The Thames bridges
eight central crossings, and the things on them nobody stops to look at
Below Teddington Lock the Thames is tidal, and it is crossed about thirty times by road, rail and foot before the estuary, the last fixed road crossing being the Dartford tunnels and the Queen Elizabeth II bridge. The eight below are the central ones, and each is here for something on it rather than for the crossing itself: eight two-tonne bronzes nobody can see from the deck, a set of steps cut for watermen waiting for work, and a notice telling soldiers to stop marching in time.
Why the decoration is where it is
A Thames bridge is a piece of public engineering that a committee had to justify, and the argument was usually settled by adding sculpture. Vauxhall got its eight figures because architects attacked the design as bare. The Embankment approaches got lions and lamps because the whole river frontage was furnished as one scheme. The pattern is consistent enough to be useful: look at the piers and the abutments rather than the span, because that is where the money that was spent on appearances went.
It also explains why so much of it is missed. The Vauxhall bronzes face out from the piers, so they are invisible to anyone actually on the bridge, and the best view of them is from a boat or from the far bank with the light behind you.
Dating a crossing, and the trap in it
Almost every central crossing is the second or third bridge on its site, and the name usually belongs to the first one. Waterloo Bridge is named for a battle fought two years before the first bridge opened and eight generations before the present one. Blackfriars is named for a monastery dissolved two centuries before the first bridge there. London Bridge has had at least four incarnations and the one most people picture, with the houses on it, came down in the 1830s.
So a date attached to a Thames bridge is worth two questions: which structure it belongs to, and whether it is the date of the design, the opening to traffic or the completion. Waterloo is the clearest case of all three being different.
The entries
Vauxhall Bridge
Vauxhall Bridge SW1 / SW8 Nearest station: Vauxhall or Pimlico
Steel on granite piers, opened on the 26th of May 1906, and the first bridge in central London to carry trams. Eight bronze figures of about two tonnes each stand on the piers: Agriculture, Architecture, Engineering and Pottery upstream by Frederick Pomeroy, and Science, Fine Arts, Local Government and Education downstream by Alfred Drury. They were not, as is often written, made to use up money left over from the building; they were commissioned because the first design was attacked as purely functional, and the London County Council took architectural advice and added them. They face outward from the piers, so nobody standing on the bridge can see a single one of them.
Southwark Bridge
Southwark Bridge EC4 / SE1 Nearest station: Cannon Street or Southwark
Opened in 1921, and the replacement for a bridge by John Rennie that carried the longest cast-iron span ever built, at about 73 metres. Dickens used it repeatedly, and it is the bridge he sends Little Dorrit across. Below the present bridge on the south side is a flight of steps down towards the foreshore, cut for the Thames watermen who moored here and waited for a fare.
Waterloo Bridge
Waterloo Bridge WC2 / SE1 Nearest station: Waterloo or Temple
The first bridge here opened on the 18th of June 1817, two years after the battle it is named for. The present one is by Sir Giles Gilbert Scott: it took traffic from the 11th of March 1942, was formally opened that September and was not finished until 1945, which is why three different dates are all quoted for it. Wartime conscription left the site short of men and women made up much of the workforce, and it was called the Ladies' Bridge for years afterwards. It is also the only Thames bridge that German bombing damaged.
Albert Bridge
Albert Bridge Road SW3 / SW11 Nearest station: Sloane Square or Battersea Park
One of the few suspension bridges in central London, designed by Rowland Mason Ordish and opened in 1873 as a toll bridge. The toll houses are still standing at both ends and have been unused since the tolls came off. The bridge has never stopped having a reputation for movement, and the notices at either end still ask troops to break step when crossing, which is the only sign of its kind left in London.
Blackfriars Bridge
Blackfriars Bridge EC4 / SE1 Nearest station: Blackfriars
The third bridge built in London, after old London Bridge and Westminster, and named after the Dominican friary that stood on the north bank. Robert Mylne's first bridge of 1769 had nine elliptical arches; the present five wrought-iron ones are by Joseph Cubitt, the engineer, and were opened by Queen Victoria on the 6th of November 1869. The credit regularly goes to Thomas Cubitt, the builder of Belgravia, who had nothing to do with it.
London Bridge
London Bridge EC4 / SE1 Nearest station: Monument or London Bridge
The site of the first crossing of the Thames, in Roman London, and of the medieval bridge that stood for more than six centuries with houses and shops built along it. That was replaced in 1831 by John Rennie's stone bridge, whose lamps were reputedly cast from captured French cannon. Rennie's bridge was sold in 1968, dismantled and re-erected at Lake Havasu City in Arizona, and the present concrete one opened in 1973. Nothing on it marks any of this.
Tower Bridge
Tower Bridge EC3 / SE1 Nearest station: Tower Hill or London Bridge
Still a working bascule bridge, raised about a thousand times a year, which is roughly twenty times a week. A vessel needs to give twenty-four hours' notice and pays nothing for the lift, and the schedule is published in advance, so a raising is one of the few free spectacles in London you can plan for rather than hope for. In its first twelve months it opened 6,160 times.
Hungerford Bridge
Hungerford Bridge WC2 / SE1 Nearest station: Charing Cross or Embankment
A railway bridge into Charing Cross with a footbridge on each side, the pair of them properly called the Golden Jubilee Bridges. The railway bridge of 1864 replaced a suspension footbridge by Isambard Kingdom Brunel, and the chains taken off it were re-used to finish the Clifton Suspension Bridge at Bristol, which is why a Bristol landmark is partly made of a demolished London one.
Questions
Which Thames bridge was sold to America?
John Rennie's London Bridge of 1831. It was sold in 1968, taken apart, shipped and rebuilt at Lake Havasu City in Arizona, where it still stands. The story that the buyer thought he was getting Tower Bridge is repeated constantly and has been denied by the people involved; treat it as folklore. The medieval bridge with the houses on it is a different structure again, and it was demolished when Rennie's opened.
Why do soldiers break step on Albert Bridge?
Because a column marching in time can drive a suspension bridge at its own natural frequency, and Albert Bridge is light, old and close to a barracks. The notices at both ends are the surviving example in London. Whether the bridge was ever at real risk is not settled; the instruction is cheap and the bridge is Grade II* listed, so it stays.
Which is the Ladies' Bridge?
Waterloo. Conscription took the men and women did much of the building during the Second World War, and the name stuck for decades afterwards. It went unrecorded in the official histories for a long time, which is why it reads like a legend and is not one.
Can you see the Vauxhall Bridge statues from the bridge?
No, and that is the point of mentioning them. All eight face outward from the piers, below deck level. They are visible from a boat, from the Millbank or Nine Elms riverside walks, and from the far bank; from the pavement on the bridge itself you cannot see one of them.
Elsewhere on this site: London oddities, street furniture.