Living On The Thames

Important new discoveries illuminate the form and history of the houses that lined one of London’s most celebrated lost landmarks. Dorian Gerhold explores the remarkable story of their construction and development

- Stephen Conlin

A reconstruction drawing of London Bridge in about 1590 by Stephen Conlin, specially commissioned for Country Life. It shows the middle section of the bridge, with the spectacular façade of Nonsuch House to the left and the medieval chapel, converted into a house, on the large pier to the right. The cutaway shows the arrangement of houses along the bridge, as well as the massive hammer beams laid parallel to the roadway that supported them. Notice the cellars created within the piers or slung beneath the hammer beams. The house interior shown follows the standard plan of ground-floor shop, first-floor hall, second-floor kitchen and chambers and garrets above. Cross buildings spanned the roadway at intervals and created an intermittent tunnel; at least one foreign visitor walked along the street without realising he had crossed a river. Water for the houses was hauled from the river. The enormous starlings restricted the flow of the river and, at low tide, created treacherous shoots of water between the piers. This restricted flow stilled the water upstream of the bridge and made it easier for it to freeze over.

OLD LONDON BRIDGE, lined with rickety-looking wooden houses, was by far the longest inhabited bridge in Europe, with the homes of more than 500 people—the equivalent of a small town—perched above the rushing waters of the Thames. It was also a crucial part of London’s road network, a principal shopping street and much admired by foreign visitors. A Frenchman, L. Grenade, wrote in 1578 that ‘there is no bridge in the whole of Europe which is on a great river like the Thames and as formidable, as spectacular and as bustling with trade as this bridge in London’. He ranked it with St Paul’s Cathedral, the Royal Exchange and the Tower as one of London’s most impressive structures.