewage systems, land drainage and flood prevention. In London, apart from Hungerford Bridge, he designed railway bridges over the Thames at Cannon Street and Staines, and the southern dock basin for the West India Dock Company, as well as converting Marc Brunel’s pedestrian Thames Tunnel for use by the East London Railway. Hawkshaw’s reputation quickly spread abroad. He advised the Viceroy of Egypt on the Suez Canal proposal, designed the 16-mile Amsterdam Ship Canal and worked on projects as far apart as Mauritius, Jamaica, India, Russia and Hungary. Towards the end of his career he even worked on a proposal for the abortive Channel Tunnel Company.
The praise initially lavished on Charing Cross Bridge, as it was first called, has not been replicated by later critics or the public. M.P. Burke produced a paper, published in the Institution of Civil Engineers Proceedings of February 1998, in which he named Hawkshaw’s Hungerford Bridge as one of the five most aesthetically notorious bridges in the world. The other four were the Lansdowne Bridge over the River Indus, the Queensborough and Williamsburg bridges over New York City’s East River, and Tower Bridge. The author had arrived at these five nominations following detailed research into all the literature on bridge aesthetics published during the previous 100 years. One of the conclusions reached by the author was that Hungerford Bridge disproves the often-heard fallacy that if a structure is really scientifically designed it must be beautiful.
The only person who seems to have been able to find beauty in the rectilinear lines of the bridge’s metal framework was Claude Monet. Monet stayed at the Savoy Hotel in London on several occasions from 1899 to 1901 and had a view of Hungerford Bridge from the window of his room on the sixth floor. He painted no fewer than 35 canvases showing the bridge under different atmospheric and light conditions. The effect of air pollution, combined with the billowing steam of the crossing trains, allows the straight lines of the bridge to merge and almost evaporate into the surrounding haze in these evocative Impressionist paintings. It is doubtful if Monet would have painted the scene with such enthusiasm in the clearer light of today.
As for Brunel’s original suspension bridge at Charing Cross, the red-brick piers were not the only remains to be preserved. Brunel had designed a suspension bridge over the Avon Gorge at Clifton near Bristol but the money ran out in 1843, soon after work had begun. In 1860, the SER agreed to sell the old Hungerford Bridge suspension chains for £5,000 to a consortium which aimed to complete Brunel’s design after his death. After some modification to allow the chains to carry a vehicular roadway instead of the pedestrian footway for which they were originally designed, the consortium, of which Hawkshaw was a member, went on to create what is today the most famous structure remaining of all the works of the great engineer. The Clifton Suspension Bridge was finally opened in 1864, the same year as Hungerford Railway Bridge.
Although the cost of Hungerford Bridge itself was only £180,000, the SER had to spend a total of four million pounds to extend the railway from Waterloo to Charing Cross. To help recoup some of this huge investment, footways were constructed on the cross-girders which extended to both sides of the railway, and tolls were charged for pedestrian crossings until the Metropolitan Board of Works bought out the SER’s right to levy tolls for £98,000 in 1878. The upstream footway was removed in 1886 when Hungerford Bridge was widened to carry an extra four tracks. An additional source of revenue was generated from the steamboat landing stage which was constructed at the base of the southern red-brick pier and was accessible via stairs descending from the footpath.
Sir Joseph Bazalgette’s scheme for embanking the Thames and carrying London’s sewage out to the east to be emptied into the Thames at Beckton and Crossness was begun in 1862, just before Hungerford Bridge was completed. At this point in the river, the Victoria Embankment runs underneath the bridge where it fans out to take the railway tracks into the station platforms. The resulting reduction in the width of the river is highlighted if we note the site of the sixteenth-century structure known as York Watergate which stands in Victoria Embankment Gardens, where the river used to flow before the embankment was built. Bazalgette’s bust, designed by the sculptor George Simonds and inscribed with the words ‘Engineer of the London Main Drainage System and of this Embankment’, is located a few yards upstream of the bridge.
Joseph Bazalgette (1819–91)
Like Isambard Kingdom Brunel, his friend and fellow engineer, Joseph Bazalgette came from a family of French immigrants. He took an early interest in engineering and was apprenticed to the firm of the respected engineer Sir John MacNeill, where he gained considerable experience in land drainage and reclamation while working on the railways. In 1842, he was able to set up his own consulting practice.
The Metropolitan Commission of Sewers was set up in 1847 with the aim of improving London’s sewage system. Its first edict was to order that all the cesspits should be closed, with the result that the excreta of London’s total population of three million was disgorged directly into the Thames. Bazalgette was appointed assistant surveyor to the Commission in 1849, by which time over 14,000 people had died in a cholera epidemic induced by drinking polluted water. In 1856, the Commission was abolished. It was immediately replaced by the MBW, and Bazalgette obtained the job of chief engineer following an enthusiastic recommendation by Brunel. The hot summer of 1858 resulted in what became known as the ‘Great Stink’, when the Members of Parliament were overwhelmed by the stench from the polluted river and were induced to pass legislation enabling the construction of a radical new drainage system for London. Bazalgette designed the system of embankments and intercepting sewers which solved the problem of cholera and is the basis of London’s present sewage network.
He received a knighthood in 1875, and was elected president of the Institution of Civil Engineers in 1888. Apart from his great work on London’s sewers, Bazalgette was responsible for many other civic works, including the construction of Northumberland Avenue, leading from Trafalgar Square to the Thames by Hungerford Bridge. He also designed three of London’s river crossings, at Hammersmith, Putney and Battersea, all of which survive.
The railway line crossing Hungerford Bridge was and still is popular with Londoners because it takes passengers directly to the very centre of town. To complement the station, E.M. Barry, the son of the architect of the Houses of Parliament, Sir Charles Barry, constructed the Charing Cross Hotel, with its French-Renaissance-style Strand frontage, together with the replica of the Eleanor Cross which stands in the forecourt. This impressive location proved so popular that ‘under the clock at Charing Cross’ became a favourite meeting place. According to Volume 75 of Railway Magazine, ‘Half feminine London used to wait there at night for its young man, and the other half said that was who it was waiting for.’
The atmosphere on the riverbank by Hungerford Bridge, where the trains approached the station, was less salubrious. Here Rudyard Kipling lived for a time as an unknown writer on his return from India in 1889. He ch
ose this location because of the low-priced accommodation and cheap food obtainable in the nearby eatery at the bottom of Villiers Street, which is known today as Gordon’s Wine Bar. The fumes from the railway inspired him to write his first novel, The Light That Failed.
In 1926, the Royal Commission on Cross-river Traffic made wide-ranging recommendations on London’s river bridges. Regarding Hungerford Bridge, the Commission proposed a new combined road/rail crossing, as well as the widening of Waterloo Bridge in order to cater for the increasing road traffic in this central area of London. Neither of these proposals was implemented. Then, in 1930, London County Council submitted a Bill requesting authorisation to transfer Charing Cross Station to the south bank of the river on the site of the Lion Brewery and to construct a new road bridge in place of Hungerford Railway Bridge. Parliament rejected the Bill on the grounds of the high estimated cost of 13 million pounds and the unsuitability of the site for the station.
Nevertheless, public pressure for a road bridge continued to build, and the City of Westminster instigated a review of the Charing Cross Bridge schemes with a view to making its own proposals. The report, published on 31 May 1935, found that traffic was indeed growing, partly because of the shift from horse-drawn vehicles to motorised transport. In 1924, 17 per cent of traffic in central London was horse-drawn, but by 1933 this had reduced to 1.5 per cent. It was concluded that a new road bridge at Charing Cross was highly desirable but that the cost would be considerably more than the 13 million pounds estimated by the LCC, and it would only be possible to go ahead if the Government contributed most of the money. Unsurprisingly, nothing was done and Hungerford Bridge survived until the Second World War, when enemy bombs nearly destroyed it. In 1941, bombs did severe damage to the Charing Cross Hotel and set fire to four trains in the station. A German landmine came to rest near the signal box on the bridge, and its parachute gear became entangled in the bridge girders.
Crossing the River: The History of London's Thames River Bridges From Richmond to the Tower Page 17
