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| Not only is walking alongside the Thames a wonderful experience (at least for all of its length that I was able to see), but as it flows through London it's spanned by these marvelous bridges. Beautiful to see from the riverside, fun and exciting to cross (with fabulous views on offer during the crossings) they are among the most wonderful aspects of London. Each one unique and special in its own way, they provide the icing on the cake of the visual feast that is the Thames. | ![[spacer]](../../shim.gif){kind=small} |
You can read my review of these great structures in this blog post, which includes links to sites giving more historical and technical information about each one.You can also see these photos, plus some more, in this Flickr set. And for reference, if you like bridges as much as I do, this handy Wikipedia page lists all the Thames crossings, from upstream of Oxford to the North Sea! |
If you want to see where all the Thames Bridges are that I saw, check out this map:
View a larger version of this map here.
In addition to providing fun, excitement, and visual beauty, they help you navigate the city. Identifying a landmark by its relationship to one or more bridges, they also make great places for meeting up with friends. Learning their order from upstream to down is a task I set myself before I left for London, but somehow I was never able to keep them straight until I saw them all. But once I was there, knowing which appears when became almost second nature very quickly.
This order of bridges also provides a good way to organize the photos on this page. I'm starting with Hammersmith, the furthest upstream bridge that I saw, and moving downstream to end with the Tower Bridge. This latter structure is so incredibly photogenic that I've devoted an entire page to pictures of it.
So, drifting downstream on the Thames, you see...
Hammersmith Bridge (at low tide) |
Putney Bridge (seen from Bishop's Park) |
Battersea Bridge (with the Albert Bridge in the background) |
The Albert Bridge, named, as is everything else Albert in London, for Queen Victoria's beloved consort, is so visually stunning that it merits more than just one look. Henry took these lovely photos of the bridge from different angles and in different lights. And I was rather tickled by the sign, and had to document its odd safety notice:
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Continuing downstream, we have...
Chelsea Bridge standard (on the north bank) |
Vauxhall Bridge (with MI-6 headquarters in the background) |
Lambeth Bridge (with the Victoria Tower and Houses of Parliament in the background) |
....followed by ...
Westminster Bridge, with its famous landmark |
Hungerford [railroad] Bridge, with adjoining Jubilee footbridges, as seen from the Victoria Embankment |
Waterloo Bridge (seen during the Thames River Race) |
Blackfriars was one of my favorite bridges, with its fascinating decorations and curious double-barreled structure. You'll be able to see the latter aspect of the bridge better on the general Thames River page, but here is an interesting angled shot taken from below the bridge on the embankment, and a closeup of one of those rosettes:
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Next is the very useful, fun, and famous "wibbly-wobbly" bridge, otherwise known as the Millennium Bridge, that connects St. Paul's Cathedral and the Tate Modern art museum.
Regarding the wobbling, Anna Quindlen remarks in Imagined London:
| "The engineering problems have since been resolved, and the new bridge joins the other legendary spans across the Thames. But there's no doubt that if such a bridge had been built by Henry VIII for some grand occasion and had rattled about in such a fashion on its maiden voyage, heads would have rolled." |
The shot in the middle is taken from the Tate's courtyard near sunset, while the one on the left is taken from high up on St. Paul's earlier in the same day. A day that just happened to be seeing the bridge closed for a few hours for inspection. Don't want it to start wobbling again! (Although it did more than wobble in the opening scenes of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince.) The bridge standard on the right is from the next bridge downstream, Southwark:
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I didn't take any pictures of London Bridge, the next one, as a whole, since it's currently, in spite of song and story, a very plain, vanilla, and rather uninteresting structure. But, crossing it and looking downstream, as we did on our first full day in London on our "orientation" tour, you can see the most ornate, fascinating and infinitely interesting structure—the Tower Bridge—in the distance. So even though London Bridge's bland, current incarnation is nothing like its historical counterpart (which used to be the only way to cross the Thames other than by water taxi) it still has something to recommend it. And London does still remember the old bridge, as you can see on the sign below.
For many more closeups of its more photogenic cousin, check out my Tower Bridge page. But on the right here is a tease, from the middle of London Bridge:
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