Amazing & Extraordinary Facts: London Read Online Free PDF Page A

to take the city and the kingdom. In 1091 the bridge was destroyed by a tornado and in 1176 a more substantial stone bridge was built in the reign of Henry II. This bridge remained in use until the 1820s. It was soon lined by houses, with a gate and drawbridge at the Southwark end for defensive purposes while the City end was decorated with the heads of traitors and other criminals.

    London Bridge
    The medieval bridge had 19 arches; from 1584 one of them was occupied by a waterwheel installed by a Dutch engineer called Peter Morice and used to pump water to conduits in the city. For this he was paid ten shillings a year, later installing wheels in two further arches. The combined effect of all this masonry and machinery was to slow down the flow of the river. In 1823-31 a new stone bridge of five arches was built by Sir John Rennie, a short distance upstream from the medieval bridge, its wider arches enabling the river to flow faster which helped to prevent it freezing. In 1967-72 the present bridge of three spans was built, Rennie’s bridge being dismantled and reassembled at Lake Havasu City, Arizona. Both the 19th-century bridge and its 20th-century replacement were funded by revenue from the Bridge House Estates. These arose from properties given or bequeathed to the Corporation of London in the 12th and 13th centuries for the upkeep of the medieval bridge. The revenues are still used to maintain the four bridges which are the Corporation’s responsibility: Blackfriars, Southwark, London Bridge and Tower Bridge.
    NEXT CHARIOT FROM PLATFORM 10 IS FOR NORWICH
    Boudicca’s husband, Prasutagus, ruler of the Iceni tribe in East Anglia, had agreed with the representatives of the Roman emperor, Nero, that Boudicca would succeed him. On Prasutagus’s death the governor of Britain, Gaius Paulinus, ignored the agreement, had Boudicca flogged and her daughters raped, and imposed heavy taxes on the Iceni. In the ensuing rebellion both Colchester and London were sacked before Boudicca was defeated. According to persistent legend she is buried beneath what is now platform 10 of King’s Cross Station in an area formerly known as Battle Bridge.
    In 1879 the Metropolitan Board of Works proposed the construction of a bridge near the Tower of London to give an additional crossing point since London Bridge, at that time the lowest crossing on the Thames, was overcrowded. It was opposed by the City on the grounds that it would impede access to the wharves which were then in the Pool of London, just downstream from London Bridge; and by the inhabitants of Southwark because it would make it too easy for Eastenders to cross the river and would therefore ‘have a prejudicial effect upon the value of a large amount of property’! Despite these objections the famous ‘Bascule’ bridge, which could open to admit ships to the Pool of London, was designed by the architect Horace Jones (who also designed Smithfield meat market) and the engineer John Wolfe-Barry who was assisted by Henry Brunel, son of Isambard Kingdom.
    The engineering is ingenious. Each bascule is a giant see-saw which requires comparatively little energy to raise it. The structure of Tower Bridge is a steel frame and the stone that we see is, in effect, cladding which was used to give the bridge its ‘Gothic’ appearance. It was opened in 1894, amidst much ceremony, by the Prince of Wales.
    The present Hammersmith Bridge replaced the original bridge (London’s first suspension bridge) in 1887. The authorities were alarmed when, in 1870, twelve thousand people crowded on to the old bridge to watch the Oxford and Cambridge boat race. Designed to carry horses and cabs it survived two attempts by the IRA to blow it up and uncomplainingly accommodated heavy goods vehicles and double-decker buses until 1997 when it was briefly closed to vehicular traffic for repair. At the same time the nearby Hammersmith flyover, built in the 1960s, was closed for the same reason. Victorian