When I later learned that there had been previously been a footbridge on the site it became obvious that the footbridge stuck on the side of the railway was part of the price for putting the rail bridge across the river that the railway company had to pay.
Years passed and I started work for Post Office Telecoms and, working in the area, came to know the bridge quite well. Walking over it and on the embankment nearby I noticed something odd, the Bridge has two large brick piers and several steel supports, why not all the same? It was as though the bridge had been built at different times. In fact it had.
In 1845, the Hungerford Bridge was opened as a footbridge for pedestrians walking from Charing Cross on the north bank of the River Thames to Lambeth on the south bank. Isambard Kingdom Brunel designed the bridge, not unlike his Clifton Bridge in appearance, in 1841. It was
commissioned to encourage trade at the new Hungerford Market. Two 80ft-high brick piers, built in the river to an Italianate campanile style, carried the bridge platform 1,352ft across the Thames, suspended from four iron suspension chains.The Illustrated London News observed that pedestrians could ‘walk through the centre of the fruit stalls, over the fish market, and in a few minutes find themselves in Pedlar’s Acre, Lambeth’. Later when the Charing Cross Railway wanted to replace the pedestrian suspension bridge with a rail bridge, the company argued that few people used the Hungerford Bridge due to the smell from the river, especially during the summer.
The Hungerford Bridge was closed in 1861, and replaced in 1864 with the Charing Cross Railway Bridge, a nine-span wrought iron bridge that carried Railway passengers to the new West End terminus at Charing Cross. The two central piers that suspended the Hungerford Bridge were however incorporated into the new bridge and remain to this day. I had been right to suspect the different material used in construction. Obviously the railway required more support than the footbridge, but the canny Victorian railway magnets didn’t want to waste the cost of replacing the perfectly strong piers that Brunel had built only twenty years before.
Brunel, equally crafty however, used the chains of the original bridge which he obtained at a knockdown price to complete a new suspension bridge in Clifton. The chains from the Clifton Suspension Bridge had been sold to the Cornwall Railway Company in 1853 when the Clifton scheme ran into financial difficulties. The Hungerford Bridge chains were acquired as a replacement for the paltry price of £5,000.
Today you can now cross the river on two new bridges either side of the old rail bridge which allows you a better view of the Brunel piers than you could get when walking over them or riding a train into the station and interestingly, and ironically, they are now being cleaned and repaired!
Hungerford Market is long gone buried under Charing Cross Station. Though once upon a time that same schoolteacher had taken me around a collector's market under the arches there. On the Lambeth side, beyond the South Bank complex and Jubilee Gardens, containing the London Eye, is Belvedere Road, the area once known as Pedlar’s Acre.
You see tourists taking pictures of the new bridges and of London Eye from it. People say “Isn’t it great to have the upstream view of the Houses of Parliament now”. Whereas me, I feel it’s a shame we lost the beautiful Brunel bridge for the ugly railway crossing. Even though I often use Charing Cross station I think “Couldn’t they have put it somewhere else?”
Laurie Smith
