The Bridge That Was a Street and a Dam

Old London Bridge stood across the River Thames for six hundred and twenty-two years. It was built between 1176 and 1209 under the direction of the priest Peter de Colechurch, on the orders of Henry II as an act of royal piety. It carried houses, shops, a chapel, two gatehouses, and a single roadway across nineteen stone arches. It was the only bridge across the Thames in London until 1750. It survived medieval fires, plague, the Great Fire of London in 1666 (which it stopped, on its northern end), the Civil War, two Stuart restorations, and the Industrial Revolution. It was finally demolished, plank by stone, between 1831 and 1832.

It also dammed the river. The piers of the bridge, set close together in slow-moving water and surrounded by extensive timber pile-and-rubble breakwaters called starlings, blocked approximately 80 percent of the river’s flow at the bridge crossing. The Thames upstream of Old London Bridge — the section that ran through Westminster, past the City, and toward the western suburbs — moved like a slow lake. It became one of the most reliable freezing rivers in Europe. During the Little Ice Age, between 1608 and 1814, the upper Thames froze hard enough for frost fairs to be held on its surface on at least twenty-three separate winters. After 1831, when the new bridge opened and the old piers and starlings were dismantled, the Thames in London has never frozen.

The construction

Peter de Colechurch was the priest of St. Mary Colechurch in Cheapside, a small London parish that has not survived. He was already an experienced bridge-builder — he had supervised an earlier wooden Thames bridge in 1163 — when Henry II authorized him to build a stone replacement in 1176. The work began that year and continued for thirty-three years, through the reign of Richard I and into the reign of King John. Peter died in 1205 without seeing it finished and was buried in the crypt of the bridge chapel — a small Norman chapel dedicated to Saint Thomas Becket, built directly onto the bridge structure.

The bridge had nineteen pointed Gothic arches, each separated by a massive stone pier. The piers sat on the river bed and were protected by starlings — irregular almond-shaped piles of timber piles, mortar, and rubble that surrounded each pier and formed effective breakwaters against scour. The starlings grew over the bridge’s life, as repeated repairs and additions accreted: by the 17th century the original starlings of the 1209 bridge had been more than doubled in width, and the available channel width for the river to flow through had narrowed accordingly.

The roadway across the bridge was approximately twelve feet wide. Houses began to be built on the bridge within the first generation of its completion, on cantilevered platforms that extended outward from the piers. By the 14th century there was a continuous street of houses, three to seven stories tall, on both sides of the central roadway, with shops at street level and residences above. There were two gates — one at each end — and a drawbridge in the middle, originally for naval defense and later for ceremonial use.

The most spectacular building on the bridge was Nonsuch House, a four-story timber palace built in 1577 at the Southwark end, replacing an earlier stone gatehouse. Nonsuch was prefabricated in the Netherlands, shipped across in pieces, and assembled on-site without iron nails — the entire structure was held together with wooden pegs. It stood for more than a century. Drawings and engravings of it survive.

Living on the bridge

The population of Old London Bridge varied between approximately 200 and 500 residents at any given period. It was a fashionable address for shopkeepers — particularly pin-makers, hosiers, glovers, and milliners — because of the high foot traffic between the City and Southwark. Hans Holbein the Younger lived briefly on the bridge in the 1530s. So did the publisher Wynkyn de Worde, the successor of Caxton.

The bridge’s gatehouses were used for the display of severed heads of executed traitors. The southern gatehouse — the Stone Gate at Southwark, replaced by Nonsuch House in 1577 — was the standard execution-display location through the 16th and early 17th centuries. The heads were par-boiled and tarred to slow decomposition and then mounted on pikes above the gate. The German traveler Paul Hentzner counted thirty heads above the gate in 1598. The practice ended in 1660.

The bridge also functioned as the only major roadway south out of London until the 18th century. Carts, horses, oxen, and pedestrians moved across it in continuous queues during the working day. The crossing took, by contemporary accounts, between twenty minutes and two hours depending on traffic. Several major queue-related accidents are recorded — the worst, in 1633, killed approximately twenty people in a crowd crush on the central drawbridge.

How it dammed the river

The hydraulic effect of the bridge was understood from at least the 16th century, when the water level above the bridge was observed to be sometimes as much as five feet higher than the level below at falling tide. The waterworks engineer Peter Morris obtained a 500-year lease on the second pier from the north in 1581 and installed a series of water wheels in the gap between starlings; the wheels exploited the bridge’s hydraulic head to pump water up to the city’s first piped water supply. The same wheels operated, with various rebuilds, until the bridge was demolished in 1831.

The downstream side of the bridge produced a near-continuous turbulent rapid as water forced through the narrow gaps under each arch. The drop between water levels could exceed five feet at low spring tides. Pleasure boats avoided the bridge or had their passengers disembark and walk around; a boat trying to “shoot the bridge” — pass under it at falling tide — was likely to be wrecked. The expression shooting London Bridge meant taking an unnecessary risk; it survived in English usage into the 19th century.

The bridge’s effect on the river’s upstream behavior was the dam. With 80 percent of the flow obstructed, the river above the bridge moved slowly. In severe winters of the Little Ice Age, particularly during the Maunder Minimum of 1645–1715, the upstream Thames froze across its full width, sometimes for weeks at a time. The frozen river was solid enough to support frost fairs, ox-roasts, printing presses, and (in 1684) coach-and-six teams driven back and forth across the ice between Westminster and Blackfriars.

Demolition

By the late 18th century the bridge was both architecturally and hydraulically obsolete. The houses had been cleared in the 1750s and 1760s as a public-safety measure (fire risk, structural overload). The arches were widened and the starlings reduced in 1759 to allow somewhat freer river traffic. The bridge nonetheless remained a major obstruction to navigation, drainage, and sewage outflow — and the sewage problem was becoming acute, leading directly into the Great Stink of 1858.

The City of London Corporation commissioned a replacement bridge in 1801. The new design, by the engineer John Rennie, was approved in 1823 and built between 1824 and 1831, directly upstream of the old bridge. Rennie died before completion; the bridge was finished by his son John Rennie the Younger and opened on 1 August 1831.

The old bridge was demolished between August 1831 and the spring of 1832. The starlings were dismantled last. The river’s flow was finally unblocked in May 1832. The upstream Thames has not frozen since.

The 1831 Rennie bridge itself was demolished in 1967 — its 19th-century granite blocks were sold to the American oil entrepreneur Robert P. McCulloch, who had them shipped, in numbered pieces, to Lake Havasu City, Arizona. The blocks were used to face a new concrete bridge across an artificial channel in the Arizona desert. The Rennie bridge in Arizona was opened in 1971. The current London Bridge, on the original site in central London, was opened in 1972. It is a flat concrete deck on three piers.

The chapel of St. Thomas on Old London Bridge, where Peter de Colechurch had been buried in 1205, was demolished in 1832 along with the rest. His remains were thrown into the river along with the rest of the medieval rubble. They were never recovered.