All this fine architecture was destroyed in the Great Fire of 1666, but a still better pile of buildings was put up, and now the houses were separated by a roadway twenty feet wide. In earlier times the passage between the houses ranged in width from twelve feet to fourteen. At last, in 1756, every house on the bridge was pulled down, but the chapel was granted a few years more of life. Guess why? Because some vandal or other was willing to use the chapel as a warehouse. At about the same time the chapel on Rotherham Bridge, Yorkshire, was a tobacco shop. As for the merchant who leased the Chapel of St. Thomas à Becket, he built a new ceiling with heavy beams that crossed each other; soon he tired of his warehouse, and then—then the historic old fane was destroyed. A city is like a board meeting—from time to time it has a conscience.
Two other historic facts find a place here. In March, 1782, the right of toll was discontinued, so that Londoners were separated from a direct personal interest in the welfare of their bridge, just as free education separates parents from their most sacred duties. Eight years earlier, in 1774, the waterworks of little windmills were destroyed by fire, after bickering for 192 years under the shadow of Old London Bridge.
The end was drawing near. New London Bridge was begun on March 15th, 1824. George Rennie made the designs after studying the Bridge of Augustus at Rimini, and his brother, Sir John Rennie, directed the workmen on a site 200 feet west of the Old Bridge; just as Peter Colechurch crossed the Thames a little west of the earliest known timber bridge built by Londoners.[89] It took only seven years to carry out the designs of Rennie, whereas Colechurch and his successor, the Frenchman Isembert, were busy for thirty-three years. On August 1st, 1831, New London Bridge was opened by William IV, and by the second year of Victoria’s reign the old bridge was dead and gone. It had taken a long time to murder her, fragment by fragment, but yet she lived almost as long as the first Westminster Bridge, designed by M. Labelye, which lasted from 1750 to 1853.
NEW LONDON BRIDGE, DESIGNED BY GEORGE RENNIE, AND CARRIED OUT BY HIS BROTHER, SIR JOHN RENNIE. OPENED TO THE PUBLIC IN 1831
One purpose of Old London Bridge has been forgotten: she was an arcaded dam, and she deepened the water for shipping on the eastern side. According to Arber’s reprint of “Euphues and his England,” there were twenty arches in all, “whereof each one is made of excellent freestone squared, every one of them being three-score foote in height, and full twenty in distance one from an other.” This latter statement is incorrect. The arches ranged in width from 18 feet to 32 feet 6 inches, and the piers varied in breadth from 25 to 34 feet; they were raised on strong elm piles, covered with thick planks bolted together, and they occupied not less than two-thirds of the waterway. Yet modern engineers played the fool with this ancient breakwater. Several arches were thrown into one large span, so the Thames poured through the bridge with an increased and uneven force; the ground current developed a scour that dug deep holes under the piers, and into these holes tons of stuff were poured ineffectually, for the scour continued to undercut the foundations. Even Labelye’s bridge at Westminster was affected very much by this new devilry in the ground current of the Thames.
It was Euphues who described the old bridge as “a continuall streete, well replenyshed with large and stately houses on both sides.” To-day we have one bridge well replenished with houses (unless the vandalism of trade has made a recent feast of it), but its architecture is not large and stately. I refer to William Pulteney’s Bridge at Bath, an experiment of the eighteenth century, when amateurs trifled with architecture, and architects trifled with amateurs. The structure is sedately prim and dull, but yet it is admirable, for it has tried to renew in England a generative tradition that links every housed bridge to the earliest lake-villages.
So I am glad to say that the crippled old buildings on the High Bridge at Lincoln—a favourite subject of Peter de Wint—have been restored. This work was done, and done very well, thirteen years ago, under the direction of two architects, and a long account of the repairs, with a full-page illustration, was published in “The Builder,” March 21, 1903. The illustration shows the back view of the houses with the bridge beneath and beyond. The restoration is conservative and excellent, but time alone can mellow it from a thorough newness into a ripe completeness. Even then it will be a poor little monument when compared with its Florentine superior the Ponte Vecchio, which history gives to Taddeo Gaddi and the fourteenth century.
The Ponte Vecchio has but one fault—the long and level roof, which has two parallel lines of a most unpliant straightness. Why should an architect put himself at odds with the curved witchery that Nature gives to her sky-lines and horizons? In other respects the Ponte Vecchio has a charming citizenship haunted by romance. Even the beaked piers are not too large, though they are said to date from the year 1355. Perhaps they were remodelled by Renaissance art; certainly they have a style not unlike that of the great Ammanati. As for the three arches, they are well balanced, their roadway has a gentle slope, and their shape goes about half-way between a cycloid and a surbased round arch. The cycloid form appears in the arches of another Florentine bridge, Ammanati’s masterpiece, the incomparable Ponte della Trinità. Some of the many-windowed tiny cots that project from the parapet of the Ponte Vecchio seem to be stuffy compromises between tombs and homes; they would be fit resting-places for the occasional ghosts that men of science welcome, after infinite hesitation unrelieved by humour.