The Four-Story Wooden Palace That Was Shipped to London in Pieces and Pegged Together on Top of the Bridge

Old London Bridge — the substantial 905-foot stone-arch crossing that connected the City of London to Southwark — had supported substantial inhabited buildings along its length since substantially the original 1209 construction. By the late 16th century the bridge carried approximately 200 dwellings, shops, and warehouses built directly above the roadway, with structures projecting outward over the river on cantilevered timber jetties. The bridge was a linear riverine village.

The most distinguished of these inhabited bridge-structures was Nonsuch House, erected on the bridge between 1577 and 1578.

What it was

Nonsuch House was an unusual building. It was four stories tall, constructed entirely of timber (no iron nails — only oak pegs), gabled and turreted in the Flemish Renaissance style, and decorated with carved-and-painted external timberwork. It occupied a 60-foot section of the bridge roadway between the seventh and eighth piers from the southern (Southwark) end, replacing an earlier drawbridge-control house that had been destroyed in the 1576 redevelopment of that section of the bridge.

The unusual feature was that the structure had been prefabricated somewhere in the Low Countries (probably at Antwerp or Amsterdam — the documentary record is not specific) and shipped to London in numbered pieces. The London assembly was executed using the wooden pegs the Low Countries carpenters had pre-drilled and pre-fitted; no on-site cutting or modification was required.

The assembly took approximately five months in the autumn and winter of 1577–1578. The finished building stood as a Flemish-style architectural anomaly in the otherwise English-vernacular London bridge streetscape for the next 180 years.

The name

The name Nonsuch — meaning ‘incomparable’ or ‘unmatched’ — echoed Henry VIII’s 1538 palace of Nonsuch in Surrey, the Tudor royal hunting-palace that had been built as a English answer to Francis I’s Chambord. The 1577 bridge structure borrowed the palatial name as a commercial-marketing gesture; the building had no direct connection to the royal Surrey palace.

The commercial use of the structure through the Elizabethan, Jacobean, and Stuart periods was mixed. The ground floor housed luxury shops; the upper floors provided private apartments let to wealthy City of London merchants and their families. The top-floor apartments had views over the Thames upstream and downstream and commanded the highest rents on the entire bridge.

What it survived

Nonsuch House survived the Great Fire of London in 1666. The bridge had burnt as far as the fourth-from-south pier in the 1633 fire; the 1666 fire had burnt the northern end as far as the gap left by the 1633 earlier burn; the standing gap between the two burnt zones prevented the 1666 fire from crossing the bridge into Southwark. Nonsuch House stood in the unburnt central section and was undamaged.

It survived for another 91 years.

The demolition

The 18th-century City of London Corporation decided in the 1750s to demolish the entire inhabited-building line along Old London Bridge as part of the wider widening of the bridge roadway and the improvement of riverside traffic flow. The Corporation’s surveyors classified the bridge dwellings as obsolete fire hazards. Nonsuch House was demolished in 1757 along with everything else along the bridge.

The wooden pegs that had held the building together for 180 years had never been replaced. The demolition workers reported that they had been able to disassemble the entire structure intact by extracting the pegs in reverse order — the same process the 1577 builders had used to assemble it, run backward. The recovered timbers were sold for re-use in Southwark warehouse construction; none of the original Nonsuch House fabric is now traceable.

The bridge itself was demolished and replaced between 1823 and 1831. The Stone Gate at the southern end that had displayed traitors’ heads for 355 years came down at the same time. The subsequent 19th- and 20th-century London Bridge rebuildings completed the removal of every visible trace of the original medieval-Tudor structure.