Westminster Bridge

The engraving above appears in William Maitland's History and Survey of England, 1756. It depicts the newly-built Westminster Bridge with Westminster Palace (the Houses of Parliament) which was almost entirely destroyed in a disastrous fire of 1834 (Westminster Hall is one of the few surviving remnants of the ancient palace). To the right in the background, shown by the letter F is Lambeth Palace. Also note the medieval and Tudor houses lining the banks of the Thames. The barges in the river belong to various of London's companies; that in the right foreground, under the letter G, was the City barge, considered the finest in all of Europe.

By the eighteenth century the area of Westminster urgently needed a bridge - people living in Westminster had to travel miles to use London Bridge to access Southwark and Lambeth - and there was only a horse ferry in operation at Westminster, a slow and often dangerous means of crossing the river. It took almost 20 years of public agitation to secure permission to build the bridge, the watermen and ferrymen objected most violently and had to be compensated. There were many problems in the building - particularly with settlement of the piers - but the bridge was finally opened with great fanfare in late 1750. It lasted until the mid-1800s, when a cast-iron bridge replaced it. The building of the bridge in the mid-eighteenth century necessitated the razing of many of the ancient narrow streets and tiny courts of Westminster in order to accommodate the new wide avenues and roads that acted as the approach routes to the bridge. Bridge Street and Parliament Street were two of the new streets created - see a plan of the works.