Robert Mylne (1734–1811)
Robert Mylne was the eldest son of Thomas Mylne, surveyor of the City of Edinburgh, who favoured the classical style of architecture which was prevalent at the time. In 1754, he went to Rome to complete his architectural education. There, he won a first-prize medal for architecture at the Academy of St Luke, and his early interest in classical architecture was reinforced by his friendship with Piranesi. In 1759, he returned to England just in time to enter the competition for the design of Blackfriars Bridge. Although his training was in architecture, he had obtained considerable skill in engineering. At that time, these professions were not as clearly defined as they are today.
Following his success at Blackfriars, he was appointed surveyor of both Canterbury and St Paul’s cathedrals. He obtained many commissions for bridges and villas throughout England and Scotland, which involved much travel even during his time as manager of the Blackfriars Bridge project. His other major appointment was as engineer of the New River Company, which had been set up in the seventeenth century to construct a channel to bring water from rivers in Hertfordshire to supply much of London’s water from its reservoir in Clerkenwell.
There had been much resentment when Mylne, as a young man from Scotland, had defeated his more famous English rivals in the Blackfriars Bridge competition. However, by the end of his life he could move in the highest circles, having been elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1767. He was buried near to Sir Christopher Wren’s tomb in St Paul’s Cathedral.
Needless to say, Publicus’s pamphlet aroused fury among Mylne’s rivals. Smeaton wrote his own rebuttal of Publicus’s criticisms and challenged the author to admit that Publicus was in fact Mylne himself. Publicus replied, repeating his arguments against Smeaton. He refused to reveal his identity and, addressing the Committee directly, claimed that his only motive was to ‘save my fellow citizens and you, our trustees’. At this stage, a surprising intervention came from Dr Samuel Johnson, who was the most distinguished figure in London’s intellectual society at the time but was not known for his knowledge of engineering, as was admitted by his normally appreciative biographer James Boswell. He wrote a letter to the Daily Gazetteer criticising Mylne’s use of elliptical arches, which Johnson claimed would be much weaker than the semicircular arches proposed by Johnson’s friend John Gwynn. Unfortunately, Johnson had failed to understand that Mylne, by use of ingenious counter-arches built into the stonework of the bridge, had ensured that his elliptical arches would be as strong as semicircular ones. Moreover, the expert whose opinions Johnson quoted to support his arguments wrote that he was not in fact opposed to elliptical arches.
The ever-irascible Johnson refused to give up and published two more letters with rather more personal attacks on Mylne, but he had clearly lost the argument. Johnson was accused of attacking Mylne because of his well-known prejudice against the Scots. Boswell, however, claims that Johnson’s real motive was to support his friend Gwynn.38 Moreover, he adds that: ‘So far was he from having any illiberal antipathy to Mr Mylne that he afterwards lived with that gentleman upon very agreeable terms of acquaintance, and dined with him at his house.’
Having selected Mylne’s design, the Blackfriars Bridge Committee decided to appoint him as surveyor and engineer, effectively putting him in charge of the project. The bridge was 995 feet long and 45 feet wide, supported on nine semi-elliptical arches. Between the arches were double Ionic columns which supported small projecting recesses against the face of each pier, but with no statues. The first stone was laid by the Lord Mayor, Sir Thomas Chitty, on 31 October 1760. The ceremony took place in the middle of the Seven Years War, when Britain was allied with Frederick the Great of Prussia against France, Spain and Russia. General Wolfe had just won the battle for Quebec, losing his life in the process, and patriotic fervour was at its height. The Lord Mayor read a glowing inscription praising the Prime Minister, William Pitt the Elder, for ‘augmenting and securing the British Empire’ and declaring that: ‘The Citizens of London have unanimously voted this Bridge to be inscribed with the Name of William Pitt.’39 The inscription was deposited under the foundation stone, together with contemporary coins, a copy of that day’s Times and the medal Mylne had won in Rome. According to Mylne’s grandson, as recorded in The Times of 5 July 1865: ‘In the enthusiasm of the moment the architect took the medal from his neck and threw it into the cavity of the stone.’ Well before the bridge was completed Pitt had lost his popularity with the citizens of London because of the great expense of the war, and it was opened as Blackfriars Bridge in 1769.
Robert Mylne’s Blackfriars Bridge of 1769 as painted by William Marlow
As with Westminster, then, Blackfriars Bridge was constructed partly during time of war. The war was one of many reasons given by Mylne for the nine-year length of the project and the escalating costs. The final cost was £232,000, which was more than the £160,000 authorised in the first Blackfriars Bridge Act, but, as Mylne pointed out to the Committee, much less than the £400,000 for Westminster Bridge. Extra money amounting to £16,200 was voted by the Common Council to come from the fund of sheriffs’ fines. These fines were paid by sheriffs, who were senior aldermen due to be appointed Lord Mayor of London but who preferred to buy themselves out of this honour because it would involve considerably more personal expense than the fine.
The Bridge House Estates (BHE), which had been set up to finance London Bridge, was under pressure at the time because of the removal of the houses on London Bridge and the resulting loss of income. The City Corporation was also involved in the expenses of removing all the Roman city gates and rebuilding Newgate Prison. Consequently, the rest of the money had to come from extending the tolls from their expected end date of 1770 until 1785, and the Sunday tolls until 1811. This was authorised by an Act of Parliament in 1769. Since pedestrian tolls were just one penny, a huge amount of coinage was collected. The Blackfriars Bridge Committee had an agreement with a Mr Cordy that he would pay £10 for every 100 lb of copper. As recorded in the minutes of a meeting of the Committee on 27 June 1775, Cordy complained in a letter that so much bad money had been collected that he made a loss on the deal.
Mylne’s diaries describe the many problems he met with during the construction project. In the winter of 1762–3, the Thames froze over. The Frost Fair held on the frozen river provided a variety of public entertainments but stopped any work on the bridge. Like Labelye at Westminster, Mylne used caissons for the construction of the pier foundations. However, having learned from the disaster that befell one of the Westminster piers, Mylne had wooden piles driven deep into the river-bed to give firm support before building the piers. Even so, the caissons seem to have caused severe difficulties, with four men working around the clock on pumping them dry. Attempts to float the caissons frequently failed, and on one occasion four horses, sixty men and nine pumps proved inadequate for the job. The Fleet Ditch must have added to the difficulties faced by the workmen. According to a contemporary witness:
The large sewers that empty themselves in the neighbourhood occasion a constant accumulation of sand, mud and rubbish which destroys a great part of the navigation at low water. The mud and filth thus accumulated is extremely offensive in summer and often dangerous to the health of the neighbouring inhabitants.40
Surprisingly, Mylne himself records only one accident during the whole of the project, when ‘one man’s arms were a little hurt when a great part of the timbers supporting the arches broke’.41 There would certainly have been many more serious accidents and fatalities on so dangerous a project given the lack of modern equipment and safety standards. This is hinted at in the 1784 report of the Blackfriars Bridge Committee, which mentions ‘the many and great unavoidable accidents, commonly attendant on all great undertakings’.
Detailed information on such matters was lost when in 1780 the records of the Blackfriars Bridge Committee were destroyed in the Gordon Riots. The Gordon Riots were instigated under the banner of ‘No Popery!�
�� by Lord George Gordon, who objected to the repeal of anti-Roman Catholic legislation. He assembled a crowd of 30,000 in Southwark, but soon lost control. The crowd quickly forgot about the Catholics and became a mob, rampaging through the streets of London, destroying many of the prisons, including the newly rebuilt Newgate Prison, and freeing the prisoners. They also vented their fury on the Blackfriars Bridge tollhouses. The Blackfriars Bridge Committee minutes of 12 June 1780 record that on the night of 7 June, known as ‘Black Wednesday’, a great mob attacked Blackfriars Bridge and fired the tollhouses. They carried off the money chests, which were found empty of all but half a guinea and four sixpences after the mob had been dispersed by the military. Early records of the Committee were also destroyed. The general riots finally died down when the troops were called in and many of the rioters had had too much to drink. Gordon himself was arrested. Ironically, he died soon after in Newgate Prison, after it had been reconstructed yet again.
Meanwhile, Mylne continued to be the surveyor of Blackfriars Bridge and was responsible for rebuilding the toll-gates. He also built himself a substantial house in the now more fashionable area to the north of the bridge, where, as recorded above, he entertained Dr Johnson to dinner. It is surprising that he kept the position through all those years, because he had been involved in a protracted dispute with the Common Council about payment for his work on the construction of the bridge. The initial contract had stipulated that he should be paid a salary of £350, but there was a general understanding that people in his position should receive 5 per cent of the construction cost and 1 per cent of the purchase cost. Since there was nothing about this in the written contract, Mylne presented a petition claiming what most people agreed was his due. In 1771, a court of the Common Council examined Mylne and asked him if he thought he was entitled to the full payment as a right. Mylne answered that he did claim it as a right. It seems that Mylne’s answer was considered arrogant, and the petition was turned down. Mylne then resubmitted his petition in 1774 to the Blackfriars Bridge Committee, which agreed he should be paid the extra money but could not authorise the payment without the approval of the Common Council. Eventually, in 1776, Mylne received the exact amount he demanded, minus his annual salary, as evidenced in his diary entry for payment of £4,209 16s. ¾d.
One of the reasons for the length of the construction project and the cost overruns was the difficulty in negotiating property purchases for the approach roads. On the northern side, New Bridge Street and Chatham Place were constructed, and these were soon lined with impressive buildings, including Mylne’s own house. Underneath the buildings ran the Fleet Ditch, which was now a 17-foot-wide sewer diverted to empty into the Thames clear of the bridge. In 1783, an inspection established that the roof of the sewer was in danger of collapsing, which would result in many buildings falling into it. Expensive repairs were needed to ensure the safety of the buildings. At the same time, embankments were constructed from Blackfriars to Temple to overcome the problem of vessels accessing the quays and wharves, which were silted up at low water.
The southern approaches proved even more problematic because of the many and complex land rights in St George’s Fields. The original idea was to construct roads to London Bridge in the east and to Westminster Bridge in the west, but this proved too complicated. Eventually, a compromise was reached with the trustees of the Surrey Turnpike to construct a road to St George’s Circus, where roads from London and Westminster bridges already converged. The City funded the road, but the Turnpike Trust was made responsible for lighting, watching and repairing it from tolls collected at the toll-gate at St George’s Circus. At the time, the road was known as Great Surrey Street, but it was renamed Blackfriars Bridge Road in the nineteenth century. An obelisk was erected at St George’s Circus in 1771, giving the date of construction under the mayoralty of Brass Crosby, as well as mileages to the three bridges. This was removed in 1905 but has now been restored to its original position, where it is noticed by few people because of today’s hectic traffic conditions.
The final report of the Blackfriars Bridge Committee was produced in 1786. This announced that all the work had been completed and all the capital paid off. There was concern that, now the tolls had ceased, the small residual annual income of £175 would be insufficient for maintenance. Already in 1790 it was reported that the road surface on the bridge was wearing away due to increased traffic following the removal of the tolls, and a proposal was put forward for granite paving. More severe problems occurred because of the poor quality of the Portland stone used in the bridge’s construction. According to Thornbury, only the Government had use of the best Portland quarries.42 The City Corporation, as a private enterprise, was forced to use second best.
By 1833, the deterioration was such that a new Act was passed authorising the restoration of the arches and the lowering of the crown of the bridge at a cost of £74,000. This work would lessen the architectural beauty of Mylne’s bridge but was expected to prolong its life by many years. However, after the removal of Old London Bridge, the resulting increase in tidal flows caused severe damage to the foundations of the piers at Blackfriars, just as at Waterloo and Westminster bridges. By 1860, the City was so worried about the state of Blackfriars Bridge that the Common Council resolved to replace it.
This time, the bridge was to be financed from the Bridge House Estates. Proposals were submitted for a bridge of either three or five spans. The watermen and other river users favoured a three-span bridge because this would provide clearer navigation. The committee set up to examine the matter reported back to the Common Council with a recommendation for a three-span bridge. However, many members of the Common Council supported a five-span bridge, which would align with the preferred design of the proposed bridge of the LCDR to be built 100 feet downstream.
When the time came for the Blackfriars Bridge Committee to be re-elected, the supporters of the five-span bridge managed to change the membership so that the previous recommendation was revoked and invitations were sent out for a five-span design. Unsurprisingly, the design of Joseph Cubitt (1811–72), the LCDR engineer, was accepted. William Lucey, who had sponsored three petitions in favour of the three-span design, wrote a furious pamphlet summarising the arguments from his point of view and implying a degree of shady dealing:
May I be permitted to ask the question whether the members of the Common Council have employed paid persons to get up and obtain signatures to petitions to aid them in procuring the adoption of their favourite scheme – a system which must be pronounced by all right-minded persons corrupt and nefarious?43
The 1863 Act authorised the removal of Mylne’s failing structure and the erection ‘in lieu thereof upon a deeper foundation, a new Bridge of grander width, with improved gradients, and a lesser number of arches’. Joseph Cubitt designed a bridge consisting of five wrought-iron spans with a total length of 963 feet and an unprecedented 75-foot width. The piers are ornamented with massive red polished-granite columns. The columns’ capitals are carved with interlaced plants and birds, the downstream capitals representing maritime species and the upstream capitals inland creatures.
The project started in 1864, when the old bridge was demolished together with a number of nearby buildings, including Mylne’s own house. Mylne himself had died in 1811. He is buried in the crypt of St Paul’s near the tomb of Sir Christopher Wren. Wren’s own memorial, inscribed on his tomb, reads ‘Lector, si monumentum requires, circumspice’, translated as, ‘Reader, if you seek his memorial, look around you.’ Sadly, Mylne’s great work served as his memorial for only half a century.
The foundation stone of the new bridge was laid by the Lord Mayor, Warren S. Hale, on 20 July 1865. The 2-ton granite block came from the old bridge. The inscription refers to the difference between the time of war when the old bridge had been started in 1760 and the ‘profound peace in the 29th year of the reign of Queen Victoria at a moment when … by the adoption of Free Trade, those separate interests which divided nation
s have been happily bridged over’. With more modern equipment, the construction project took less than half the time required for the building of the original bridge. The Illustrated London News of 3 December 1864 was especially impressed by the newly invented steam cranes, erected on rails alongside the construction site, which could lift and carry the largest granite blocks with ‘unexampled rapidity’.
The new Blackfriars Bridge was opened by Queen Victoria on 6 November 1869, almost exactly 100 years after the opening of the earlier bridge. Clearly the authorities were worried about the possible reception the Queen might receive after she had for so long refused to appear at any public ceremonies, including the opening of Westminster Bridge, following the death of Prince Albert. The Illustrated London News of 6 November 1869 printed a strong defence of the Queen’s behaviour:
Blackfriars Bridge of 1869 with the dome of St Paul’s Cathedral
If it has taken her a somewhat protracted time to recover from the effects of that crushing blow, it shall be borne in mind that Royalty, from its very position, is peculiarly isolated, and that the loss to the Queen of nearly the only companion with whom she could share the inmost thoughts, the ever-present responsibilities and the tenderest affection of her being was one which left her, more than others who have suffered a similar bereavement, solitary and alone.
Crossing the River: The History of London's Thames River Bridges From Richmond to the Tower Page 21
