The Secrets of London's Bridges (Travel History Documentary) | TRACKS

[Music] between richmond and the north sea thirty bridges span the thames they carry people across a stretch of river 35 miles long bringing together a population of nearly 8 million [Music] these extraordinary structures have been the making of london britain's capital and i think europe's greatest city [Music] millions of londoners cross these bridges every week most i don't suppose give them a second thought but for me which is the far more than merely means of transport ways of getting from one place to another they are also ways of linking the present to the past london's bridges are not just functional objects they're also symbols metaphors they transform connect inspire and they tell great stories of bronze age relics on the vauxhall shore of why london bridge was falling down of corpses splashing beneath waterloo bridge and above all of the sublime ambition of london's bridge builders themselves [Music] i was born but london was still one of the world's great ports and the thames of the world's great working rivers i will remember the child the impression that london's bridges made on me i suppose bridges gave me my first thrilling stomach-churning architectural experience and goodness me they are doing the same now ah brilliant view [Music] some of london's bridges have vanished or been replaced they are ghost crossings of the past but each of them is include the city's hidden history in some ways they are that history a history that's lasted nearly 4 000 years [Music] in the beginning was the river the thames the greatest the longest river in england 200 miles from its source the river meets the tidal stream the result is a landscape of marshes and islands indeterminate and always changing only here far downstream from the city of london can you understand the elemental world of sand mud pebbles and debris that was the thames before the city and its bridges were built for generations stretching back over centuries londoners labored in the marshes at now long-lost trades mud locks and scavengers tasha's and dredgers watermen and oyster gatherers all gone and lost class the river has always been a portal into the past it's inspired artists and writers none more so than joseph conrad who wrote that nothing is easier than to evoke the great spirit of the past that upon the lower reaches of the thames from here conrad could see the great modern city of london from an ancient perspective [Music] the monstrous town was marked ominously on the sky a brooding gloom in sunshine a lurid glare under the stars and this also has been one of the dark places of the earth we live in the flicker but darkness was here yesterday the marshy landscape on the banks of the thames gave birth to london but the earliest bridge was built not here about 15 miles upstream to the west past the city of london beyond the seat of power at westminster at a place which today we call vox hall here in 1500 bc before troy fell and long before julius caesar came to britain the people of the marsh has made a first attempt at a crossing we're extremely lucky the remains are only completely exposed twice a year at the very bottom of the spring tide but what a find tests have shown that these timber piles have been preserved here for three and a half thousand years so you've had this dated with dendrochronology yes so you you're absolutely there for sure what 1 500 years calendar dated bc yes 1 500. so bc which is about 350 000 yes so therefore this is in a way that is the oldest of the in-situ bit of structure in london isn't it why did they build this bridge some archaeologists think it carried people not across the river but to an island that probably existed in the stream we can't know for sure but gustav and his team think that back then this was the highest point of the title stream it's also a place where three rivers met the thames and two of its lost tributaries the tyburn and the ephra that's that's something magical three rivers meetings and weird and wonderful tidal things happen i suppose 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 saying when the tide will be low and when it'll be high when people see this connection between those things in the sky you know that the moon and those things on earth the river they they connect to you know as a safety thing you would need to placate the river because very high tides would flood any settlements you had around here so we have possibly a sort of sacred river at this point when the bridge was discovered the archaeologists found two bronze spearheads driven point down into the mud beside the bridge were they offering to the deity of the river like coins in the fountain is urged universal and even today londoners continue to make offerings all the way up and down the thames these days we find this kind of stuff now these are not bronze age these are diwali lamps oh my goodness me sounds like it's like in ninjas like in the like in the sacred gang hang on a minute but they're modern modern lord ganesh over a couple of obstacles great fellow and it looks like christian or something and isn't it and these chats they look like so they do found these in the thames so hindus living in england in london i cast using the the temp as is like the ganges sacred river right so they're replicating what we used to do in the bronze age a ritual river a powerful god if gustaf is right this challenges a lot of our assumptions about what bridges are for it didn't originate as a means of transport or trade but as sacred creations this was a bridge between a spiritual not a material divide a bridge between worlds a bridge between the world of man here and the world of gods being life and death the thames was like the river jordan to cross it was to cross to a promised land the link between bridges and the sacred echoes through the millennia is in fact commemorated in our language the head of the roman catholic church the pope is called in latin the pontifex which means both bridge builder and priest indeed it was the romans about 1500 years after our marsh people's activities here who built london's first traditional conventional bridge bridging the thames is not easy the riverbed is changing all the time because of tides and currents and human activity but in truth it's very shallow sometimes less than two meters deep at low tide the romans knew this they were the champion engineers of the ancient world they put their bridge on the shallowest narrowest path river now spanned by the modern london bridge right next to the ancient port what is called the pool of london the consequences have been immense for centuries this area was the heart of the british economy a key reason for that is that this was the first place upstream from the sea about 40 miles in that direction that a bridge could be constructed to connect the south and the north banks of the thames in addition hardened by the bridge is a tidal pool allowing a large ship to anchor very good for trade there's been a bridge here on and off for nearly 2 000 years and that's been the making of london because of the crossing london became an explosively successful settlement right from the beginning so successful in fact that only when building work takes place can we get a glimpse of the roman foreshore as conquerors the romans needed a defensible riverside site and port so that reinforcements could be rushed in if needed and an evacuation could take place at speed in the case of an emergency the trauma of boudicca's rebellion in 1861 when the roman capital of colchester was burnt combined with the fact that already at that time the bridge here made london the transport center of roman britain meant that when roman authorities were established london not colchester became the provincial capital from here the romans could control england and they did that for several centuries you're looking at a slice of roman london or the beginning of a slice of london the very first of the first century waterfront would have would have come through roughly where the guy down there is digging we're looking south at the moment towards the river so it would have cut across more or less there so you can see we're only just beginning to uncover we've only been here a couple of days but you can see the difference between this modern stuff which they're digging out and the actual layers of archaeology which is left and that's what they're trying to do they're trying to distinguish real archaeology from modern rubbish this is the first chance we've had to investigate the roman bridge for more than 30 years as far as we could make up we only saw one pier of the bridge in 1981 but quite a lot of it yeah it's formed of a combination of horizontally laid timbers stacked on top of each other cantilevering out and then the actual bridge platform the deck is laid along the top of that so that's using the evidence of what we actually found in the ground how how we how we speculate the bridge would have looked fascinating as the excavation continues the archaeologists begin to find wooden piles survives of nearly 2 000 years of urban development conrad is coming to grips with roman engineering there's the pile oh very solid these battered stumps are the remains of the wharves beside the bridge through which the goods of empire flowed in and out changing the physical geography and economy of britain forever but the invaders never forgot that the bridge was still a sacred metaphysical place too when the georgians built the predecessor to the bridge i'm standing on they dredged the riverbed to clear the bottom for ships to pass out there in the middle of the river they found a large cache of roman coins rather like these wonderful things bronze and brass and maybe silver archaeologists believe there was a shrine in the middle of the bridge and people passing over would cast coins into the mighty thames to appease his power so for the romans as with the bronze age marsh people upstream at vauxhall bridges were sacred things things of religion have remember of course that in rome the same word was used for a bridge builder as for priests pontifax indeed it was on the titles of the roman emperor both emperors and empire are of course long gone and the bridge with them for centuries there was no attempt to rebuild it and no real need the main settlement in london now was a long way from the remains of the roman bridge a mile and a half upstream around what is now covent garden a new trading post grew up by a sharp bend in the river it was a beach market town and the london street names preserve its memory of the strand where early english merchants pulled up their ships and the old witch the ovicus or trading port and the river became as it had been before the romans a frontier a border between warring kingdoms with names like essex middlesex surrey and kent [Music] for london to achieve its destiny as a great city it needed a proper bridge once king alfred and his successors had reunited england and reoccupied the roman city a bridge was built but it was really no more than a flimsy causeway intended more to uh stop raiders traveling upstream than to be an aid to transport for a proper and solid bridge london had to wait around a thousand years off the roman bridge but then that bridge was very solid and very proper indeed [Music] 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 line but the structure immortalized in the song is not the ruthless concrete span we see today nor even the one that preceded it the bridge we remember is the medieval bridge the bridge of thomas beckett and dick whittington the one chaucer and shakespeare knew but it's a ghost which haunts me still and the question i ask myself is what was it really like what was london bridge and why was it falling down to find out we have to go back 800 years to the 12th century at the time london was booming much the street plan of the modern city was laid down by then though very few of the actual buildings survive but what has endured are the records of the bridge preserved in the archives of the corporation of london they tell us that in 1173 a religious community the chaplains brethren and sisters of the british of london were entrusted with building a new stone bridge and the mastermind of the project was a parish priest peter of coal church off cheapside these ancient documents offer insights into the creation the use and maintenance of one of london's greatest structures old london bridge started in 1176 it's been long lost but this treasure trove of intimate and evocative documents almost bring it back to life look at this wonderful thing for example it is um a grant dated 1205 a grant from peter the priest pete of colchurch the architect the creator of london bridge incredible and attached to this grant is something utterly wonderful it's a seal here it is and it shows peter of coal church not as an architect or engineer but as a priest offering communion absolutely wonderful such a direct connection with the main man behind old london bridge now this is a charter of about 13 13 20. and we have attached to it here another seal again wonderful it shows an abstract representation of the bridge i suppose just simply an arch with uh thomas beckett sitting on the top of it and below the arch we see the city of london absolutely a wonderful image some pauls in the center olson pools with its spire intact flanked by city churches with their spires pointing to the heavens one of the reasons the medieval london bridge became such an icon for the city was that it was a living bridge an astonishing structure with the houses and shops built upon it the oldest image of it dates from the 15th century here we see it it's the first sort of drawn image of london bridge in the foreground the tower of london with various activities going on and there's the watergate from the thames and in the background an incredible image of the northern half of london bridge great chapel in the center and the arches connecting that to land the north bank and in the background there's one kind of similar image to that on the seal the skyline of london with the spires oath and paul's and the spires of city churches it's a wonderful thing this drawing manuscript drawing [Music] in our search for old london bridge the street plan of the city is a major clue we know that the medieval bridge lay just to the east of his modern counterpart and if you decode the street plan its ghostly location begins to reveal itself the monument to london's great fire of 1666 was put up beside the ancient northern approach to the bridge and at each end of the bridge we're told there was a church following the road here fish street hill leads us down to the churches of magnus martyr we stood like a kind of spiritual toll booth at the northern end of the bridge once you understand that old london bridge stood slightly to the east of modern london bridge everything here makes sense this splendid elevation on the tower of magnus the master church which everybody crossing london bridge would have passed because the carriageway the roadway to london bridge was here and inside there within the arch so to speak below the tower was the pedestrian route and here we have salvaged some of the stone from old london bridge i suppose they're part of the mid 18th century recasing of the bridge in portland stone inside the church is something of a relic our next clue to what old london bridge might have been like this wonderful model shows london bridge as it could have looked as indeed i'm sure it did look in about 1400 it's uh was then 900 feet long from the city here to southern with the uh carriageway the roadway carried on 19 stone-built arches the twentieth ah it's being like a drawbridge somewhat in the middle um and on the uh stone-built arches we have a an array of timber build houses and shops about 140 in 1400 also i can see very clearly that about half the width of the river is um sort of constrained by a thick piers of the arches and the brake washed in front of them they're called starlings with the edges protected by timber piles in the middle roughly is the great fortification the drawbridge remind that london was defended to a degree by the by the thames it was like a moat and to span it was to compromises adventures of the city so one needed to prevent invaders coming across the bridge from the south up comes the drawbridge this is a fortification the bridge in the sense is part of the defenses of london along with the city wall i don't know i just wonders can anything of this wonderful bridge still survive below the waters of the thames 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 was never really finished to resist a huge force of currents and tide on the river it had to be maintained [Music] and that offers us a clue to the real meaning of the nursery rhyme what we have here bizarrely is what the um the cut waters the piers for london bridge would have looked like the medieval bridge they would have been roundwood piles like this made out of what chestnut elm elm often driven in with a ram yeah and then clad behind with timber planking that would be made up with with masonry with earth all sorts of solid things in between that the timber beams so the bridge would be supported by the infill of these artificial islands held in place by planks right and roundwood piles very laborious work but when do these days fall these are contemporary with probably the last phase of the medieval bridge these would have been here in the late 18th century the obvious question for layman is the these these are powers of some centuries old they survived underwater and about low tide at high tide waters right up here it's astonishing so timber is preserved by being kept wet yes if it's kept wet yeah it'll be preserved if it's kept dry it'll be preserved the real problem is if a timber rises from the bottom above the high water mark it'll decay at the high water mark because part of it is dry and therefore doesn't expand part of it is wet and therefore it expands when it's wet and then when it shrinks when it's dry we took huge quantities of timber in kentish rag stone to maintain old london bridge the enormous costs were paid for by the proceeds from tolls from both people and ships but sometimes the money went astray and the results could be catastrophic in 1282 five of the arches of the bridge collapsed about 12 years earlier king henry iii had given the revenues of the bridge to his wife creed eleanor and she spent it on herself not on maintain the bridge that's why london bridge collapsed she is the my fair lady of the nursery rhyme a nursery rhyme which reveals londoners deep anxiety about the future of their all-important bridge it wasn't properly maintained on a regular basis it would indeed collapse after the disaster it was a small revolution the city of london took back the revenues of the bridge from the crown and gave them permanently to the people indeed to the successes of peter of coal church's community now called the bridge house estate the bridge now symbolized london's newfound civic independence but its religious roots were not forgotten there were churches at each end and in the middle of the chapel on two levels one at the roadside for travellers and one 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 southwark cathedral coming the other way we have a short service in the middle of the bridge um we pray for people who work on the river who take their recreation on the river for people who have drowned in the river indeed and then we throw a wooden cross into the river itself as a sign of god's blessing [Music] these youngsters too are a direct link to that medieval world because the organization which built and preserved old london bridge still exists there's an income of 700 million pounds a year derived from centuries of investment it is still responsible for all the bridges within the bounds of the city but they have an annual surplus of up to 20 million pounds which goes to london charities like this dance group funded directly from the tolls and charity left by medieval londoners all those centuries ago old london bridge stood about 15 meters over there with its tall buildings its houses and shops it was in a sense a city within the city in that space people londoners lived and died toiled and took their pleasures for nearly 600 years i lived nearby and i often come here to look imagine the spectral bridge to listen to see i can pick up the sound echoing through the sentries of the uh the pilgrims the merchants the travelers the soldiers crossing one way and the other it may seem fancible but who knows perhaps perhaps for 600 years london bridge dominated the city and the massive iconic structure redefined the very river it spanned its huge piers and starlings interfered with the flow of the thames itself a blockage caused by the bridge slows the current as a result the river regularly froze over londoners took to the ice with gusto and what were called frost fares with games and processions stalls and even bull baiting became a london institution by holding back the water the peers of the bridge also function as a giant weir in even the earliest manuscript we can clearly see the rapids pouring through the arches passing through it was known as shooting the bridge and boats were often overturned feigned by the arches of london bridge the thames became a theater for the royal pageantry the more unpopular wives of henry viii shot the bridge a right of passage rather than being given more conventional coronations and later on royalty traveled on the thames in wonderful batches such as this this splendid thing was made in the 1730s for frederick prince of wales and of course audrey londoners enjoyed the thames as well there were frost fares firework displays and the lord mayor's show was originally held on the water like venice london was a world of the water the whole city faced the foreshore here in greenwich downstream from the city of london you can still catch a sense of how the river and city once merged here to one of the great tudor palaces right on the water rebuilt by the stewards from 1610 onwards greenwich never lost its river focus it's a relic of the world of the royal river a world which is seen would last forever but london's growth changed all that as industrial revolution swept onwards london planned more bridges but is made possible by new technology this volume contains visionary proposals for tenside london they drawn up in 1800 for the city corporation which at that time wanted to reorganize the port of london that involved rebuilding london bridge and moving it significantly to the west this shows a rebuilt london bridge this is the central arch cast iron much higher so greater clearage for indeed high mastership shown going through this is an amazing image incredible of course this did not happen but things have gone things didn't happen all has changed change to a large degree brought about by engines such as this 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 suppose here you see horses it says horse powered going around capstone with a gear device to increase the power of the horses the ropes would rise this great hammer up here there it is his hammers brought up the top here then it would be released and rushed down pow and drive the timber pile into the riverbed so very important movement in in bridge construction industrial revolution of course transformed london transformed the world and um particularly for london it fueled an explosion of bridge construction for more than 500 years london bridge stood alone as a crossing of the thames it defined the original city the commercial giant but two miles upstream was another big urban center westminster from 1300 onwards this area had been a seat both of political power and social prestige in england but it had no bridge that's because the city of london had fought to preserve old london bridges lucrative monopoly so when plans for another crossing at westminster were muted in the 1660s there was uproar it wasn't just the city fathers who objected they were joined by thousands of watermen that's boatman and ferryman who believed their livelihoods would be threatened if the second bridge was built must remember that then unlike now the tent is london's main highway packed with crafts of all types carrying goods from people up and down and from side to side now the watchmen were a very powerful lobby indeed they had their own city livery company and even their own poet the waterman poet john taylor he complained about the competition of the introduction and tudor times of the sprung carriage carriages coaches jades and flanders mares to rob us of our shares our wares our fares against the ground we stand and knock our heels whilst all our profit runs away on wheels they couldn't charge more than the set fear right as taxis do today but um if you could persuade your passenger it was against the tide and it was a terrible evening and whatever and i'll do my best to get you there on time then of course there might be a nice tip at the end indeed so they're okay so the water will be involved in many things the one of course getting people across the thames in a sense bridges were the enemy of waterman they took away they took away the trade absolutely yeah so and they objected to them they objected to every bridge and were compensated very often for well at least the company was compensated very often for a bridge being built taking trade away would you still object from yet another bridge being built did the borderlands company object to the recent millennium bridge absolutely yeah oh yes excellent we thought that was hilarious a wobbly bridge yes probably they're going but well seriously i mean you would you would object did it did objects to that bridge yes but much more venomously in the past but we still say you know it's not you don't need another bridge there but it was only in 1736 after centuries of argument the parliament agreed to a bridge at westminster under the act the watchman got 25 000 pounds compensation the equivalent day of more than 2 million pounds [Music] when westminster bridge officially opened in 1750 london was transformed once again the thames had been a kind of mode protecting the city now all that changed the commercial and political pals north of the river once represented mainly by the church now took charge across the river and so started the dramatic transformation of the south bank of the thames traditionally the south bank had been a place independent of the city of the north bank a place free of the city's controls and statutes it was i suppose a land of liberty and liberties there were theaters bear baiting pits brothels market gardens and pleasure grounds but now it became something quite different it became in a way a province of the north bank of the thames large because perhaps ironically on the major land owners and developers the south side of the thames was the city corporation the city in the bridgehouse estate owned land across river which jumped in value once westminster and then blackfriars bridge were built and the obelisk they erected here planned to be the focus of a grand new urban district marks the center of their holdings as a result of the new bridges london north and south of the river have become one great city the new crossings were instinctive part of what was to be the zenith of george and london but like the roman and medieval bridges before them they too are now ghosts swept away by development flying 14 miles upstream however we can experience their effect richmond bridge a classic 18th century masonry arch structure is the only one of london's georgian bridges to survive and it sits in a green riverside landscape a middle-class suburb surrounded by aristocratic houses and parks it allows 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 height early one morning in september 1802 william woodsworth parked across westminster bridge on the top of a coach 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 in this bronze plate upon westerns the bridge [Music] earth has not anything to show more fair dull would he be of soul who could pass by a sight so touching in its majesty this city now does like a garment where the beauty of the moon ships towers domes theaters and temples lie open unto the fields and to the sky standing here i can see the city as wordsworth sword it haunts my imagination george and london one of the greatest urban creations ever achieved by mankind i argued and to think that from here that great city unfolded itself to wordsworth in a way he could not resist wordsworth's poem was actually a swan song for george and london between 1750 and 1850 nine bridges were thrown across the thames but despite this the city began to turn its back on the water as a population of more than two and a half million pushed further and further away from the riverbanks london was fast becoming an industrial mega city it needed rapid transit and bridge builders like john rennie rennie built three great bridges southwark bridge waterloo bridge and a new london bridge but sadly none of them survive so like old london bridge you have to search for renny's bridge this is part of the southern approach to rainey's london bridge it's a fragment that offers a glimpse of the character of the power of the whole reminder of the architectural engineering wonder that we've lost i love the bold classical corners and the tremendously strong granite walling it all has a roman solidity and grandeur reni's new london bridge was his final work was built alongside the medieval bridge new roads had to be built much demolition was carried out and historic street plan of london was changed and although to my mind it never rivaled the medieval bridge it too became a signature of the city famous enough to be dismantled and sold to rich americans in the 1960s the whole structure was rebuilt stone by stone to grace a housing development in the arizona desert must be going no longer staying the burning turns i have to cross the new bridges reduced london's reliance on the river even more once it was common to row on the river at night like this not anymore success came with a price the 1840s and 50s were grim years in london's history the population the city had swollen london's infrastructure couldn't cope with a mega city london had become the river was filthy polluted on sewage and industrial waste it was poisoning londoners it was killing them in their tens of thousands waterborne diseases like cholera was rife the city was poisoning the wells of london and killing its population the bridge is shared in the sickness wart lubridge became notorious for suicides particularly for despairing women jumping from his parapets and statistics confirm its reputation in the 1840s about 15 percent of london's suicides jumped from waterloo bridge this aspect of london's bridges and the thames as theaters of death is etched into our literature the charles dickens in our mutual friend essentially a novel about the river and river life starts the story with these characters fishing in the thames for corpses a valuable commodity london have now become the capital of a world empire the largest richest and most powerful city in the world and yet it was awash with disease and poverty something had to be done the solution was a brutal taming of the thames itself an embankment which contained not just a giant new sewer but a railway line as well was the work of one of london's great engineers joseph baseljet i'm standing on the victoria embankment in front of me and above me is the hungerford bridge below me is basiljet's mighty sewer the underground railway a gas mains and a telegraph cable this was and remain spectacular engineering when completed london would never be the same again this was the death knell of the riverside almost venetian looking london grand buildings like somerset house once has spectacular watergate where at high tide people and goods could arrive by boat but basil jet build a vast wall to separate the river from the city inside it 22 acres of land were reclaimed pushing the river back in places by more than a hundred meters this 17th century watergate is the last surviving relic of the old waterfront and is now marooned on the edge of embankment gardens you can clearly see it in this painting which shows just how splendid the georgian waterfront must have been safer transport and cleaner water came with a cost the legacy has been really rather appalling it's cut off the river from the life of london and the great riverside boulevard a wonderful win just full of horse-drawn traffic and pedestrians is now noisy and polluted urban motorway and the buildings that once rose from the river like somerset house behind me rose like palaces in venice arise from swathes of traffic so with the embankments had a a terrible effect on the city it's going one of the reasons why londoners in a way have forgotten the wonders and beauty of the river nonetheless victorian modernity still had its triumphs hamish's bridge in the western suburbs is one of them is one of three built by the same joseph basil jet unsurprisingly construction hammersmith employed the latest technology it's a suspension bridge with the roadway supported from above rather than below unlike traditional arch bridges the road hangs from wrought iron cables strung over cast iron towers with each end anchored firmly in the ground it's wonderful looking the bridge it's a really window into mid victorian london um the engineering of course epitome of victorian engineering combination of beauty and of incredible strength uh cast iron 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 bit more elastic so they're there they have a tensile strength and hence raw shines used so wonderful again it doesn't seem much now as a casual observer but a lot of engineering technology going on here functional strong also beautiful and in castle and of course you can cast a lovely detail hence the the suspension towers having some classical detail at the top of cornerstone and various uh countless leagues rather wonderful molding so every time we look at this bridge you can read more into it and understand more about the the wonder of the uh of the engineering in victoria in london it's a complete victorian piece one of london's best bridges i love it battlejet's triumphant hammersmith was commissioned by the newly created metropolitan board of works the board was the first overall government for the new victorian mega city in 1869 it had taken over all the private bridges across the thames and abolished all the remaining tolls and it was determined to proclaim his authority i love the ornament on this bridge the iconography it's so revealing look for example this wonderful piece of heraldry i suppose behind me in the middle is a royal coat of arms to the left the arms of the city of london on the right the arms the city of westminster but also the arms of kent of surrey of middlesex and of essex this bridge really defines london as it was in the late 19th century it also revealed the power of bridge building london was no longer simply a city it was a city-state by the 1890s bazeljet and the border of works had shaped the city preparing it for the 20th century and with it the climax of the british empire the city of more than 5 million people stretched down both banks of the thames but for more than half that distance from london bridge to the sea there were still no bridges just dangerous and expensive tunnels they were dug because despite all the changes london was still a port indeed it was the greatest portal city in the world and a bridge would prevent big ships from coming upstream the docks downstream west interdocks and catherine stock had been constructed in the early 19th century but in the late 19th century london traditional port the cold of london over there still functioned with ships moved several deep into the thames some almost as large as hms belfast over there so any crossing of the thames downstream from here has to allow the largest of ships still to reach the pool everybody had their own idea of how to solve the problem two architects contributed different swing bridge plans another contemplated a tunnel under the thames yet another hoped to build a transporter bridge which lifted people and traffic high enough to let the ships through but the winning plan returned to a feature of the legendary medieval crossing a drawbridge the completed tower bridge deployed a vast hydraulic system powered by steam engines to pivot the entire roadway to let ships sail through in the bowels of the structure the scale of it all becomes clear this vast cavern of space is a vascular chamber below the south tower water level is roughly here and above me is the underside of the roadway you can hear the traffic echoing quite uncanny that's painted white moves so when the tower bridge roadway goes up the white elements here that's the counterweight come down to occupy this space must be very scary to see that amazing of course this is a bridge like no other in london it's a moving bridge and living bridge in a sense with the crew people in control rooms machinery operating it living vibrating almost speaking i can hear it but all the engineering expertise was invisible in the completed bridge instead the architecture was deliberately designed to merge with the tower of london next door this is one of those astonishing things about tower bridge it's not a gothic structure built out of stone but it's a steel frame structure a modern building and through this window you can see exactly what i mean i'm looking at the companion touch this one outside all this wonderful gothic finials lovely ornamental details all designed to fit in with the ancient tower of london all history and in here all is modern steel a functional building very strong very very sort of um i say almost brutally honest in this construction inside outside all his ornament history beauty pedigree evocation of dreams of the past hiding the brute functional realities behind a gothic facade may have been a triumph of late victorian genteel propriety but the effect was to create a sense of immemorial age that it had always been there old london bridge with his house and shops have been unique icon of london now the city has found its successor tower bridge the imperial city's gateway to the massive docks downstream and its vast empire beyond after 150 years of frantic bridge building london had reinvented itself after so much of the victorian ended ward in britain london's bridges were so steeped in nostalgia instantly historic look at tower bridge utterly amazing um now there was to be a century of quiet on london's river apart from two bridges built far upstream a quiet that seemed timeless as t.s eliot observed as he like me slipped quietly downstream in the wasteland [Music] the river sweats oil and tar the barges drift with the turning tide red sails wide to leeward swing on the heavy spa the barges wash drifting logs down greenwich reach past the isle of dogs by the end of the 20th century the vast brawl of greater london meant travis now had to be able to go round it as well as through it at the time this heroic bridge at dartford was completed in 1991 carrying the orbital motorway across the thames engineering had moved into a new league between the towers is three times as long as old london bridge and runs 57 meters above the water it's among the largest bridges of its kind in the world dartford's a cable stayed bridge this is not the same as a suspension bridge here the forces and loads travel out the cables and then directly down the towers um unlike the suspension bridge where they are anchored on each bank this is a more stable design allows for the creation of vastly wide and high spans this is a bridge that's making a statement what's it saying well it's proclaiming that the whole of the thames estuary belongs to london crossing the thames far downstream from the historic city dartford bridge defines london as being larger than ever a city-state within south east england the claims of board of work has displayed a hammersmith far upstream now seem vindicated here you really do understand the nature of this bridge it does command the estuary it is this great gate the approach to london is here now the city over there the sea over there ships come and go my goodness me i can just about see the towers of a canary wall but however magnificent the bridge is in itself however modern it doesn't erase the echoes of the past that so intrigued joseph conrad i'm about 15 miles downstream from the pool of london where everything started around 2000 years ago there of course things have changed many times but here in places like this it feels well surely much they did when the roman triumphs pass by this is a strange location it sort of seems to seem lost between worlds a very odd place indeed an edgy frontier yet emerging from the primordial ooze and mud and slime and the reeds much as london emerged all those centuries before oh now this is why i love the thames it carries memories of all the people who have traveled on it you've lived beside it look here bits of pottery porcelain earthenware look at this lovely delicate handle from a teacup i suppose beautiful in such a intimate connection with the person that owned it loved it lost it that's what's so incredible about this place that it's um you know a living connection with the ghosts of the past who stand here one finds and connects and remembers by ad2000 london had lived through nearly 20 centuries of his own history and what better way to celebrate that history than with a bridge and not a giant a jewel one designed not for transport but for human delight a pedestrian bridge that opened up a new way through the city and in a nod to its noble forebears a spiritual bridge pointing directly to london's cathedral some paul although it suffered teething troubles the design by engineers over arab architect norman foster and even a sculptor anthony carro is a work of art this bridge has redefined london once again by creating a new link across the thames it's uh brought added life to southwark in front of me and the city behind me created a wonderful connection between tate modern up there and uh some paul's cathedral doesn't look absolutely fantastic also the bridge has um created a spectacular new vistas of the city from here i can see an array of bridges left and to right wonderful tower bridge over there in the distance also a wonderful object lovely to walk across it loves you to explore to touch it and look at it reminds me in a way of um other great pedestrian bridges around the world through alto bridge in venice for example also exquisite it of course is lined with shops a lovely living thing there also bridge plus your mind of inhabited bridges i wonder if london could ever recapture the glory of old london bridge with his houses could there be a new inhabited bridge in london perhaps perhaps i hope people have been building bridges in london for 3 000 years or more and those extraordinary structures have defined the city from the beginning they were sites of primal spiritual power as man attempted to tame and harness the brute force of nature but they've also shaped london's economic and political dominance once a permanent bridge was built wealth and power found their way to london and with them the talents of millions of people and so these crossings became not only a vehicle for royal and political display they helped london become to my mind the greatest city in the world there'll be new bridges and different london's in the future even now a cable car bridge is being built downstream at the docks that like this bridge can only be a good thing it'll help londoners regain the pleasures of the thames and only through the thames and its bridges can you grasp the true nature of london and understand those diverse people costa mongers and kings warriors and merchants who've made london the fantastic city it is

Channel: TRACKS - Travel Documentaries

Views: 139,928

Keywords: British heritage exploration, British history, British history revealed, British travelogue series, Discovering London's heritage, Heritage of London's bridges, Historical bridges of London, London history, Remembering London's past, Secrets of London's landmarks, bridge history, hidden gems, historical facts, historical mysteries, travel adventures, travel back in time, travel storytelling, travel tales, unusual histories, urban heritage

Id: keKpC8J4FtY

Length: 58min 41sec (3521 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 06 2021