Although the design of the new bridge could never rival Rennie’s masterpiece from an aesthetic point of view, its simple if severe elegance was generally well received. Even the president of the Royal Academy, who had fought so hard for the preservation of the old bridge, gave it his approval. The new bridge’s engineering design received universal praise and was widely admired in the profession. As recorded in the 1943 Institution of Civil Engineers Proceedings, Peter Lind, whose company won the construction contract, commented that he did not think that an ounce of steel or concrete had been put in which could not be held to serve a useful purpose.
Somerset House glimpsed through the southern arch of Waterloo Bridge
The construction project was delayed considerably both by two strikes which occurred in 1937 and 1939, and by labour shortages and enemy action during the course of the Second World War, which started when the superstructure was still resting on temporary timber staging. There was great concern that the bridge would collapse in war conditions and block the whole river. Fortunately, despite 20 air-raid incidents which caused damage both to the old temporary bridge and to the new bridge itself, work progressed well enough for the new bridge to be partially opened for two lanes of traffic in August 1942, while the footways were opened in December. According to figures presented by E.J. Buckton at the June 1943 meeting of the Institution of Civil Engineers, the numbers of men working on the project between 1937 and 1942 varied from 100 to 500. In fact, as a result of the severe shortage of manpower on the home front during the Second World War, many of the workers were women. For this reason some people still refer to Waterloo Bridge as the ‘Ladies’ Bridge’.
Unlike the 1817 opening of Rennie’s bridge, which commemorated Wellington’s famous victory over Napoleon, the partial opening of the new bridge was conducted without ceremony because of wartime conditions. The Evening Standard of 11 August 1942 reported that
No Cabinet Minister was present to give it a blessing, no LCC chief to represent the ratepayers who paid for it and only a small crowd, among them bicyclists, a horse-drawn hackney cab, several motor cars and a bus laden with passengers.
At precisely 10 a.m., the foreman walked across the bridge to remove the red flags and a race began to see who could cross over first. The race was won by a 16-year-old schoolboy on a bicycle, who got a flying start and so reached the winning post before the faster motorised vehicles could catch him.
In 1943, the temporary bridge which had served its purpose well for nearly 20 years was at last demolished. The huge steel girders were then shipped to Belgium and performed their final duty during the Allied advance on Germany near the end of the Second World War. In March 1945, the US First Army was advancing to cross the River Rhine at Remagen when the Germans tried to impede progress by setting off high explosives on the bridge, which had originally been built there by General Ludendorff during the First World War. The superstructure of the bridge was lifted up in the air, but, amazingly, it dropped back down onto its supports, thus allowing the Americans to cross the river and set up defensive positions on the other side. Unfortunately, the bridge had been severely weakened, and on 17 March it collapsed into the Rhine while engineers were attempting to strengthen it. Ten men were killed and eighteen reported missing. The temporary Waterloo Bridge was then re-erected in one week under enemy fire, and so the Allied advance was hardly interrupted. Having served its purpose, the temporary bridge was finally demolished. The Ludendorff Bridge itself was not rebuilt, although its bank-side towers remain standing and have been turned into a Museum of Peace.
Meanwhile, in London, the new Waterloo Bridge was opened in November 1944 for all six lanes of traffic, again without ceremony. After the end of the war, the official opening was performed on 10 December 1945 by Herbert Morrison, who had started the destruction of Rennie’s bridge 11 years before. Even after its demolition, remains from the old Waterloo Bridge can still be found in many parts of the country today. The river-piers of the new bridge are faced below water level with granite from the old bridge. Underneath the present bridge, on the Victoria Embankment, is a platform which was built over the foundations of one of the piers of Rennie’s bridge, with the original twin Doric columns on either side. On the river side of the platform is a bronze model of the old bridge and a replica of the 1811 foundation stone plaque. These were erected here in 1974. Sadly, few people apart from the homeless visit this rather gloomy spot under the shadow of Waterloo Bridge. Two of the original lamp-posts now adorn Rennie’s earlier bridge at Kelso in the Scottish Borders.
Sixty thousand tons of stone from the old bridge were taken away for storage at Harmondsworth, Middlesex. According to the South London Press of 10 February 1961, much of this was eventually bought by the contractor Michael Pierce, who planned to crush it for use as under-surfacing for the new M4 motorway. When he found out its origin, he asked Sotheby’s to sell it off piecemeal as a piece of history, and it was used in many a gravestone, fireplace and sundial throughout the land. Appropriately, the memorial to John Rennie in his birthplace at East Linton contains a bird bath standing on a pedestal made from one of the balusters of his Waterloo Bridge. Sadly, the old balustrading and Doric columns which were originally incorporated into the southern abutment of the new bridge were removed during the 1960s redevelopment of the South Bank cultural centre, when the Hayward Gallery, Queen Elizabeth Hall and National Film Theatre were constructed.
The only major development on the northern side of the new bridge involved the subway to Kingsway. In 1908, the LCC had constructed a tram subway to link Kingsway to the Victoria Embankment as part of the major redevelopment of Aldwych. When Waterloo Bridge was reconstructed, the subway had to be diverted to align with the new wider bridge in order to allow the trams to emerge from under the centre of the bridge and turn on to the embankment. The last tram passed through in 1952, and the subway was used as a storage area since nobody could agree what to do with it. In 1959, it was finally agreed to use the subway as a basis for a road link from Waterloo Bridge to Kingsway for northbound traffic. The new ramp leading down to the subway had to start clear of the bridge structure and therefore required a steep gradient of 1 in 12 to allow it to pass under the Strand sewer. This meant that restrictions were placed on bicycles and vehicles over 12 feet high.
Today, Waterloo Bridge is one of London’s busiest bridges both for traffic and pedestrians. On 7 September 1978, the evening rush hour on Waterloo Bridge proved the ideal spot for a Cold War political assassination with all the elements of a James Bond plot. The victim was Georgi Markov, who had become one of Bulgaria’s most respected writers under the Communist regime of Todor Zhivkov. Increasingly disillusioned by the lack of freedom and the personality cult that had developed around his country’s ruler, Markov left Bulgaria clandestinely in 1969 and never returned. His broadcasts for Radio Free Europe and the BBC enraged the Bulgarian leadership to such an extent that an agent was sent over to England to warn him that he would be eliminated if he did not cease his criticisms. Markov refused to be intimidated, and on the fateful evening of 7 September 1978, on Waterloo Bridge, he felt a sudden stab of pain in his thigh. Turning round, he saw a swarthy man who bent down to pick up an umbrella and muttered ‘I’m sorry’ in a foreign accent before hailing a taxi.
The City skyline viewed behind Waterloo Bridge’s elegant flat white arches
On returning home, Markov thought no more about the incident, but within three days he was dead. The post-mortem established that a precision-made ricin pellet embedded in his leg was the cause of death and that it must have been fired from an umbrella with a built-in compressed air cylinder, which had been developed by the KGB. This was the same weapon used a few weeks before in an unsuccessful attack on another Bulgarian defector, Vladimir Kostov, in Paris. Although suspicion fell heavily on the Durzhavna Sigurnost (DS), the Bulgarian secret service, the actual perpetrator could not be identified until the daily newspaper Dnevnik published leaks from its files in May 2005. These
revealed that the killer was Francesco Giullino, a Danish citizen of Italian origin, who had been caught smuggling drugs into Bulgaria and in return for avoiding punishment had become a DS spy. The whereabouts of Giullino and his umbrella are still unknown, although when the Communists were ousted from Bulgaria in 1989, a whole stack of the special KGB umbrellas was found in the interior ministry. Markov, who had settled in England, is buried in a Dorset country churchyard far removed from the intrigues and violence of the Cold War. It is to be hoped that his death signalled the end of Waterloo Bridge’s long connection with battles and wars.
CHAPTER 11
Blackfriars
At Blackfriars, there is a cluster of three bridges, although the middle one now consists merely of headless columns, as the railway crossing they supported was demolished in 1985. The upstream bridge is Blackfriars Bridge, opened in 1869 to replace the original Blackfriars Bridge, which had been completed almost exactly 100 years before. Just downstream from the headless columns of the former London, Chatham and Dover Railway Bridge is another railway bridge which also belonged to the LCDR. This was completed in 1885 and is the only bridge to carry railway services across the Thames from south to north through the centre of London.
Blackfriars Bridge
The name of Blackfriars Bridge commemorates the former Blackfriars monastery which was sited at the north-east end of the bridge until it was dissolved by Henry VIII during the Reformation. The origins of the monastery go back to 1276, when a community of Dominicans, otherwise known as Black or Preaching Friars, was given land near Ludgate on the site of Montfichet and Baynards castles, which had been built during the reign of William the Conqueror. Great monastic buildings were constructed in place of the demolished castles. Montfichet Castle was never rebuilt and is virtually forgotten, while Baynards Castle was rebuilt downstream of Blackfriars monastery, only to be destroyed in the Great Fire of 1666. It is still remembered in the name of Baynard House, where BT has a rather forbidding concrete office block.
Blackfriars monastery had a distinguished history. On 17 January 1382, William Courtenay, Archbishop of Canterbury, held a council of bishops and lawyers to examine and condemn 24 articles drawn from the teachings of John Wycliffe. This became known as the ‘Earthquake Council’ because a great earthquake shook the city that day. Wycliffe famously stated that this was a sign of God’s judgement on those who had condemned his teachings. In 1522, Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor, stayed at Blackfriars as the guest of Henry VIII, and in 1529 Henry VIII attended the court here when the papal legate heard the case for his divorce from Catherine of Aragon. Blackfriars was dissolved in 1538. Most of the buildings were demolished at that time, and the remainder were destroyed in the Great Fire of 1666.
All that remains of the monastery in the area is a fragment of wall in Ireland Yard and the names of the bridge, the station, some streets and the Black Friar pub in Queen Victoria Street. On the outside of the pub is a mural depicting some portly friars catching fish in the River Fleet, which used to flow past the western side of the monastery. The twin sources of the Fleet in Hampstead and Highgate still exist, but the lower course of the river, which flowed through King’s Cross and down to the Thames at Blackfriars, has long since vanished underground. When crossing Blackfriars Bridge today, it is hard to imagine the time when a wide river flowed into the Thames at this location. The River Fleet had formed the western boundary of the ancient Roman city of Londinium. According to John Stow, the Fleet had been ‘of such breadth and depth, that ten or twelve ships’ navies at once, with merchandise, were wont to come to the bridge of Fleet’.35 The river was subject to pollution from many sources, including offal from Smithfield meat market, private and chargeable latrines, and rubbish of all sorts and sizes. Stow records several attempts to clean up the river, the latest in 1589, but says that at the time of writing in 1598 it was ‘worse cloyed and choken than ever it was before’.
Following the Great Fire, Sir Christopher Wren again cleaned up and canalised the lower course of the River Fleet as far as Holborn. However, few ships used it, and soon the river became so silted up with pollution again that it was referred to as the ‘Fleet Ditch’. Jonathan Swift described the state of the Fleet in his poem of 1710:
Now from all parts the swelling kennels flow,
And bear their trophies with them as they go:
Filth of all hues and odours seem to tell
What street they sailed from, by their sight and smell.
[…]
Sweepings from butcher’s stalls, dung, guts and blood,
Drown’d puppies, stinking sprats, all drenched in mud,
Dead cats, and turnip tops, come tumbling down the flood.36
The state of the Fleet clearly provided cause for amusement as well as disgust, as in the story told in The Gentleman’s Magazine of 1844 about a boar which had disappeared from a butcher’s stall in Smithfield but had turned up five months later at the mouth of the river, which by then had been covered over. The result of the boar’s sojourn in the sewer was such considerable fattening that it was improved in price from ten shillings to two guineas.
The stretch of the river between Holborn and Fleet Street was covered over in 1733 for the establishment of the Fleet Market. There was little local opposition when the City Corporation submitted a Bill to Parliament in 1756 to cover over the final stretch below Fleet Street with a view to constructing a bridge over the Thames. As we have seen, the City Corporation had previously strongly opposed any attempt to construct a bridge across the Thames in London. However, now that Westminster Bridge was completed, the fear was that the centre of business might shift away from the City, and this caused a radical rethink about strategic river crossings. According to the Bill, there were many benefits to constructing a bridge between Westminster and London bridges. It was argued that such a bridge would provide a crossing in what was then the centre of London, between Westminster in the west and London Bridge in the east; it would combat the grand schemes for the area around Westminster Bridge that threatened to take business away from the City; it would result in new streets and developments on the south bank around St George’s Fields and therefore increase the value of the City’s estates in that area; it would provide an alternative crossing in the likely event that London Bridge closed for repairs or widening; and it could outdo Westminster Bridge in grandeur and magnificence. George Dance (1700–86), the distinguished City Architect, produced a plan for a bridge between what was by then known as Fleet Ditch and the opposite side of the river for an estimated cost of £185,000. A report delivered to the Common Council of the City Corporation on 26 September 1754 recommended that the bridge costs should be met by Parliament because it would be of benefit to the nation. It also recommended that the houses on London Bridge should be removed.
In 1756, an Act was passed ‘for building a Bridge across the River of Thames from Blackfriars within the City of London, to the opposite side in the County of Surrey’. Authority was given to raise up to £160,000, but the proposal that costs should be met at the national expense was rejected, presumably because the main reason behind the proposal was to benefit the City in competition with Westminster. The money raised was to be paid off by tolls which should cease as soon as the debt was cleared. One of the many stipulations in the Act prohibited the building of any houses on the bridge, except for tollhouses and toll-gates. Authority was given to provide access roads and to ‘fill up the channel of Bridewell Dock up to Fleet Bridge and to build and maintain a sewer to the Thames under the new road’. The Act also allowed the City Corporation to remove the houses from London Bridge. The only people who had opposed the Act were the City’s old allies, the watermen, who put forward the usual arguments about danger to navigation and silting up of the river that the City authorities themselves had used in opposing all previous attempts to construct a bridge across the river in London. Since the watermen ran a Sunday ferry at Blackfriars, the Act did provide compensation to them for loss of bus
iness.
The City Corporation now set up a Blackfriars Bridge Committee to oversee the execution of the works specified in the Act. Its first job was to select the bridge design. As with Westminster Bridge, much controversy surrounded the selection process and, again as with Westminster, there was a surprise winner. In 1759, the Blackfriars Bridge Committee chose a shortlist of eight, including the design of the City Architect, George Dance. The other competitors included William Chambers, John Smeaton, John Gwynn and a little-known young Scottish architect, Robert Mylne, who had no real experience but had won a first-prize medal for architecture during a five-year period in Rome, where he had been influenced by Piranesi. Smeaton had just completed the famous Eddystone Lighthouse and, with his experience of building in water, was considered the favourite. Chambers and Dance were the outstanding architects of their time and were also considered strong contenders.
However, in 1760 a paper was published, under the anonymous authorship of Publicus, which analysed the shortlisted designs and attacked them all apart from Mylne’s.37 Publicus claimed that Chambers, although a distinguished architect, had produced a design too imitative of Roman precedents and unsuitable for England. Dance had grown old in the service of the City and his design was now old fashioned. Publicus had expected Smeaton to produce ‘a most complete piece of mechanism. This, however, I don’t find quite so clear, but on the contrary it is from ocular demonstration the weakest of all the designs given in.’ Mylne, on the other hand, had produced a design ‘magnificent, yet simple; light, yet not too slender; and modest, without bordering on rusticity’. Praise was especially given for his concept of niches for statues of admirals to celebrate England’s domination of the sea, although after Mylne finally won the competition these statues were not erected for reasons of cost.
Crossing the River: The History of London's Thames River Bridges From Richmond to the Tower Page 20
