On the day, according to the Illustrated London News of 13 November 1869, the crowds cheered Queen Victoria on her route to Blackfriars from Paddington Station, to where she had taken the train from Windsor. An alternative version, claiming that Queen Victoria and her manservant John Brown were hissed on their way to the opening ceremony, appears in The London Encyclopaedia, but I have found no other evidence to support this.
The Queen’s first function was to open Holborn Viaduct, which had been constructed to cross Farringdon Road over the former valley of the River Fleet. She then proceeded to Blackfriars Bridge, which she opened and then crossed in her coach. It has been said that Queen Victoria approved the bridge’s red granite columns and the semicircular recesses supported by them, which were designed to look like pulpits and so be a reminder of the ancient Blackfriars monastery from which the bridge took its name. The statue of Queen Victoria by C.B. Birch on the north side of the bridge was erected in 1896. Her Diamond Jubilee was celebrated in the following year, by which time her popularity was such that the route to St Paul’s Cathedral was lined by cheering crowds of over one million people.
The ‘pulpit’ capital of a Blackfriars Bridge river-pier
When Cubitt’s Blackfriars Bridge was completed, the Victoria Embankment had finally removed the putrescent mudbanks and the danger to health caused by the continuing outflow of sewage from the covered River Fleet. The channel of the sewer was now diverted back to its original course, so that today it comes out into the Thames underneath Blackfriars Bridge, where it can be seen at low tide from the Embankment. Bulk sewage is now taken to Beckton sewage works via Bazalgette’s low-level intercepting sewer, while the outflow of the Fleet is used only as an overflow sewer in conditions of heavy rainfall.
The bridge itself was a solid enough structure, but problems arose when the London County Council presented a Bill to Parliament in 1905 with a proposal to run its trams over the river at Blackfriars and Westminster. The City opposed the Bill, but was persuaded to allow a tramway to be built at the same time as the bridge was widened. The LCC agreed terms to lease the tramway and maintain it. The Corporation of London (Blackfriars and other Bridges) Act of 1906 authorised the work to widen the bridge and install a tramway. Finance again came from the Bridge House Estates, supplemented by the LCC lease. Sir Benjamin Baker (1840–1907), who had worked with Sir John Fowler on the Forth Railway Bridge, was engaged as engineer. His design involved removing the columns and ironwork from the upstream side of the bridge and reinstalling them after the bridge had been widened from 75 feet to 105 feet. Baker was asked to manage the project but was advised by his doctor not to undertake any more business commitments because of his state of health. He died in 1907 and his partner, Basil Mott (1859–1938), took over management of the project. Sir William Arrol & Co. won the £210,000 contract, which contained bonus and penalty clauses. The project was due to be completed in 36 months, but a bonus of £20 was to be paid for each day saved and a penalty of £1 imposed for each day lost. This was to cost the City an extra £3,560 when Arrol finished the work 178 days early. Arrol had been responsible for constructing a number of outstanding river bridges, including the Tay and Forth bridges and the steelwork for Tower Bridge.
Two fatal accidents occurred during the widening project, as reported by Basil Mott to the Bridge House Estates Committee on 14 December 1911. On one occasion, a labourer fell into a barge and died a few hours later, and on the second occasion, a serious accident occurred when the wooden staging from which a caisson was being lowered collapsed, killing four men. A Board of Trade inquiry found that no blame could be attached to anyone, since unfortunately the only ones who could have confirmed what happened had lost their lives. Compensation was paid to the men’s families.
The widened bridge and tramway were opened by the Lord Mayor, Sir George Truscott, on 14 September 1909, when a joint party of City Corporation and LCC dignitaries crossed the bridge in a tram driven by the Lord Mayor himself. The Lord Mayor seems to have enjoyed being in control of such a powerful machine, as the tram was seen to lurch forward at great speed. The opinions of the rest of the distinguished party were not recorded.
Blackfriars Bridge is today one of the widest and busiest of London’s Thames bridges. Its history is depicted in a series of tiled mosaics underneath the south bank arches. The bridge is still notorious for a murder mystery as sinister as the poisoned umbrella murder for which Waterloo Bridge is known. On 18 June 1982, the body of a man was found hanging under Blackfriars Bridge, with bricks and stones stuffed into his pockets to weigh him down. The body was identified as that of Roberto Calvi, who was chairman of Banco Ambrosiano and who had close links with the Vatican, hence becoming known as ‘God’s banker’. He was also suspected of having links with the Mafia.
The initial coroner’s inquiry found that Calvi had committed suicide after the collapse of his bank in the wake of news reports regarding a 400-million-pound anomaly in its accounts. He was also due to be tried for his involvement in allegedly fraudulent property deals with a Sicilian banker. However, his son Carlo campaigned to have the case reopened and in July 2003 a panel of judges in Rome issued a statement that it had no doubt that Calvi had been murdered. The judges nominated four people with alleged Mafia links as suspects. The City of London police reopened the murder case in September 2004. The trial started in October 2005 and is likely to expose the murky Mafia underworld and financial scandals possibly involving Italy’s political and religious establishment. Calvi was a member of a secret Masonic lodge and it seems that Blackfriars Bridge may have had some Masonic significance. The repercussions of the trial may well put The Da Vinci Code in the shade.
London, Chatham and Dover Railway Bridge
The LCDR Company was described as ‘one of the most gigantic frauds ever perpetrated’ in the Railway Times of 10 December 1870. However, the Railway Times was a strong supporter of the rival South Eastern Railway Company, whose railway bridge over the Thames at Cannon Street was built soon after the LCDR Bridge. The cut-throat competition between the two companies resulted eventually in both becoming virtually bankrupt, and they were forced to merge in 1899. The fascinating and complex story of the LCDR and its various stations on both sides of the river has been told by Adrian Gray.44 Here I will concentrate on the origins and fates of the two LCDR Thames railway bridges.
In 1860, the Metropolitan Extensions Act authorised the LCDR to extend its lines across the Thames at Blackfriars and Victoria. LCDR trains first crossed the Thames in 1862, to Victoria, where the company leased the western half of the station from the London, Brighton and South Coast Railway. In 1864, the LCDR opened Blackfriars Bridge Station on the south bank as its own London terminus for the lines to the south. However, this was a temporary measure, since the real aim was to be the first railway company to enter the City from the south and to link up with northern railway companies such as the Great Northern Railway and the Midland Railway both for passenger and coal transport. This was achieved when, on 21 December 1864, the LCDR Bridge across the Thames was opened.
The 933-foot bridge was designed by Joseph Cubitt to align with his Blackfriars Bridge. It consisted of a wrought-iron lattice-girder structure of five spans supported by massive cast-iron columns. The bridge rivalled Hawkshaw’s Hungerford Bridge for ugliness and was much criticised. However, trains were soon running for the first time through London to the North via a station at Ludgate Hill. The Act had stipulated that the LCDR should provide ‘workmen’s trains’ to run at fixed times and for fixed low fares. The reason was that the construction of the railway extension on the south bank had required the demolition of hundreds of workers’ homes and the displacement of the inhabitants further away from their place of work in the City. The cost of the whole scheme, including railway lines, stations, bridges and compensation, amounted to £1,450,000, and this was a major cause of the company’s eventual bankruptcy.
Following the construction of the LCDR’s second Thames crossing, t
oday’s Blackfriars Railway Bridge, Joseph Cubitt’s bridge and the Ludgate Hill Station it served became increasingly superfluous. Harsh criticisms of the bridge and the station it served were voiced in the Railway Magazine of February 1899: ‘Probably no railway station since the iron roads were first invented has ever come in for such an avalanche of gorgeous and whole-hearted abuse as has fallen of late upon that of the LCDR at Ludgate Hill.’ The line struggled on until services ceased altogether in 1971. The South Eastern Region of British Rail finally removed the superstructure of the bridge in 1985 using a 360-foot-tall crane which was towed across the North Sea from Rotterdam and then up the Thames to Bankside. Here, the crane was moored by the power station (today Tate Modern), where it towered 35 feet above the chimney. At night and at weekends it was towed to the LCDR Bridge, where it removed the lattice girders in sections in a period of less than two weeks, compared with the five months that would have been required using traditional methods.
Today, all that is left of the bridge are the massive LCDR insignia which were re-erected on the south side of the river and the headless cast-iron columns which still straddle the river between Blackfriars Bridge and the existing railway bridge. This must be one of London’s strangest and most inspiring sights, but it will soon be no more if the Thameslink 2000 planning application is allowed to proceed in its entirety. This envisages widening the existing railway bridge using the old LCDR cast-iron columns and building a new platform roof canopy spanning the river, with a station entrance on the south as well as the north side. The project is planned to take place between 2007 and 2011, but no firm decision has been taken at the time of writing.
Blackfriars Railway Bridge
In 1881, the LCDR succeeded in obtaining another Act of Parliament authorising them to build a second bridge to a new station to the east of Ludgate Hill Station. The station was called St Paul’s and provided services to the Continent as well as for through traffic to the North and commuters. The bridge was designed by John Wolfe Barry, who later did the engineering design for Tower Bridge, and H.M. Brunel, the second son of Isambard Kingdom Brunel. It was completed in 1886 as a five-span structure with piers placed to align with the two earlier bridges to the west. The ironwork was produced by the Thames Ironworks & Shipbuilding Company of Blackwell and installed by the contractors, Messrs Lucas & Aird. The bridge carried seven lines across the river on its 81-foot-wide railroad but fanned out on the north side to a width of 123 feet to allow for the platforms of St Paul’s Station, which extended over the river. Because of the great width of the bridge, it was not possible to use simple lattice girders, as with the first LCDR bridge. Consequently, wrought-iron arched ribs were built under the rails, giving sufficient support and also enhancing the bridge’s appearance.
Blackfriars Railway Bridge with the headless columns of the former London, Chatham and Dover Railway Bridge
Today, Blackfriars Railway Bridge provides the only through service between north and south in central London. The old St Paul’s Station was rebuilt in 1977 and renamed Blackfriars Station. Its aesthetic merits are limited to the views upstream and downstream from the southern ends of the platforms, and the stone blocks inscribed with the names of the stations that used to be served from St Paul’s Station. These inscribed stones were preserved from the old station and contain such idiosyncratic juxtapositions as Sittingbourne and Marseilles, Sheerness and Vienna.
Old station plaques preserved in the rebuilt Blackfriars Railway Station
CHAPTER 12
Millennium Bridge
The Millennium Bridge was opened to great acclaim in June 2000, but, because of the famous wobble, it had to be closed after just two days. It was reopened in February 2002 after protracted remedial work finally cured the problem of the wobble. The bridge provides a pedestrian crossing between St Paul’s Cathedral on the north side of the river and Tate Modern on the south. It was the first entirely new bridge to be constructed across the Thames in London for over a century, since Tower Bridge was completed in 1894. As a footbridge, its modern, minimalist appearance could hardly be more different from the flamboyant Gothic extravagance of its nineteenth-century predecessor.
The first proposal for a bridge at this location was made in 1854, in the report of the Select Committee on Metropolitan Bridges. The Committee recommended four new bridges, including one at St Paul’s, as being necessary for ‘providing further means of communication across the river’. The other recommended locations were at the Tower of London, Lambeth and Charing Cross. No action was taken on the St Paul’s proposal until in 1911 an Act of Parliament authorised the City Corporation to construct a new road crossing at this point as well as to rebuild the old Southwark Bridge. As described in Chapter 13, the Southwark Bridge reconstruction project, which it was estimated would cost £300,000, went ahead. The St Paul’s project, however, was delayed because of the high estimated cost of well over one million pounds and because the First World War started before the exact route could be agreed. After the war, the City Corporation spent over £1,500,000 on purchasing property in preparation for building the approach roads for St Paul’s Bridge but abandoned the project in 1931.
The idea of constructing a bridge at St Paul’s lay dormant until the 1990s. By then, huge changes had taken place on the south bank of the river. The most significant event was the opening in 1960 of Bankside Power Station, designed by Giles Gilbert Scott, who had also designed Battersea Power Station and Waterloo Bridge. The power station, with its single tall chimney, stood across the river exactly facing St Paul’s Cathedral, which for so many years has been seen as the symbol of London. Today, this seems a most extraordinary juxtaposition. By the 1970s, it was no longer considered desirable to pollute London’s air by electricity generation, and by 1981 both Bankside and Battersea power stations were closed. Around this time, the wharves along the riverfront were being abandoned as the Port of London ceased to attract industrial and commercial river traffic, and the area became almost derelict.
The 1980s saw the start of a remarkable regeneration of both the disused docks to the east of Tower Bridge and of Southwark’s riverside. This culminated with the decision in 1992 to transform Bankside Power Station into the Tate Modern art gallery. Now that Southwark’s attractions were more on a par with those on the north bank, the idea of providing a new crossing in this area was resuscitated. Indeed, there was even a suggestion of the crossing being lined with houses, and in 1996 the Royal Academy held an exhibition of seven designs for a habitable bridge at Temple Gardens. One of the plans was by the charismatic bridge designer Santiago Calatrava, but even he could not inspire anyone to foot the bill for such an ambitious project.
In the Millennium Bridge official publication, Deyan Sudjic describes how the much more practical and ultimately successful scheme for a footbridge was initiated at about the same time as the RA exhibition.45 The driving personality was David Bell, managing director of the Financial Times, the head office of which had recently moved to the south bank by Southwark Bridge, from where there is a clear view of both St Paul’s Cathedral and Tate Modern. His initiative was strongly supported by others, including Nicholas Serota, director of Tate Modern, and Southwark Council, both of whom saw the advantages of improving access to the south bank for the wealthy inhabitants on the north bank as well as City workers and tourists.
Needless to say, there was some opposition. English Heritage was concerned that a bridge would obstruct views of St Paul’s from passing river traffic. Eventually, it was persuaded that, with a projected four million annual pedestrian crossings, many more people would have an amazing view of the cathedral from the bridge than would have their views impaired from the relatively few boats. The City Corporation was at first lukewarm about the project but later agreed not only to make a large contribution to the cost of construction but also to take over the maintenance. The Millennium Bridge thus became the fifth bridge to be financed as part of the Bridge House Estates, following in the footsteps of Lond
on, Blackfriars, Southwark and Tower bridges.
As has always been the case with proposals to bridge London’s river, the process of obtaining authorisation and finance proved complex. The first step was to hold an architectural competition. No fewer than 227 entries were submitted for the prestigious project. A shortlist of six was selected by the distinguished panel of judges, which included Jacques Herzog of Herzog & de Meuron, the firm of architects responsible for transforming Bankside Power Station into Tate Modern. Finally, in December 1996, it was announced that the winners were the team of Norman Foster, Anthony Caro and the engineering firm Ove Arup & Partners. This was considered a dream-team combination of architecture, sculpture and engineering.
Rather surprisingly, the initial concept seems to have come not from the architect or sculptor but from Chris Wise of Ove Arup. Before the first team meeting, he was sitting in a restaurant with a colleague and did a simple drawing on a napkin of a straight line linking two banks of a river. This was to become today’s slender structure, which provides minimal obstruction to views along or over the river by day, allows plenty of headroom for shipping to pass underneath and by night dissolves into the justly named ‘blade of light’. Of course, a huge amount of design work was required to turn the concept into reality.
The final design is in fact a suspension bridge, although it does not conform to most people’s idea of what a suspension bridge looks like. Interestingly, Norman Foster’s offices overlook Albert Bridge, which does look like a suspension bridge but is in fact a cable-stayed bridge. In the case of the Millennium Bridge, there are no tall river-towers supporting curved chains, but the cables are stretched from the abutments on each side of the river and over the ‘V’ shaped top ends of the river-piers, hardly rising above the level of the deck they support. It is rightly described as a ‘flat suspension bridge’.
Crossing the River: The History of London's Thames River Bridges From Richmond to the Tower Page 22
