HAMMERSMITH BRIDGE

1827: THE FIRST HAMMERSMITH BRIDGE

In the early 1820s s group of local people proposed a new bridge at Hammersmith rather than detouring to either Kew Bridge or Putney Bridge to cross the river. The construction of the bridge was first sanctioned by an Act of Parliament on 9 June 1824. Work began on site the following year, and the bridge was opened on 6 October 1827. Construction of the bridge cost some £80,000 (equivalent to £7.5 million in 2021). It was the first suspension bridge over the River Thames and was designed by William Tierney Clark (above). Clark, a Fellow of the Institution of Civil Engineers, was one of the first designers of suspension bridges. He lived locally, and is buried in St. Peter’s Church, Hammersmith. Internationally, he is revered for his design of the Széchenyi Chain Bridge across the Danube in Budapest, Hungary, for which his bridge across the Thames at Marlow (still preserved) was a nearly identical, but smaller, prototype. The first bridge linking Buda and Pest, it was designed by Tierney Clark in 1839, with construction supervised locally by Scotsman Adam Clark (no relation). Clark’s Budapest bridge was manufactured entirely in the UK, and was shipped out in parts for local assembly, opening in 1849. It is shown below.

Clark’s bridge was held in great affection despite its unsuitability for the increasingly large volume of traffic using it. The low clearance level at high tide was lampooned in an 1842 edition of Punch: ‘A vessel passing under it is compelled to lower her chimney onto the heads, or into the laps, of the passengers, besides rendering it incumbent on all on board to bend to circumstances, by placing their heads between their knees, during the time occupied in passing under the elegant and commodious structure.’

In 1870 the bridge was barely able to sustain the pressure created by the presence of over 11,000 enthusiastic spectators who came to Hammersmith to watch the annual University Boat Race. The resulting safety concerns were one factor leading to the construction of a new bridge.

1887: THE PRESENT HAMMERSMITH BRIDGE

The present Hammersmith Bridge (above) was designed by Sir Joseph Bazalgette (below) and rests on the same pier foundations constructed for Tierney Clark's original structure. The new bridge was built by Dixon, Appleby & Thorne and was opened by the Prince of Wales on 11 June 1887. With much of the supporting structure built of wrought iron, it is 700 feet (210 m) long and 43 feet (13 m) wide and cost £82,117 to build (equivalent to £9.7 million in 2021).

JOSEPH BAZALGETTE

The following profile of Joseph Bazalgette is extracted, with acknowledgement and thanks, from the website of the Institution of Civil Engineers.

CAREER

Early in his career, Sir Joseph Bazalgette set up a private consultancy in 1842 with an office in Great George Street, Westminster. As a consulting engineer, he worked on the Tame Valley Canal in Birmingham, at Portsmouth Dockyard, and was heavily involved in surveys for railways. However, stress and overwork contributed to a serious breakdown in Bazalgette’s health, and between 1847 and 1848, he left London to recuperate in the country. When he recovered, Sir Joseph returned to London. On 16 August 1849, he was appointed assistant surveyor to the second Metropolitan Commission of Sewers, on a salary of £250 a year. In 1852, he was appointed engineer at the Metropolitan Commission, until it was replaced by the Metropolitan Board of Works (MBW). Joseph was elected engineer to the Board on 25 January 1856 on a salary of £1,000 a year. He stayed in the role until the MBW was replaced by the London County Council in 1889.

DRAINING LONDON

The first work of the MBW was to finish the design and implement the plans for the main drainage of London. The whole system consisted of 1,300 miles of sewers and 82 miles of west-east intercepting sewers. It also included Abbey Mills pumping station at Stratford, Western pumping station at Pimlico, Deptford Pumping Station, Crossness Pumping Station (whown above), and the Southern Outfall Sewer. As part of the drainage system, Sir Joseph embanked the River Thames in central London, which he said reclaimed about 52 acres of land. The embankments tidied the mud banks on the river’s edge, improved road traffic flow, and created additional building land. These comprised the Victoria Embankment (opened 1879), which runs between Westminster and Blackfriars Bridges, the Albert Embankment (opened 1868) on the south bank between Westminster and Vauxhall Bridges, and the Chelsea Embankment (completed 1874).

PERSONAL LIFE

Sir Joseph William Bazalgette was born on on 28 March 1819 in Enfield, Middlesex. He was the only son, and fourth child, of naval officer Joseph William Bazalgette and Theresa Philo Pilton. His surname has French origins. Joseph’s grandfather, Jean Louis, was born in southern France and arrived in England in 1784. Joseph married Maria Keogh from County Wexford, Ireland, on 20 February 1845 at St Margaret’s in Westminster, London. The couple had six sons and four daughters. Joseph was described as “slight and square” and “considerably under the average height”. He was given a “retiring allowance” of £1,333 6s 8d a year – two thirds of his salary – from 25 March 1889. Joseph died at his home in Wimbledon on 15 March 1891, at the age of 72, just two years after his retirement.

OTHER MAJOR WORKS

As well as working on London’s sewers, Sir Joseph influenced the city’s bridges and roads. In 1888, he wrote a report which led to MBW buying 12 bridges for just under £1.5m from their corporate owners and freeing them from tolls. The bridges included Hammersmith, Putney, Wandsworth, Vauxhall, Waterloo and Charing Cross. A large maintenance programme was carried out following the purchase, and Joseph decided to replace three of the bridges – Putney, Hammersmith and Battersea – with new structures of his own design. To ease congestion due to horse-drawn traffic in London, Joseph also started a major programme of design and construction of new streets in London. Examples of these are Southwark Street (1864), Queen Victoria Street (1871), Northumberland Avenue (1876), Shaftesbury Avenue (1886), and Charing Cross Road.

During his retirement, he rode for two or three hours a day. “I find it splendid exercise for counteracting the effects of a sedentary life,” Sir Joseph Bazalgette said. He also kept a couple of cows, and made “a little hay” in summer. After an extraordinarily productive life, he died in 1891 at the age of 72.

HISTORICAL SIGNIFICANCE

The following section is extracted, with acknowledgement and thanks, from the Historic Bridges website at www.historicbridges.org.

Hammersmith Bridge is an extremely rare example of an eyebar suspension bridge. While there are other examples of eyebar suspension bridges both in Great Britain and elsewhere in the world, on a global scale they are among the rarest types of bridges. Eyebar suspension bridges tend to be the oldest types of extant suspension bridges. They fell in popularity for bridge construction in favor of stronger wire cable suspension bridges. Eyebar suspension bridges are sometimes called "chain bridges".

While not the oldest such bridge remaining, Hammersmith Bridge is one of the most ornately decorated, with the towers and anchorages being the most ornately detailed features. Original lattice railings are traditional in design except for the decorative star-shaped motifs on them. The bridge design includes two independent eyebar catenaries (one directly above the other) on each side of the bridge, with each catenary composed of individual parallel eyebars.

This bridge embodies the core of what makes so many old bridges more beautiful than modern bridges: an attention to detail and architectural design that is integral with the functioning bridge structure. Modern bridge design involves designing the most simple and plain bridge possible, ignoring form and focusing on function only. In contrast, old bridges were made beautiful by first selecting a functional bridge structure that even without embellishments and attachments would be attractive, such as a suspension bridge with graceful curves of a catenary contrasting with imposing towers. like the Hammersmith Bridge  Then, if needed or desired, as was in the case with the Hammersmith Bridge, embellishments and decorations are included on the bridge that are either integral with the functioning bridge, or they compliment and extend the appearance of the functioning bridge.

Hammersmith Bridge illustrates all these concepts of old and beautiful bridge design beautifully. Integral decorations are visible in the corbelling and inset shaped on the towers, as well as the shaped anchorage design. The decorative copulas on top of the towers are actually functional elements, acting as protective covers for the saddle and bearings for the eyebar catenaries. Non-functional decorative elements on the bridge such as decorative finials and the medallions on the anchorages are made of similar materials as the functioning bridge structure, and are also elements unique to the bridge.

The green color of the bridge is a calm, pleasing color that makes the bridge visible without causing it to dominate the landscape. The gold highlighting acts to catch the eye and draw attention to the beautiful details of the bridge.

BRIDGE HERALDRY

At both the Hammersmith and Barnes ends of the bridge, there is a heraldic composition made up of seven coats of arms. These were formerly painted in their correct heraldic colours but have now been painted in the standard colour scheme. In the centre is the royal coat of arms of Queen Victoria which is surrounded by six others, representing municipalities within the area of the Metropolitan Board of Works, which was responsible for the construction of the bridge. From top clockwise they are the coats of arms of the City of Westminster, the Borough of Colchester, the County of Middlesex, the City of London, and the County of Kent.

SABOTAGE ATTEMPTS

The first attempt by Irish republicans to destroy Hammersmith Bridge occurred on Wednesday 29 March 1939, when it was attacked by the IRA (of 1922–1969) as part of their S-Plan. Maurice Childs, a women's hairdresser from nearby Chiswick, was walking home across the bridge at one o'clock in the morning when he noticed smoke and sparks coming from a suitcase that was lying on the walkway. He opened it to find a bomb and quickly threw the bag into the river. The resulting explosion sent up a 60-foot (18 m) column of water. Moments later, a second device exploded causing some girders on the west side of the bridge to collapse and windows in nearby houses to shatter. Childs was later awarded an MBE for his quick-thinking. Eddie Connell and William Browne were subsequently jailed for 20 and 10 years respectively for their involvement in the attack.

On 26 April 1996, the Provisional IRA attempted to destroy the bridge after installing two large Semtex devices on the south bank of the Thames. Though the detonators were activated, the bomb, the largest Semtex bomb ever found in Britain at the time, failed to ignite.

At 4:30 am on 1 June 2000, the bridge was damaged by a Real IRA bomb planted underneath the Barnes span.[Following two years of closure for repairs the bridge was reopened with further weight restrictions in place.

HEROIC RESCUES

Near midnight on 27 December 1919, Lieutenant Charles Campbell Wood, a South African serving as an airman in the Royal Air Force, dived from the upstream footway of the bridge into the Thames to rescue a drowning woman. Although Wood saved her life, he later died from tetanus as a consequence of his injuries. His act of bravery is commemorated by a plaque on the handrail, which reads:

Lieutenant Charles Campbell Wood RAF
of Bloemfontein, South Africa dived from this spot into
the Thames at midnight 27 Dec. 1919 and saved a woman's life.
He died from the injuries received following the rescueHe died from the injuries received following the rescue

Locally born Chick ‘Cocky’ Knight was walking by the river on 15 June 1930 when he saw two people in the water. One of them was a young girl and the other a man who himself had been attempting a rescue when he got into difficulties. Professional wrestler Chick, who was a strong swimmer and had worked as a lifeguard at Acton Swimming Baths, jumped in and pulled them out of the river one by one. This was in fact the second time that he had put his life in peril to rescue someone at risk of drowning. In June 1924, while stationed with the army in Gibraltar, he dived in to save a fellow soldier from a watery grave in Catalan Bay. Chick saved Private E (Edward) Durrant swimming out into the water some 300 metres, bringing him back to shore and then performing CPR. They were bogh serving in the 1st Battalion Suffolk Regiment at the time.

After his retirement as a professional wrestler, Knight was employed as a security guard at Kensington Palace. During the early 1960s, one of Princess Margaret’s Kensington Palace guards was champion London boxer, wrestler and film stuntman Chick ‘Cocky’ Knight. The 20 stone bear of a man had been a doorman for nightclubs in Soho during the 1950s and famously knocked out four thugs with knives outside one. Now in his late fifties, Chick worked in one of the police boxes at The Bayswater Road end of the royal residence’s grounds. One evening he noticed a young policeman getting a terrible beating from two men. The old boxer didn’t hesitate and went straight over where he took on the thugs and laid the pair of them out. Chick received a personal thanks and was presented with a police cape, a dark blue Macintosh overcoat, which he wore while on duty protecting Princess Margaret.

While a professional wrestler, Chick Knight had a side career as a film stunt man. He made several films with the comedian George Formby and is pictured below (on extreme left) with the cast of George Formby’s film Trouble Brewing. Click here to hear George Formby, with his signature ukelele, singing ‘When I’m Cleaning Windows’.

MAJOR REPAIRS

Hammersmith Bridge is in 2023 closed to motor vehicles while major structural repairs take place. It remains open for pedestrians and cyclists. The full repair of the Grade II* listed bridge is expected to cost over £130 million. The current intention is to recover part of this cost by imposing a toll for vehicles crossing the bridge - as was the case for its predecessor, the 1827 bridge. For an update on the repairs from the London Borough of Hammersmith and Fulham, please click here.

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