He quickly expanded his interests and worked on increasingly large-scale projects in canal and bridge building, in improving the drainage of the Fens in Norfolk and in the construction of docks. His major projects included the Kennet and Avon Canal, the London Docks in Wapping and the great breakwater at Plymouth, which created the Royal Navy’s premier harbour. His three bridges over the Thames expanded the state of the art in terms of the width and flatness of their arches. They all lasted for over 100 years, but eventually had to be replaced. Rennie died in 1821 before work started on his final project at London Bridge. He was ranked with Telford, Stephenson and Brunel as among the greatest civil engineers of his age and was buried in the crypt of St Paul’s Cathedral near Sir Christopher Wren.
Construction started with the laying of the foundation stone of Cornish granite on 11 November 1811. A set of contemporary coins enclosed in a glass case was placed underneath the foundation stone. Crowds flocked to watch progress, among them Tsar Alexander I of Russia, who visited the site several times on his state visit to London in 1814. Rennie employed a number of revolutionary techniques during the project, including the first use of steam pumps to remove water from the cofferdams which were used to build the river-piers. The bridge’s granite facings were transported from Aberdeen and Cornwall, but the remainder of the stone was hewn in nearby fields on the south bank. Samuel Smiles tells the story of how the stone was transported by truck on temporary rails drawn by horses.30 Most of these trucks were drawn by Old Jack, a popular local carthorse. His driver would stop for a drink with his friends at an inn by the track, and often the drinking time was prolonged. On one occasion, Old Jack became impatient, poked his head in at the open door of the inn, took his master’s coat-collar between his teeth and dragged him out to resume working.
Smiles also states that Rennie surfaced the bridge roadway using the same method patented by John Loudon McAdam six years later. Instead of laying the gravel and flint on the roadway in its natural state, which allowed vehicle wheels to churn up the surface and leave large ruts, Rennie first levelled off the gravel and then covered it with broken flint, which he pressed down into the gravel to form a firm ‘macadamised’ surface. Had Rennie taken the credit due to him, we would have had to use the term ‘tarren’ instead of ‘tarmac’.
The year after Tsar Alexander’s visit saw the momentous victory of the Allies against Napoleon at Waterloo. Patriotic fervour was such that the Strand Bridge Company renamed itself the Waterloo Bridge Company following a new Act of Parliament of 1816. The Act explained the change of name in unusually florid language for a legal document:
Whereas the said bridge when completed will be a work of great stability and magnificence, and such works are adapted to transmit to posterity the remembrance of great and glorious achievements: and whereas the said Company are desirous that a designation should be given to the said bridge which should be a lasting record of the brilliant and decisive victory achieved by His Majesty’s forces, in conjunction with those of his allies, on the eighteenth day of June one thousand, eight hundred and fifteen; Be it therefore further enacted, That from and after the passage of this Act the said bridge shall be called and denominated the Waterloo Bridge.
The old Waterloo Bridge of 1817
Waterloo Bridge was opened by the Prince Regent, accompanied by the Duke of Wellington, on 18 June 1817, exactly two years after the Battle of Waterloo. According to The Gentleman’s Magazine of June 1817, the bridge was bedecked by the national flags of Russia, the Netherlands and Prussia, as well as of Britain, representing the allies who combined to defeat Napoleon. A party of Horse Guards, many of them riding the same horses as at the Battle of Waterloo, provided a guard of honour. As the Prince and his party arrived in their barges from Westminster, there was a 202-gun salute, representing the number of French cannon captured at Waterloo. The Times noted gloatingly on the following day that Napoleon had given two new bridges over the Seine the names of Jena and Austerlitz, ‘where he had gained decisive victories. But these bridges, however elegant and convenient, are but trifles in civil architecture and engineering compared with that which was opened yesterday.’ The Prince Regent was so impressed that he wanted to confer a knighthood on John Rennie on the spot, but, with typical Scottish self-effacement, Rennie refused. Later, he wrote to a friend: ‘I had a hard business to escape a knighthood at the opening.’
The first people to cross the bridge and pay the one-penny tolls were the Prince Regent and his party. Iron turnstiles were installed at the four Doric-style toll lodges. These let just one pedestrian through at a time and were connected to machinery in the toll-gates to record the number of bridge users. This system was far in advance of the traditional manual collection system at other toll bridges. However, the large income expected from the tolls never materialised because Blackfriars and Westminster bridges were both free of tolls and people were willing to walk further to avoid paying to cross Waterloo Bridge. By 1840, the situation was so acute that the £100 shares in the Waterloo Bridge Company were worth just £1, since they provided no income after expenses and the paying off of loans.
The Sunday Monitor of 6 November 1825 recorded a clever attempt by two sweep boys to pay only one toll between them. At the time, policing was in the hands of the Bow Street Runners, a small body of thief-catchers set up in the eighteenth century by the novelist Henry Fielding, who was the magistrate at Bow Street Court. The name ‘Runners’ recognised the fact that they were much more effective than the elderly watchmen who preceded them and who were easily outpaced by criminals. Mr Skillern, one of the Bow Street Runners, noticed one of the boys climbing into their bag of soot and being carried to the turnstile, where the other boy paid his single penny toll. Skillern informed the gatekeeper and they both caught up with the boy before he reached the south bank gate. A crowd gathered while the sack was opened and a sweep boy emerged blackened from head to toe with soot. The crowd sided with the boys and soon several shillings were raised. The money was given to the boys, who thereby made a profit despite having to pay the second toll. The bridge was eventually made toll-free after the Metropolitan Board of Works bought it for £474,000 in 1877. This valued the bridge at a little over half what it had originally cost.
The old Waterloo Bridge and Hungerford Suspension Bridge before the building of the Embankment
In 1845, Brunel’s Hungerford Suspension Bridge was constructed upstream of Waterloo Bridge to provide an extra crossing in the area for pedestrians. As shown in the illustration above, the south bank, dominated by the Shot Tower, was then very industrialised, while the embankment had not yet been constructed on the north bank. Here, Somerset House and the other classical buildings abutted directly onto the river and were approached by watergates. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, the area to the west of Waterloo Bridge, previously occupied by the old Savoy Palace, was completely transformed, apart from the Savoy Chapel, which still stands today as the only remaining building of the old palace. In 1881, Richard D’Oyly Carte bought the site for the construction of a theatre following the success of Gilbert and Sullivan’s light operas such as HMS Pinafore and The Pirates of Penzance. Then, in 1889, he opened the Savoy Hotel, which was the first hotel in London to provide bedrooms with private bathrooms. The cost of a double room with bath was 12 shillings per night.
Also in the 1880s, a low red-brick building was constructed between the Savoy Hotel and Waterloo Bridge for the Institute of Electrical Engineers. This was to become the site of one of the most significant events in the history of broadcasting. After the appointment in 1922 of John Reith as the first general manager, the BBC began broadcasting from No. 2 Savoy Hill with the words, ‘This is London.’ Transmissions continued in the shadow of Rennie’s bridge until the opening of the new BBC headquarters at Langham Place in 1932. On 14 May 1932, according to What’s On in London of 12 January 1973, the last programme from No. 2 Savoy Hill ended with the words, ‘This is the end of Savoy Hill,’ uttered by the nightwatch
man, Oliver, as he clanged shut the entrance doors of the building.
Although Waterloo Bridge proved a financial disaster, it continued to excite the admiration of the public and inspired many paintings. John Constable witnessed the opening ceremony in 1817 and took 15 years over his great painting of the scene, with the pageantry of boats of all shapes and sizes crowding the river and almost eclipsing the view of Rennie’s bridge. The painting was first exhibited at the Royal Academy in Somerset House in 1832, and today hangs in Tate Britain. Claude Monet could see Waterloo Bridge looking eastwards from his window at the Savoy Hotel. He was struck by the contrast of Rennie’s curved stone arches with the straight-line silhouette of the steel girders of Charing Cross Railway Bridge, which he could see to the west. Monet painted no fewer than 40 canvases of Waterloo Bridge, exhibiting his characteristic skill in depicting the effects of changing light, especially over the smoking factory chimneys on the south bank in the background.
Waterloo Bridge had one of the worst reputations for suicides and crime among London’s Thames bridges. John Timbs states that an average of 40 people a year attempted to kill themselves by jumping into the river.31 Mark Searle describes how five well-dressed gentlemen paid their tolls and, having passed through the gates, jumped into the river without any explanation, in an apparent act of mass suicide.32 For this and other reasons, Waterloo Bridge was not universally popular among local tradesmen. In an undated letter, a copy of which is held in Westminster City Archives, W.C. Day complains to the Chief Commissioner of Police that
vagabonds, costermongers and itinerants of every description injure the trade of local businesses. At 2 p.m. the penny omnibuses plying over Waterloo Bridge convey freights of transpontine prostitutes to the corner of Wellington Street, from where they take their allotted beats … Numerous brothels flourish under the title of coffee houses and it is utterly out of the question that any respectable female could stop to inspect a shop window.
Waterloo Bridge’s reputation for prostitution seems to have endured well into the twentieth century, as implied in the film Waterloo Bridge. The romantic story concerns the young ballet dancer Myra and an aristocratic British army officer, Roy. They meet on Waterloo Bridge during an air raid in the First World War, fall in love and are soon engaged to marry. When Roy is called to the front, the marriage has to be postponed. Myra loses her job for missing a performance when she goes to Waterloo Station to say goodbye to Roy. She falls into poverty, and when she reads that Roy has been killed, she reluctantly decides to earn her living as a prostitute. She takes up her stand on Waterloo Bridge as the returning soldiers flood out of the station at the end of the war and meets Roy, who had mistakenly been listed as dead. Their reunion is blighted by her feeling that she is no longer fit to marry him, and she runs away to commit suicide under the wheels of an army truck on a foggy night on Waterloo Bridge. Waterloo Bridge was filmed twice. The first film starred Mae Clarke and Douglass Montgomery. It was made in 1931 when Rennie’s bridge still stood. The second film starred Vivien Leigh and Robert Taylor and was made in 1940, just after the start of the Second World War. An epilogue was added showing the scene on the eve of the Second World War when Roy, by now an aging general with grey hair, revisits Waterloo Bridge and recalls his lost love. By this time, Rennie’s bridge no longer existed and a new bridge was under construction. A mock-up of the old bridge was used for the film.
Old Waterloo Bridge did not die without a fight. The first sign of problems occurred in 1833, when dredging of the river-bed exposed the pier foundations. Rubble, mainly consisting of Kentish ragstone, was deposited to fill in the gaps around the piers. The Bridge Company records refer to several occasions when piers needed protection by depositing rubble or surrounding the concrete aprons by timber-sheet piling. In 1867, the northern river-pier was made completely safe, as it was incorporated into the Victoria Embankment. In May 1924, one of the other piers sank. After over 100 years of river scour and irresponsible dredging, and by now having to carry new forms of motorised transport when it had originally been designed for the age of horse-drawn vehicles, Waterloo Bridge had to be closed for repairs. Sir William Arrol & Co. constructed a temporary iron-girder bridge, which was used until the bridge could be reopened after the river-pier foundations had been strengthened. After the completion of the repairs, the temporary bridge was left standing in case the old bridge should fail again. This was to prove a wise decision.
The battle now raged between the pragmatists who wanted to build a new bridge fit for modern traffic conditions and the conservatives who wanted to preserve old Waterloo Bridge for historical and cultural reasons. The former were headed by London County Council, whose engineers insisted that the old bridge was beyond repair and should be completely replaced. The latter consisted of a group of societies, including the Royal Academy and the Royal Fine Art Commission, which commissioned a report from some eminent engineers to show that old Waterloo Bridge could be strengthened and widened for £1,295,000, which was the estimated cost of a new bridge. In 1926, in an attempt to resolve the impasse, the Government set up the Royal Commission on Cross-river Traffic, which looked first at the problem of Waterloo Bridge but also considered the whole question of the adequacy of London’s Thames bridges for current and future traffic volumes.
Having heard much conflicting evidence, the Commission stated:
We realised from the outset that a controversy to which so much publicity had been given might have tended to harden the attitudes of those ranged on either side, and as we proceeded with our enquiry we found little indication of any approach to an agreement between them.33
The final conclusion was that Waterloo Bridge should be strengthened by rebuilding some of the piers, and that the roadway should be widened to 35 feet in order to carry four lanes of traffic. It was also recommended that a new combined road and rail bridge should be constructed at Charing Cross. As described in Chapter 9, the Charing Cross scheme never materialised; but the Government tried to progress the Royal Commission’s recommendation to widen Waterloo Bridge.
Unfortunately for the old bridge, politics intervened. In 1934, Labour gained control of the LCC under the leadership of Herbert Morrison, who was not impressed by any of the aesthetic or historical arguments put forward by the Conservative government and its artistic supporters in favour of preserving Rennie’s world-renowned structure. Morrison announced his decision to demolish the old bridge by personally breaking off the first stone on 21 June 1934 as he uttered his defiance of the cultural elite who opposed him with the words:
There is no absolute standard of beauty in art. Beauty is a matter for individual decision and I am not going to delegate to the Royal Institute of British Architects or anybody else my right to decide what is beautiful.34
The Government initially showed its displeasure by refusing any financial contribution towards the rebuilding project, although by 1936 tempers had calmed down and a grant of £300,000 was voted through Parliament. By then, Morrison himself had shown some regret for his act of cultural vandalism. The Times of 9 July 1936 announced that Mr H.B. Amos, who had opened a subscription list for a memorial to John Rennie, had received a note from Morrison saying that
[when] he struck the first blow that started the operations, he had a sympathetic and respectful thought for Rennie and hoped he would forgive him. In the circumstances he thought that he, at any rate, ought to make a small contribution.
After Morrison had ceremonially removed the first stone, Sir William Arrol was awarded the contract to remove Rennie’s bridge for £331,000. Fortunately, the old temporary bridge built in 1924 still stood, so traffic could continue to cross the river during the demolition process. The Builder of 20 March 1936 commented on the widespread regret at the end of the old Waterloo Bridge and related that
an engineer and a lay friend were walking along the embankment and the latter remarked, ‘How sad it is to see one of Wren’s masterpieces being ruthlessly torn down.’
‘Yes,�
� said the engineer, and unwilling to expose his friend’s ignorance, added, ‘but we engineers in our affectionate way call him Rennie.’
During the demolition project, a workman found the foundation stone of the old bridge, as well as the glass container with gold, silver and bronze coins dating from the end of the eighteenth century which had been deposited underneath at the stone-laying ceremony in 1811. On 4 May 1939, the foundation stone of the new bridge was laid using part of the old bridge’s foundation stone. A copper cylinder of contemporary coins, stamps and daily papers was deposited under the stone.
Sir Giles Gilbert Scott (1880–1960), designer of Battersea and Bankside power stations, was appointed as architect for the new bridge. He worked with the engineering firm Rendel, Palmer and Triton to design the first reinforced-concrete bridge to cross the Thames in central London. The bridge has a 58-foot-wide roadway and two 11-foot-wide footways for pedestrians. Its total length is 1,200 feet, consisting of five 240-foot spans. Although at first sight the spans look like impossibly flat arches, they are in fact steel box-girders which form the basis of the reinforced-concrete structure. The northern span lies half over the river and half over the Victoria Embankment. The next two spans cross the river where the water is deep and are normally used for boats to pass through, while the two southern spans cross shallow water. The sides of the bridge are faced with Portland stone, which was chosen because the underlying concrete does not wear so well and was considered unsuitable for the central location with impressive stone buildings such as Somerset House in the vicinity. The concrete structures that line the south bank here today did not exist at the time. The river-piers which support the superstructure are not visible because it was decided to surround them by a granite and Portland stone-faced shell. This innovatory design allows the piers protection from collisions with shipping as well as providing permanent cofferdams in case repairs should be required.
Crossing the River: The History of London's Thames River Bridges From Richmond to the Tower Page 19
