The Thames has always been London’s life-blood: a quietly serving, much abused artery that in the Middle Ages provided fresh water and fish, and by the middle of the C19 was a stinking open sewer spurned by all except those river workers — the East End dockers and sailors and the like — to whom it gave a living. By the 1950’s the river was still a very sad, grey, cold thing known for its poisonous waters, tides, vicious currents and hot weather smells — a sister to the infamous London fogs. In 1957 only eels could survive in its waters and it was declared dead. And then the closure of the docks in the late 1960’s quietly coincided with a period initiating a massive rehabilitation, but hardly anyone noticed and most Londoners continued to turn their back upon the Thames. Bankside, for example, where the Tate Modern is located, was until very recently a lost backland in a borough where the planners were desperate to regenerate the area.
Then something remarkable happened: around the Millennium, London’s citizens rediscovered the Thames and its embankments. It became not only possible but desirable to walk from Vauxhall Bridge all the way to Butlers Wharf and beyond. The riverside — especially the south side — had become a major leisure route. Parisian-style glass topped tourist boats plied the river and offered new prospects and camera opportunities to tourists. Commuter boat services to Canary — an off/on affair at the best of times — were now viable and reliable. London had apparently rediscovered its historic artery.
Of course, with hindsight, one could see the improvements slowly coming into place. But it is still remarkable how a vast re-orientation took place triggered by a few significant events such as the London Eye, the Tate Modern, the Dome, the Millennium Bridge, and the Somerset House works. Places that had invariably been accessed from the landside suddenly became features of a new riverside promenade. Older sights such as the Southbank, the Design Museum and the Globe Theatre attained a new significance midst a brotherhood of riverside friends from whom they had previously been divorced. Two new bridges (the formerly-wobbly Millennium and the additions to Hungerford) were opened. A new City Hall appeared. Farrell’s much criticised MI6 and Embankment Place buildings were suddenly respectable riverside ornaments.
Fishermen watched by tourists now patiently awaited the nibbling attention of live fish whilst older Londoners smiled in bemusement. Web sites on the Thames proliferated. The tourist authority promoted the river experience as a major London event and weekends saw the southern embankment from Westminster to the Tower thick with curious crowds. Even the more disjointed northern embankment enjoyed new attention. And our third edition of this guidebook had to rejig its content.
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Left: Embankment Gardens, below Charing Cross Station, with the 17th water-gate now left stranded by the C19th creation of the Embankment. |
Of course, it’s not all so rosy. London still has major problems in dealing with a combined rainwater run-off / sewage system that periodically gives anything living in the Thames the fright of its life. It may seem like a fun idea to play on its low-tide beaches and waddle in its waters, but it’s not to be recommended as the most healthy of past-times.
This section covers buildings along the river, from Vauxhall Bridge to Butlers Wharf, principally on the southern side, especially after Blackfriars’ Bridge.
Above: summer tourists on the Millennium Bridge, with St. Paul’s in the background.
Right: people enjoying the river near the OXO building.
The southern embankment of the Thames has become a promenade. Most people are likely to begin using that promenade at Westminster Bridge (using Westminster Underground Station) but we begin this section at Vauxhall Bridge (at MI6), where the Embankment walk logically begins and where the Tate Britain is located (best accessible from Pimlico Underground Station). You could start here and walk all the way to Tower Bridge and beyond (or vice versa).
Vauxhall will offer you Terry Farrell’s MI6 building (on the south side) — which has always suffered the fate of huge unfashionability (possibly a good reason to look more closely at this latter-day spy fortress disguised as an ordinary office building) and has been joined by an equally odd housing group by EPR and Vauxhall tube / bus interchange designed by Arup Associates. Your more likely attraction will be on the northern side, at Stirling’s Clore Gallery extension to the old Tate and the more recent John Miller work (at Tate Britain), adjacent to which is Allies & Morrison’s Chelsea Art College building (a rather nice conversion). You might then find yourself wandering down to Lambeth Bridge, perhaps darting into the backlands to visit Channel Four where the nearby street market makes an interesting lunchtime diversion), Farrell’s Marsham Street government buildings, Edwin Lutyens’ housing at Page Street (not his best, unfortunately), and the under-rated Westminster Cathedral, etc. Your aim should be to cross the river again at Lambeth or Westminster bridges, back to the south side. Westminster will offer you the Palace of Westminster, Westminster Abbey and Portcullis House (all on the north side and in the West End section because they are equally and perhaps more properly a part of Whitehall).
Starting at Westminster, you are likley to come through Hopkins’ remarkable Jubilee station and crossing the bridge will provide some fine views that naturally draw you toward the London Eye. Beyond that is the revamped Hungerford Bridge and the Southbank cultural centre, together with Denys Lasdun’s National Theatre and IBM building. The choice here is to go across Hungerford Bridge to explore Farrell’s Embankment Place and the adjacent Embankment Gardens (with Inigo Jones’ riverside gateway). You could then return down the other side of the Bridge to the Southbank.
From this point on you are likely to be keeping to the south side all the way to Tower Bridge. This neglects some fine attractions on the northern side such as Somerset House and the Temple, but you could make a diversion across Waterloo Bridge for some of the best views in London.
The southside embankment is particularly pleasant just east of Waterloo and after this it will take you past the Oxo Building, refurbished by Lifschutz Davidson, who also did the recent work at Hungerford Bridge. Another diversion around here is to Coin Street itself, where there is interesting housing by Lifschutz Davidson and Haworth Tompkins.
Winding along the river and under bridges is interesting enough at this point, but your next major attraction is the new Tate Modern, the Millennium (foot) Bridge and the thatched reconstruction of the Globe Theatre (possibly as unfashionable among architects as Farrell’s buildings, but well worth a visit if you are capable of standing for a two hour performance).
As you move east toward London Bridge the attractions become rather touristy (the Clink, Vinopolis, etc.), but scratch the surface and there is genuine historical interest here. But the best attractions are Southwark Cathedral and Borough Market — the latter beginning in the late ‘90’s as a ‘farmers’ market’ and quickly blossoming into a major weekend venue for (delicious but somewhat overpriced) organic foodstuffs.
Like a similar ‘spontaneous’ eruption at Spitalfield, Borough Market is continually under threat but its success appears to have saved it for the moment (although the ‘farming’ content becomes increasingly questionable). The Fish restaurant here is an inventive design by Julyan Whickham (no longer in its original ownership).
Walk under London Bridge toward Hays Galleria — a former barge inlet serving warehouses, now infilled and covered over. On the opposite side of the river, on the axis of Hays’ central mall, are principal City buildings such as old Billingsgate Market and Lloyd’s of London.
Walking east from here brings you to London’s new City Hall, designed by the Foster office. The adjacent office development around City Hall is also by Foster.
Now you are at Tower Bridge (the alternative starting point for this perambulation) and the next attraction is an area that is technically a part of Docklands: Butlers Wharf. You will now walk along Shad Thames — once a street serving the adjacent warehouses that have now been converted (many by Terence Conran) into apartments and restaurants. This leads you past a large Julyan Whickham development redolent with Dutch overtones (his father-in-law is Aldo van Eyck) to the Design Museum and a small building by Hopkins. It’s an interesting area, solidly defined, once all warehousing, and worth wandering around.
From here you can cross St. Saviour Dock on a recent footbridge designed by Nicholas Lacey and you can see two buildings designed by Piers Gough (China Wharf and a small housing block, both hanging over the river). You can now return or continue through new riverside housing on to Rotherhithe and beyond. If you do want to go on, you can get to Cherry Garden and Hope (Sufferance) Wharf, where there is a small ‘village’ including recent work by Hawkins Brown. The energetic among you can get to Surrey Quays (which feels like a ‘new town’; Canada Water Jubilee Station is here), to rapidly changing Deptford (also served by the DLR and where the Laban Centre is located) and even on to Greenwich Peninsula (again served by the Jubilee Line).
Left: street sellers on Hungerford Bridge.
• Westminster Bridge: 1739 – 50, original by Charles Labelye, who raised clouds of jealously and he left for Paris (no dogs allowed and death to anyone defacing the walls); closed 1846; replaced 1854-62 by Charles Page with Sir Charles Barry as consultant. This was the first bridge after the historic London Bridge.
• Hungerford Bridge: originally 1841- 45 — a suspended footbridge by Isamabard Brunel (then with the largest span in Britain); replaced 1863 by John Hawkshaw (who also did Charing Cross Station; until then trains stopped at London Bridge station), 1860-4. Current pedestrian additions by Lifschutz Davidson, 2002.
• Waterloo Bridge: 1811 – 17, as private toll bridge, by John Rennie, demolished 1937 – 38 (after settlement of the piers — a fairly common occurence to Thames bridges) and replaced by a design from Rendell, Palmer & Tritton, with Sir Giles Gilbert Scott’s as consultant, 1937 – 44 (which engineers tell me is utterly theatrical and not what it pretends to be — the structure is actually box girders, not arches).
• Blackfriars Bridge: 1760 – 9, Robert Mylne; replaced by Joseph Cubitt and H. Carr, 1860 – 9 when a then unpopular Queen Victoria opened the bridge to the hissing of the crowd. The bridge opened up Southwark for development. It was widened in 1907 – 10.
• Blackfriars rail bridge: 1862 – 4 by Joseph Cubitt and FT Turner. Now disused; only the piers remain.
• Southwark Bridge: original by John Rennie (as Vauxhall and Waterloo bridges), 1814 – 19, in three arches in cast-iron, the largest attempted in cast-iron. Replaced 1912 – 21 by present five-arch bridge by Mott & Hay with Ernest George as consultant architect.
• Cannon St Railway Bridge: 1863 – 36 by Hawkshaw and J Wofe-Barry; widened 1886 – 93 and remodelled in 1979 – 81.
• London Bridge: AD100-400; timber crossing restored 1000; stone by 1176 – 1209 (lined with houses, with nineteen arches, a drawbridge at one end and an overhanging chapel at the centre); houses along the bridge pulled down in 1758 by George Dance the elder (who designed the Mansion House) and Sir Robert Taylor; structure replaced 1823-31 by John Rennie (elder did the design; his son built it); widened 1903 – 4; replaced 1967 – 72 by Mott Hay
& Anderson (Rennie’s went to Arizona where the facing stone was cut up and stuck onto a concrete substructure.
• Tower Bridge: 1886 – 94, by John Wolfe-Barry as engineer and Horace Jones as architect. The opening span was designed to cope with the dense shipping traffic of the period. The styling is meant to be sympathetic to the Tower. The Visitor Centre at the middle of the bridge is by Michael Squire, 1992.
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Walking along the river banks has not only been much easier in recent years, but there are also numerous boat offers, including a speedy one from Tate Britain (at the Marks & Barfield Millbank Pier) to Tate Modern (but don’t be taken in by the ‘Damien Hirst boat’ hype — it’s just a few coloured dots on the side of the boat), and a fast commuter service through to Canary Wharf. Since these change, I advise doing a website search for the latest offers and timetables.
Note that you can walk west from Vauxhall and east from Tower Bridge for considerable distances and that the routes are always improving and being extended.
It is worth remembering that, for some 700 years, London only had London Bridge as its sole river crossing. However, because the stone bridge of 1209 had nineteen arches that were each some 8 – 10m thick, the river conditions upstream and downstream were quite different. In fact, there was almost a 2m difference between one side of the bridge and the other, making passage under it a rather challenging exercise. Upstream, the waters were calm and relatively stable, facilitating the ease of movement up and down, and back and forth; downstream, they were more turbulent. This was the situation until the bridge’s centre spans were opened in 1759 and the whole bridge was then demolished and replaced by a Sir Charles Rennie design in 1831. A faster flowing river now became a barrier between north and south in a way it had never been before. The original London Bridge was also a shopping and residential bridge with, at its northern end, Wren’s church of St. Magnus Martyr having its porch on the bridge pavement. Thus continuity was given between the two sides of the river.
In contrast, the need determined for a new bridge at the eastern edge of the City, at St. Katherine’s Dock (now Tower Bridge), addressed a metropolis not only divided between north and south, but also between the bulk of shipping traffic
on the east side of London Bridge (in ‘the Pool’) and the upstream parts leading into Westminster. Sitting across the midst of the Pool that held so much shipping, the new bridge had to have some means of allowing passage — hence the opening ‘bascules’ of the winning proposal by Sir Horace Jones for a new crossing finally approved by Parliament in 1885. A complicating consideration was a height difference between the northern and southern banks — an issue that engendered a design from Sir Joseph Bazelgette proposing a 450m spiral ramp on the southern side.
It is worth taking the time to overcome tourist instincts and actually look closely at the way the bridge is put together: a swan-song of nineteenth century daring among London’s monuments. The real author of everything we see now — including the architectural dressing up — was the engineer, John Wolfe-Barry (Jones died in 1887) and his assitant architect, George D. Stevenson.
Improved transportation links and the creation of walkways along the river banks have done much to lend the Thames a more positive significance and also to link north and south. However, there remains a failure to make the radical step of going back to inhabited links. It has been discussed and there has been an idea competition. Perhaps one day it will happen and the river will once again serve as London’s most significant artery to an extent that is still hardly imaginable.