Why The Medieval London Bridge Was So Important | The Bridges That Built London | Chronicle

between Richmond and the North Sea 30

bridge

s span temperatures transporting people across a 35M long stretch of river bringing together a population of almost 8 million These extraordinary structures have been the creation of London, the capital of Great Britain and I think the largest city in Europe, millions of Londoners. I cross these

bridge

s every week, most of them I don't think give them a second thought, but for me

bridges

are much more than mere means of transportation, ways of getting from one place to another, they are also ways of linking the present with the past. . London

bridges

are not only functional objects, they are also symbols, metaphors that transform, connect, inspire and tell great stories of Bronze Age relics on the voxal shore, of why London Bridge was falling, of corpses splashing underwater and, above all, the sublime ambition of London.

The Bridge Builders Themselves I was born when London was still one of the world's great ports and the Tams were the world's great working rivers. I will remember as a child the impression that London bridges made on me. I guess the bridges gave me my first exciting, stomach-churning architectural experience. experience and my goodness, now they are doing the same thing, ah, brilliant. See some of London's bridges have disappeared or been replaced, they are ghost crossings of the past, but each one of them is a clue to the hidden history of the city, in some way they are that history, a story. which lasted almost 4,000 years at the beginning was the river, the largest storm, the longest river in England. 200 miles from its source, the river meets the tidal current.

The result is a landscape of swamps and islands in certain and always changing only here, far, downstream from the city of London. Can you understand the elemental world of sand, mud, pebbles and rubble that was the TS before the buildings were

built

? city ​​and its bridges? Generations going back centuries Londoners worked in the marshes now they had long lost their trades, sludges and scavengers, tsers and dredgers Wartman and oyster harvesters are a lost class the river has always been a portal to the past its artists and writers inspired as much as Joseph Conrad, who wrote that nothing is easier than to evoke the great spirit of the past than in the lower reaches.

From here Conrad could see the great modern city of London from an ancient perspective, the monstrous city was marked ominously in the sky, a melancholy gloom under the sun, an eerie glow under the stars and this too has been one of the dark places of the land we live in flickers, but the darkness was here yesterday the marshy landscape on the banks of the storm gave rise to London, but the first bridge was not

built

here, but 15 miles upriver to the west, beyond the city ​​of London, beyond the seat of power. at Westminster in a place we today call voxhall here in 1500 BC.

C. Before Troy fell and long before Julius Caesar arrived in Britain, the marsh people made their first attempt to cross. We are extremely lucky. The remains are only fully exposed twice a year. year at the bottom of the spring tide, but what a find, tests have shown that these wood piles have been preserved here for 3 and 12,000 years, so they dated it with dendrology, so you are AB there, it sure is Calendar of 1,500 years dated BC, yes, 1,500, so BCC, which is about 3, so this is one way to be the oldest structure of the Institute in London, isn't it?

Why did they build this bridge? Some archaeologists believe it didn't transport people across the river, but to an island that probably existed in the creek, we can't know for sure, but gustaff and his team think that back then this was the highest point of tidle creek and It is also a place where three rivers meet the TS and two of its lost tributaries, the Tyon and the Efra, that is obviously magical. Three rivers meet, such strange and wonderful tidal things happen. I guess that's right and if this was the tidal head in the Bronze Age, that's a very magical place because the Moon is definitely telling when. the tide will be low and when it will be high and when people see this connection between those things in the sky, you will know that the moon and those things on the earth, the river that they connect with, you will know it as something sacred.

You need to Plaque the river because very high tides would flood anything around here, so we possibly have some kind of sacred river at this point when the bridge was discovered, the archaeologist found two bronze spearheads stuck in the mud at the side of the bridge where the offerings were. the river deity as coins in the fountain this urg is universal and even today Londoners continue to make offerings throughout the 10 SE rooms, we find these types of things now they are not from the Bronze Age, they are Diwali lamps , Oh my God. My God, it's like in India it's like in the holy GES wait a minute, but they are modern, they are modern, what is this Lord Ganesh who overcame many obstacles, great friend and who looks like Krishna or something?

T it and these chats seem Christian, don't they? So you found them in the temp, so Hindus living in England in London are chosen using the temp as Gandi's sacred rer, so they are replicating what we used to do. make in the Bronze Age a ritual river, a powerful god, if Gustaf is right, this challenges many of our assumptions about what bridges are, since they did not originate as a means of transportation or trade, but as sacred creations, this It was a bridge between a spiritual not a material division a bridge between worlds a bridge between the world of man here and the world of God it has been life and death time was like the river Jordan to cross it or to cross to a Promised Land the link between Bridges and the sacred In fact, in our language the leader of the Roman Catholic Church is commemorated, the Pope is called in Latin ponteix, which means both bridge builder and priest.

In fact, it was the Romans, some 1,500 years after the activities of our marsh people here, who built London Bridge. first traditional conventional bridge Bridging temperatures is not easy, the riverbed changes all the time due to tides, currents and human activity, but it is actually very shallow, sometimes less than 2m deep during the low tide, the Romans knew it, they were the champion engineers of the ancient world. They put their bridge in one of the narrowest and shallowest parts of the river which is now crossed by the modern London Bridge right next to the ancient port which It is called the London Pool the consequences have been immense for centuries this area was the heartland of the British For me a key reason for my economy is that this was the first place upstream from the sea, about 40 miles in that direction, where a bridge could be built to connect the south and north banks of the storm, in addition, the bridge is hardened by a tide. pool allowing large ships to anchor very good for trade there has been a bridge here on and off for almost 2,000 years and that has been the creation of London because of the crossing London became an explosively successful settlement from the start, so successful in fact that only When can we glimpse the Roman coast?

When the conquerors, the Romans needed a defensible riverside site and a port so that reinforcements could arrive quickly if necessary and evacuation could be carried out quickly in the event of an emergency, the trauma of The Bod Rebellion in 1861, when the Roman capital of Colchester was burned, combined with the fact that already at that time the bridge here made London the transport hub of Roman Britain, which meant that when the Roman authorities were reestablished, London, not Colchester, became the provincial capital from here, the Romans. They could control England and did so for several centuries. You're looking at a snub of Roman London or the beginning of a slice of Roman London.

The first century. The Waterfront would have arrived more or less where the guy down there is digging. We're looking south right now, towards the river, so it would have pretty much gone through there, so you can see, we're just starting to figure out, we've only been here a couple of days, but you can see the difference between these modern things they're digging up and the real layers of archeology that are left and that's what they're trying to do, trying to distinguish real archeology from modern garbage. Yes, this is the first opportunity we have had to investigate the Roman Bridge for over 30 years, as far as we could see, we only saw a pier of the bridge in 1981, but much of it is made up of a combination of horizontally laid and stacked beams one on top of the other that cannot be removed. uh, and then the actual bridge deck, the deck is placed along the top, so using the evidence of what we actually found on the ground, how we speculate, the bridge would have looked fascinating as the excavation continues. , archaeologists are beginning to find.

The wooden piles survive almost 2,000 years of urban development and cannot resist facing Roman engineering. There's the pile. Oh very solid, these battered stumps are the remains of the wolves within the bridge across which the goods of the Empire came and went changing the physical geography and economy of Britain forever, but the invaders never forgot that the bridge was also a sacred metaphysical place when the Georgians built the predecessor to the bridge I'm standing on, they dredged the river bed to clear the bottom so ships could pass over it. In the middle of the river they found a large cache of Roman coins similar to these wonderful things of bronze, brass and perhaps silver.

Archaeologists believe there was a shrine in the middle of the bridge and people passing by threw coins at the mighty temple to appease its power for both the Romans and the Bronze Age Marsh people Upriver at voxhall The bridges were sacred The things of religion you have to remember, of course, that in Rome the same word was used for a bridge builder as for the artifacts of priests, in fact, it was one of the titles of the Roman Empire, both Emperor and Empire , they are, of course, long and the bridge with them for centuries there was no attempt to rebuild it and there was no real need.

The main settlement in London was now a long way from the remains of the Roman Bridge. A mile and a half upstream, around what is now Cent Garden, a new trading post grew up next to a sharp bend in the river. It was a seaside market town and the street names of London preserve its memory of the Strand where the first English merchants stopped their ships and the Old Witch, the OAS or trading port and the river became, as they had been before of the Romans, on a border between warring kingdoms with names like Essex middx Su and Kent for London to reach its destiny as a great city, it once needed a proper bridge.

King Alfred and his successors had reunited England and reoccupied the Roman city. A bridge was built, but in reality it was nothing more than a flimsy causeway intended more to stop raiders traveling upstream than to aid transportation to a suitable, solid bridge. London had to wait about a thousand years for the Roman bridge, but that bridge was very solid and very appropriate, in fact, of all the river crossings in London, the one we actually call London Bridge is the most famous, the one we remember in the nursery, but the structure immortalized in the song is not the merciless stretch of concrete we see today or even the one that preceded it the bridge we remember is the

medieval

bridge the bridge of Thomas Becket and Dick Wittington the only chorister and Shakespeare knew but is the ghost that still haunts me and the question I ask myself is what was London Bridge really like and why was it falling down to find out we have to go back 800 years to the 12th century at the time when London was in boom much of the street plan of the modern world.

The city was already built by then, although very few of the actual buildings survive, but what has endured are the records of the bridge preserved in the Corporation of London Archives. We are told that in 1173 a religious community, the chaplain Brothers and Sisters of the bridge. of London were commissioned to build a new stone bridge and the mastermind of the project was a parish priest Peter of Co Church of cheapside these ancient documents offer information about the creation, use and maintenance of one of London's largest structures . The ancient London rdge began in 1176. It is long lost, but this trove of intimate and evocative documents almost brings it back to life.

Look at this wonderful thing, for example, it is a grant dated 12 125, a grant from Peter the priest Peter of Church C, the architect, the creator of London. The bridge is incredible and attached to this grant is something absolutely wonderful, it is a stamp here it is and shows Pedro de la Iglesia Fría not as an architect orengineer but as a priest who offers an absolutely wonderful communion, such a direct connection with the main man behind old London Bridge. Now this is a letter of approximately 13 1320 and we have attached another wonderful stamp here. Shows an abstract representation of the bridge.

I suppose it is simply an arch with Thomas Becket sitting above and below the arch. We see the city of London, an absolutely wonderful image, some Pauls in the center Old St Pauls with its spire intact flanked by city churches with their spiers pointing to the sky. One of the reasons

medieval

London Bridge became an icon for the city was that it was a living bridge, an amazing structure with houses and shops built on it. The oldest image dates back to the 15th century. Here we see it. It is the first drawn image of London Bridge in the foreground of the Tower of London with various activities. ahead and there is the Watergate of temperatures and in the background an incredible image of the northern half of the great London Bridge Chapel in the center and the Arches that connect that to land on North Bank and in the background there is a kindly similar image to that of Sealing the London skyline with Pauls' spies and the spies of the city's churches.

How wonderful, this handwritten drawing in our search for the Old London Bridge, the city's street plan is an

important

clue . You know that the medieval bridge lies just to the east of its modern counterpart and, if you decode the street plan, its ghostly location begins to reveal the great London Monument of 1666 which was erected next to the old northern approach to the bridge and in At each end of the bridge there will be a church following the road here Fish Street Hill takes us to the Church of a The Martyr of Magnus, which stood as a kind of spiritual tollbooth at the north end of the bridge, once you understand that the The old London Bridge stood slightly to the east of the modern London Bridge, everything here makes sense in this splendid elevation on the tower of Magnus the Mar Church. which everyone would have crossed London Bridge because the causeway, the road to London Bridge, it was here and inside the arch, so to speak, under the tower, was the pedestrian route and here we have rescued some of the stones from the Old London Bridge, I suppose Part of the reconstruction of the Portland bridge to mid-18th century.

The stone inside the church is a kind of relic. Our next clue as to what the old London Bridge might have looked like. This wonderful model shows London Bridge as it might have been, I'm sure. It looked about 1,400, so it was 900 feet long from the city here to Sou with the causeway. The road ran through 19 arches built of stone. Arch 20 was actually a drawbridge somewhat in the middle and into the Stone. arches built we have a series of houses and shops built with wood around 140 in 1400. It can also be seen very clearly that approximately half the width of the river is limited by the thick pairs of the Arches and the waters slowed in front of them are call starlings with edges protected by wooden piles in the middle approximately is the Great fortification the gate the gate The bridge reminds that London was defended to a certain extent by the time was like a moat and a span had to compromise the venters of the city, for what was necessary to prevent the invaders from crossing the bridge from the south, comes the bridge d, this is a fortification, the bridge in a sense is part of the defenses of London together with the city wall.

Don't know. I wonder if anything of this wonderful bridge still survives beneath the waters. It was 30 years before this legendary crossing was completed in 1209. It stood longer than any other in London's history, but like all bridges, it was never finished to withstand an enormous force of currents. and the tide of the river had to be maintained and that offers us a clue to the real meaning of the nursery rhyme. What we have here, curiously, is what the cut waters would look like, the companions of London Bridge, like the medieval Bridge. They had been stacks of round wood like this, made of what Chestnut or Elm Elm was often nailed with a ram, yes, and then lined behind with planks of wood that would be made of earthen masonry with all kinds of solid things between the woods. the girders on the right, so the bridge will be supported by the filling of these artificial islands held in place by planks and roundwood piles, a very laborious job, when does this day fall?

These are probably contemporaries of the last phase of the medieval bridge? These would have been here. at the end of the 18th century, the obvious question for laymen is: these are piles of are a few centuries old, they survived underwater, well, low tide, high tide, troughs up here, it's surprising, so the wood preserve by keeping it moist, yes, uh, yes it keeps. wet it will keep if it stays dry it will keep the real problem is that if a wood is raised from the bottom above the high water mark it will decay at the high water mark because some of it is dry and therefore not To expand, some of it is wet and therefore expands when wet and then shrinks when dry.

Large quantities of timber were needed at Kenish Ragstone to maintain the old London Bridge. The enormous costs were paid for by both people's toll revenues. and ships, but sometimes the money was diverted and the result could be catastrophic. In 1282, five of the bridge's arches collapsed about 12 years earlier, King Henry III had given the proceeds from the bridge to his wife Pete Elena and she spent on herself, not on bridge maintenance, that's why London Bridge collapsed. She is My Fair Lady of the Ryme Nursery, a Ryme nanny who reveals London's deep anxiety about the future of her

important

bridge.

She was not given proper maintenance on a regular basis. In fact, she would collapse afterwards. The disaster was a small revolution, the City of London took back the revenue from the Crown Bridge and gave it permanently to the people, in fact to the successors of the church community of Peter of Cole, now called the Bridge House EST State, the bridge now symbolized the city of London. New civic independence, but its religious roots were not forgotten, there were churches at each end and in the middle there was a chapel on two levels, one at the roadside for travelers and another at the water's edge for boatmen.

Spiritual tolls were paid then and now every year. On the Feast of the Baptism of Christ, which is in January, we process from this church to the middle of London Bridge and there we meet some of our friends from the South Cathedral who are coming the other way, we have a short service in the middle of the bridge. We pray for the people who work on the river who take their recreation on the river for the people who have drowned in the river and then we throw a wooden cross into the river itself as a sign of God's blessing.

These young people are also a direct link. to that medieval world because the organization that built and preserved the old London Bridge still exists has an income of £700 million a year derived from centuries of investment, is still responsible for all the bridges within the city limits, but they have an annual surplus of up to 20 million going to London charities like this dance troupe funded directly by tolls and charity left by medieval Londoners all those centuries ago, old London Bridge stood about 50m away with its tall buildings and shops, it was in a sense a city within the city in that space the people of London lived and died working hard and enjoying their pleasures for almost 600 years.

I live nearby and often come here to look and imagine this spectrum bridge to listen and see if I can catch the sound it echoes. through the centuries of the Earth, the pilgrims, the merchants, the travelers, the soldiers. Crossing from one side to the other may seem imaginable, but who knows, perhaps for 600 years London Bridge dominated the city and the enormous iconic structure redefined the river itself, its strip, its enormous companions and glances interfered with the flow. From the temperature itself, the blockage caused by the bridge slowed down the current, as a result, the river regularly froze.

Londoners took to the ice with enthusiasm and what was called Frost Faes with game stalls and processions and even bull baiting. became a London institution by holding back water, the bridge pairs also functioned as a giant wear, even in the oldest manuscript we can clearly see the rapids running through the arches that span it, it was known as shooting the bridge and the ships often capsized framed. by The London Bridge Archers, the TS became a theater for royal power. Pantry, Henry VI's more unpopular wives shot the bridge as a right of passage rather than hosting more conventional coronations and later royalty traveled back in time on wonderful barges such as This The Splendid was made in the 1730s for Frederick Prince of Wales and of course all Londoners also enjoyed the temperatures, there were also fireworks displays at the Frost fairs and the Lord May show was originally held on the water like Venice.

London was a world of water the whole city faced the beach here in Greenwich Downstream of the city of London you can still get a sense of how the river and the city Once merged here, just above the water stood one of the great palaces of Tuda, rebuilt by the Stuarts from 1610 Greinwich never lost its River Focus is a relic of the royal river world, a world that seemed to last forever, but the growth of London changed all that as the Industrial Revolution was advancing. London planned more bridges, bridges made possible by new technology. This volume contains visionary proposals for In London, they were drawn up in 1800 for the city corporation which at the time wanted to reorganize the port of London, which involved rebuilding London Bridge and moving it significantly to the west.

This shows a reconstruction of London Bridge. This is the central cast iron arch. much higher so there is more clearance for the High Seas ships shown passing by this is an amazing image. Unbelievable, of course this didn't happen, but things have happened, things didn't happen, everything has changed, the change largely brought about by engines like this. is a drawing of a pile driver designed in the late 1730s for the construction of the foundations of Westminster Bridge. This is an early product of the Industrial Revolution. I guess you see horses here. It says horsepower by rotating around an axis with a gear device to increase power. the power of the horses the ropes would lift this big hammer up here is this hammer is taken to the top here then it would be released and it would rush down and drive the pile of wood into the river bed, a very important movement in the construction of the bridge.

But the revolution, of course, transformed London, transformed the world and, most particularly for London, fueled an explosion in bridge building for more than 500 years. London Bridge stood alone as the crossroads of the times that defined the original city, the commercial giant 2 miles upstream was Westminster, another major urban center from the 1300s onwards, this area had been a seat of political power and prestige social in England, but it had no bridge, that is because the City of London had fought to preserve the lucrative monopoly of the old London Bridge, so when another crossing at Westminster was planned it was silenced in the 1660s, There was an uproar and it was not just the city fathers who opposed it, they were joined by thousands of boatmen and watermen who believed their livelihoods would be threatened if the second bridge was built.

We must remember that then, unlike now. the T was the main highway in London full of boats of all kinds that took good care of people from top to bottom and from one side to the other now the boatmen were a very powerful lobby, in fact they had their own company of lies in the city and even his own poet, the Waterman poet, John Taylor. complained about the competition after the introduction in tutor times of spring-loaded transport cars, trainers Jades and Flanders Mayes, they steal our stocks, our wars are fairs against the ground, we stand and click our heels while all our Profits roll away.

It doesn't charge more than the fear set like taxis do nowadays, but if you could persuade your passenger that you went against the grain and that it was a terrible afternoon and whatever, and I'll do my best, sir, to get you there on time. Of course, there might be some good advice at the end, so okay, water is going to be involved in a lot of things, but of course one of them is, in a sense, getting people to cross the temperature. The bridges were enemies of the water that they carried away. the trade absolutelyyes and they opposed them they opposed every bridge and they were compensated very often or at least the company was compensated very often for um a bridge being built taking away trade would you still oppose another bridge being built ?

The bman company opposes the recent Millennium Bridge for example, absolutely yes you did it, oh yes excellent, we thought it was funny, we called it the Wobbly Bridge, Wobbly Bridge, yes it indicated the move was wobbly but oh well , seriously, I mean you would object, he objected to that. bridge yes M much more poisonous in the past, but we still say you know it's not that you don't need another bridge there, but it was only in 1736, after centuries of arguments, that parliament agreed to a bridge at Westminster under the law that Waterman got £25,000. compensation on credence day of over 2 million when Westminster Bridge was officially opened in 1750 London was transformed once again temperatures had been a sort of way to protect the city now all that shifted commercial and political powers to the north of the river once represented primarily by the church now took over the other side of the river and so began the dramatic transformation of South Bank from the temporary tradition into South Bank had been an independent place from the town of North Bank, a place free of the city controls and bylaws, I suppose it was a land In the period of freedom and liberties there were theatres, bead bait pits, brothels, Market Gardens and pleasure grounds, but now it became something quite different, it became somewhat in a province on the north bank of the large TS because perhaps, ironically, for the major landowners and developers on the south side. of the times was the City Corporation, the city on the bridge house estate, its own land across the river, whose value jumped once Westminster and then the Black fr Bridge and the oblisk they erected were built here it planned to be the focus of a large new urban district marking the center of its properties as a result of the new bridges.

North London and south of the river had become one big city. The new crossings were a distinctive part of what was to be the zenith of George and London, but like the Roman and medieval bridges before them. Now they are also development-swept ghosts flying 14 miles upriver, yet we can experience their effect. Richmond Bridge, a classical 18th-century masonry arch structure, is the only one of London's Georgian bridges to survive and stands in a green riverside landscape. A surrounded middle class suburb. Surrounded by aristocratic houses and parks, it gives us a glimpse of what Westminster might have been like when the bridge was new and the idea of ​​London as a river city was at its peak one September morning in 18002.

William Woodsworth crossed Westminster.bridge bridge atop of a carriage he was inspired by what he saw it was a vision he wrote a poem and the poem in the most charming way is here on this bronze plaque on Westminster Bridge The Earth has nothing to show more beautiful and boring He is of the Soul who could pass by such a moving sight in his Majesty. This city now seems like a dress where the beauty of the morning ships. Towers, domes, theaters and temples open onto the fields and the sky. Standing here I can see the city. like words worth having, they haunt my imagination George and London, one of the greatest urban creations ever achieved by mankind, I maintain, and to think that from here that great city developed to Woodsworth in a way that it could not resist.

Wordsworth's poem was actually a swan song. For George and London between 1750 and 1850 nine bridges were built over time, but despite this the city began to turn its back on the water as a population of more than 2 million inhabitants moved further and further away. from the banks of the river. London was rapidly becoming an industrial megacity in need of rapid transit and bridge builders like John Reny reny built three great bridges: Waterloo Bridge and a New London Bridge, but sadly none of them survive, so like old London Bridge, you should look for Ren's Bridge, this is part of the southern approach to Ren's London Bridge is a fragment that offers a glimpse into the character of the power of all the reminder of the marvel of architectural engineering that we have lost.

I love bold classical corners and tremendously strong granite walls, everything has a Roman solidity and Grandeur Ren's London New Bridge was the final work of his. It was built next to the medieval bridge. New roads had to be built. Much destruction was carried out and the historic street plan of London was changed and although in my opinion it never rivaled the medieval Bridge. It also became a city landmark famous enough to be dismantled and sold to wealthy Americans in the 1960s. The entire structure was rebuilt stone by stone to honor a housing development in the Arizona desert.

I have to go, not stay with the T on fire. I have to cross. The new bridges further reduced London's dependence on the river. Once it was common to paddle the river at night, success no longer came at a price. The 1840s and 50s were dark years in London's history, the city's population had increased London's infrastructure. could not cover with a mega city London had become the river was dirty, polluted by sewage and industrial waste, it was poisoning Londoners, it was killing them in its tens of thousands of diseases like Chera was R, the city was poisoning the wells of London and killing.

Its population shared the bridges in the water disease. The bridge became famous for suicides, especially desperate women jumping from its parapets, and statistics confirm its reputation in the 1840s, around 15% of London suicides jumped from the water bridge. This aspect of London bridges and temporary ones as theatres. of death is etched in our literature, Charles Dickens in our mutual friend, essentially a novel about the river and the life of the river. He begins the story with these characters fishing for corpses through time, a valuable commodity. London had now become the capital of a world empire, the largest.

The richest and most powerful city in the world and yet it was plagued by disease and poverty. Something had to be done. The solution was a brutal taming of temperatures. An embankment that contained not only a giant new culvert but also a railway line. a work of one of London's great engineers, Joseph Baselet, I am standing on the Victoria embankment in front of me and above me is a hungry bridge, below me is the mighty Basel Jet sewer, the underground railway, a network of gas and a telegraph cable, this was and still is spectacular engineering when it was completed London would never be the same again this was the death knell of the London Riverside with an almost Venetian appearance Great buildings such as the sued house once had spectacular water gates where at high tide people and goods could arrive by boat, but a vast wall was built to separate the river from the city inside 22 acres of land were reclaimed by pushing the river back in some places more than 100 m.

This 17th century Watergate is the last surviving relic of the old Waterfront and is now abandoned on the edge of The Embankment Gardens can be clearly seen in this painting which shows just how splendid the Georg Waterfront must have been. Safer transportation and cleaner water came at a cost. The legacy has been truly horrific. He has isolated the river from the life of London and the greats. Riverside Boulevard is wonderful when it was filled with heavy traffic and pedestrians now it is a noisy, polluted urban highway and the buildings that once rose from the river like a sunny house behind me rose like palaces in Venice rose and the SES of the traffic , so the embankment had a terrible effect on the city is just one of the reasons why Londoners have somewhat forgotten the wonders and beauty of the river, however, Victorian modernity still had its triumphs the bridge hammeri in the western suburbs is one of them it is one of three built by Joseph himself Unsurprisingly, the construction of the Basel Hammersmith Jet employed the latest technology.

It is a suspension bridge with a roadway supported from above rather than below, unlike traditional arch bridges, the roadway hangs from raw iron cables strung over cast iron towers with each end anchored firmly in the ground. It looks wonderful. bridge, it's really a window to Victorian London, um, engineering, of course, the epitome of Victorian engineering, combination of beauty and incredible strength, uh, carstein, very strong, as they say, in compression, pushing down, very strong, that's good, perfect for the suspension towers, but the chains. Of course they have to be a little more stretchy so they have tensile strength which is why the use of rotin is so wonderful again, it doesn't seem like much now to a casual observer but there is a lot of engineering technology being implemented here , functional, strong, also beautiful and in chestnut.

Of course, you can create lovely details, therefore the suspension towers have classic details in the upper corners and several leaves of gray, quite wonderful moldings, so every time you look at this bridge you can read more about it and understand more about The Wonder. of engineering in victoriia London is a complete Victorian piece one of the best bridges in London I love Basel The Jet triumph at Hammersmith was commissioned by the newly created Metropolitan Board of Works the board was the first general government for the new Victorian Mega City by 1869 he had seized all the private bridges through the storms and abolished all remaining tolls and was determined to proclaim his authority.

I love the ornamentation on this bridge, the iconography is so revealing. Look, for example, at this wonderful piece of all heraldry. I guess behind me in the middle is our royal coat of arms, on the left the arms of the City of London, on the right the arms of the City of Westminster, but also the arms of Kent, of sex means and essence, this bridge really. defines London as it was in the late 19th century and also reveals the power of bridge building London was no longer simply a city, it was a city state in the 1890s and the Works border had shaped the city preparing it for the 20th century and with At the climax of the British Empire, the city of more than 5 million inhabitants stretched along both sides of the storm, but more than half that distance from London Bridge to the Sea still There were no bridges, only dangerous and expensive tunnels, because despite all the changes London was still a port, in fact, it was the largest port city in the world and a bridge would prevent large ships from arriving.

Upstream, the docks, Downriver and the West Indies Docks and Catherine Dock had been built in the early 19th century, but in the late 19th century, the Port of London there was still functioning with several ships trapped deep in the temperatures, some almost as big as Belfast Station, so any crossing of the temperatures downstream from here had to allow the largest ships to reach St. The Pool, all had their own idea of ​​how to solve the problem, two architects contributed different plans for swing bridges, another envisioned a tunnel under the temperatures, and another HED to build a conveyor bridge that lifted people in traffic high enough to let passengers pass. ships, but the winning plan again became a feature of the legendary medieval crossing.

A drawbridge. The completed Tower Bridge deployed a vast hydraulic system powered by steam engines to rotate the entire road and allow ships to navigate through the bowels of the structure. The scale of everything becomes clear. The space cavern is a basal chamber under the South Tower, the water level is difficult here and above me is the bottom of the road. You can hear the echo of the traffic in a rather strange way. Everything that is painted white moves, so when the Tower Bridge road goes up, the white elements here. that's the counterweight coming down to occupy this space it must be very frightening to see, it's amazing of course, this is a bridge like no other in London, it's a moving bridge, a living bridge in a sense, with the crew, the people in the control rooms, the machinery that operates it, live vibrating.

I can almost hear it, but all of his engineering expertise was invisible in the finished Bridge. Instead, the architecture was deliberately designed to blend with the Tower of London next door. This is one of the most surprising things about Towerbridge. It is not a Gothic structure built with stone, but it isa steel structure, a modern building and through this window you can see exactly what I mean. I'm looking at the tower that accompanies this one, outside, all this wonderful group of gothic finishes, lovely ornamental details, all designed to fit in with the old Tower of London all the history and here it's all modern steel a very strong functional building very very type of um I say almost brutally honest in its construction inside out all its ornamentation history Beauty pedigree evocation of dreams of the past that conceal the crude functional realities Behind a Gothic façade there may have been a triumph of late Victorian genteel decorum, but the effect was create a sense of immemorial antiquity that had always been there.

Old London Bridge with its houses and shops had been a unique icon of London now that the city had found its successor, Tower Bridge, the Imperial City's gateway to the massive Downstream docks and its vast Empire Beyond, after After 150 years of frenetic bridge-building, London had largely reinvented itself as it was in late Victorian and Edwardian Britain. London's bridges were suffused with instantly historic nostalgia. Look at Tower Bridge, absolutely incredible. Now there was going to be a penny of quiet on the London river, apart from two bridges built far away. Upstream, a silence seemed behind us as TS Elliot watched as he, like me, glided silently.

Downstream, in the Wasteland, the river sweats oil. and tar the barges drift with the changing tide the red sails drift to Lee they sway in the heavy Spar the barges wash logs drift through granage come to pass the dog corridor at the end of the 20th century the vast BR of the men of greater London Travelers now had to be able to go around and across it by the time this historic bridge in Dartford was completed in 1991 carrying the orbital highway through time. Engineering had moved into a new league among the towers. It is three times longer than the old London Bridge and runs 57 m over the water it is one of the largest bridges of its type in the world Dartford a cable-stayed bridge this is not the same as a suspension bridge here the forces the loads travel up the cables and then straight down the towers um unlike a Suspension Bridge where they are anchored to each bank.

This is a more stable design that allows the creation of very wide and high sections. This is a bridge that makes a statement about St. What does it say? Well, proclaim that all temporal Esty belongs to London. crossing temperatures far downstream from the historic city Dartford Bridge defines London as a larger than ever city-state within the south-east of England. The labor board claims as shown at Hammersmith far upstream now seem vindicated here, you really understand the nature of this bridge it overlooks. the esther is this great door the access to London is here now The city over there the sea over there The ships come and go My God, I can see the towers of a Canarian wall, but no matter how magnificent the bridge itself is, no matter how modern it is. does not erase The echoes of the past that so intrigued Joseph Conrad I am about 15 million downstream from the pool of London, where it all began some 2,000 years ago.

Of course, things have changed many times, but here, in places like this, it is felt. Well, they sure did a lot when the Ran Dryes came through. This is a strange place. It seems like I'm lost between worlds. all those centuries before, oh now that's why I love temperatures, it carries memories of all the people who have traveled in it and who have lived alongside it, look here at a piece of ceramic, porcelain, look at this beautiful and delicate handle of a teacup, beautiful I guess. it is a kind of intimate connection with the person who owned it, loved it, lost it.

That is what is so incredible about this place is a living connection with the ghosts of the past that are here and that one finds, connects and remembers in the year 2000. London had lived almost 20 centuries of its own history and what better way to celebrate its history than with a bridge but not a giant, a jewel designed not for transportation but for human delight, a pedestrian bridge that opened a new path through the city and in a nod to its nobility a spiritual bridge that points directly at London Cathedral something by Paul although it suffered teething problems the design by Arup engineers architect Norman Foster and even an anonymous sculptor Caro is a work of artThis bridge has redefined London once again by creating a new link across of the times.

It has brought more life to my soul in front of me and the city behind me created a wonderful connection between the Tate Modern up there and St Paul's Cathedral, you can't quite see it. Also fantastic is the bridge, which has created new and spectacular views of the city from here. I can see a series of bridges to the left and right. A wonderful tower bridge there in the distance. It is also a wonderful object. It's lovely to cross it. It's lovely to explore. touching and looking at it reminds me in some ways of other great pedestrian bridges around the world, the High Bridge in Venice, for example, also Exquisite, of course, it is full of shops and charming living beings.

The real Puente Alto makes me think of inhabited bridges. I wonder if London could ever regain the glory of the old London Bridge with its houses. Could there be a new inhabited bridge in London? Maybe Maybe I hope so. People have been building bridges in London for 3,000 years or more and those extraordinary structures have to find the The city from the beginning were places of primordial spiritual power as man sought to tame and harness the brute forces of nature, but they also shaped to the economic and political dominance of London once permanent images built well-being and power found their way to and with London. the talents of millions of people, so these crossings became not only a vehicle for royal and political display, but helped London become, in my opinion, the greatest city in the world.

There will be new bridges and different Londons in the future, including now a cable car. A bridge is being built downstream at the docks which, like this bridge, can only be a good thing, it will help Londoners regain the pleasures of the temperatures and it is only through the temperatures and its bridges that the true nature of London and understanding those diverse people. cost dealers and warrior kings and merchants who have made London the fantastic city is that