The Sun.
London, England, 1858-09-30 00:00:00

TAB NEW BRIDGE AT WESTMINSTER,

The unsightliness of " Old" Westminster Bridge
makes everyone anxious for the moment when its
young and graceful successor shall strip itself of its
present mysterious hoarding, and at last unfold its
beauty and utility to the public gaze and occupa-
tion. For years past we have been accustomed to
submit to a horrible disfigurement of the great
western water thoroughfare which, while stripped
of its old-fashioned quaintness and associations, has
never during its numerous transformations as yet
realised our modern notions of the fitness of things.
We have lost the row of covered recesses on each
flag-way which were wont. to be such com-
forts to the way-worn traveller, and of which, an-
tiquarians, affiieteil with a love of the marvellous,
used to tell us (such wonderful stories of murders
that had been discovered by means of the echoes of
the bridge. The crown, so pleasant to look at, and
so picturesque to every one but omnibus horses and
obese pedestrians, has been gradually shaven down
to the very verge of safety, and the balustrades,
through which strangers peeped at the finest river
views in Europe, have been superseded by a
wooden partition, which permits nothing to be seen
but its own dull, impervious monotony. The
traveller on the "silent highway" has had his eye
offended by closed and bungled up arches decorated
with warning whisps of hay ; and, altogether
this great metropolitan structure has looked
more like an Irish castle rack-rent than a great
arterial communication in the greatest city in the
world. Meanwhile, the traffic, north and south, had
daily and hourly increased, until, at last, a daily
average of thirty thousand vehicles of one sort or
another has been ascertained to pass over the crazy
waterway. Poor M. Labeylle, the Swiss engineer
who, some century or so ago, was employed by:the
Board of Works of the day to construct Westmin-
ster Bridge, had little notion of the future work
which his edifice would have to do, or he cer-
tainly would not have submitted so easily to the
authorities, who in all ages have been the
sworn foes of architects and engineers. M.
Labeylle laid his foundations simply for a wooden
superstructure, but even for that his arrangements
were insufficient, and would be laughed at by the
merest tyro in engineering of the present day. The
worthy Helvetian made his wooden caissons where
he listed, and having duly filled them with stones,
he had them towed to the station wherein they
were finally to rest. Having got them there he
commenced digging a foundation for them with
great pertinacity, never remembering that as fast as
he made a hole at the ebb tide, the water filled it
again at the flow, until at last, tired of the bootless
work, he dropped his caissons on the gravel, and com-
menced raising his piers without further preparation.
He had designed a wooden structure, but the powers
that were decided that it should be stone, and ac-
cordingly stone it was made ; so that between the
unskilfulness of the engineer and the ignorant
mulishness of the authorities, a bridge was'made in
the eighteenth century which became crumbling
and dangerous in less than one hundred years ;
whereas old London Bridge, which had been built
by Peter of Colechurch some eight hundred years
before, showed a tenacity which almost defied the
pickaxes of the artisans of the present structure.
When that bridge was completed, and free passage
was given to the immense volume of water which
previously had had to squeeze itself in a sort of
cascade through the numerous arches of the old
bridge, the doom of Westminster Bridge was
sealed. The "scour" began immediately to under-
mine its unskilfully-placed caissons, and that
" settling down " commenced which, during living
memory, has been the constant cause of trouble and
anxiety to successive Boards of Works.
The erection of the new Houses of Parliament
brought matters to a crisis. Sir Charles Barry
could not bear to see his beautiful Gothic tracery
stand side by side with a crazy tottering agglome-
ration of wooden hoardings, clumsy looking piles,
debilitated arches, some blind, some with one eye
out, some labelled dangerous with the significant
bundle of straw, and with a roadway shaven so
close to the crown as to threaten a shower of omni-
buses or some similar calamity into the river
at any given moment. Mr. Page, the eminent go-
vernment engineer, was accordingly set to work, and
in due time a design was produced at once bold,
original, and beautiful, and which would satisfy
the artist's desideratum of harmonising with the
new Palace, and at the same time fulfil the more
utilitarian end of accommodating the enormously
increased traffic of the river. A perfectly novel and
courageous conception respecting the new bridge
was, that it should be actually constructed on the
site of the old one while the others still remained
open for traffic ; and at this moment piers arc 'icilyg
completed and ribs arc being thrown across, while
the human tide rolls incessantly over head; and
the
great intercommunication of north and south
London
goes on without interruption on a platform
so to speak, under which the piledriver, the black-
smith, and the mason are working incessantly
night and day. The works of the new bridge were
commenced in 1853 by Messrs. Mare, of Black-
wall, from the designs of Mr. Page, and continued
for two years in the hands of that firm, until its
bankruptcy brought everything to a standstill, and
two valuable years were subsequently lost in a red-
tape interregnum. Mr. Page then took the work in
hand himself, and with the powerful aid of Mr.
Harris, his chief superintendent, got more work
done during the last year than would have been done
in six at the. rate maintained by the original con-
tractors. At this moment the abutments of both