A BRIDGE WORTH CROSSING

Jack Watkins takes a trip down the River Thames and a look back at London’s illustrious bridge-building heritage

- Jack Watkins

THE idea of a Garden Bridge has been spiked and the last major Thames crossing to go up—the Millennium Bridge—got off to a shaky (quite literally) start before finally rooting itself in the public consciousness, but London has a proud heritage of finely engineered bridges. Despite lacking the antiquity of Paris’s Pont Neuf, many have transcended their utilitarian purpose to become objects of visual delight in their own right. Ironically, given the name, that doesn’t include London Bridge, now formed from concrete and steel. In its earlier incarnations —including a series of timber bridges and the medieval stone structure that stood for 600 years—London Bridge was the capital’s sole Thames crossing beyond Kingston until the first Putney Bridge was raised in 1729. In fact, the first London Bridge, built by the Romans above the Southwark marshes in AD43, instigated such a rapid growth of London’s trading port that, by the end of the century, the settlement had replaced Colchester as the capital of Roman Britain.

The current crossing was completed in 1973 and its streamlined functionality has its admirers, but it’s hardly surprising that Tower Bridge outranks it as a tourist industry marketing motif. Its famous Gothic towers, pure Victorian romanticism, house and support the bridge-lifting machinery and suspension cables.