Putney Bridge
George Seymour
c. 1882-84
Source: Watson, “The Lower Thames — I,” 485
“I propose that we should take the water at Putney, and proceed down the river very much at our leisure, until we find ourselves brought to a standstill amid the confusing traffic and the crowded shipping of Greenwich Reach” [continued below].
Other images of Putney Bridge
Image capture and formatting by George P. Landow.
There, in our first illustration, is old Putney Bridge, with the moon shining down upon it, on one of those nights when, as in Keats's daring simile, the clouds are “like herded elephants,” and the moon is now obscured, and now shines dimly through a vaporous cloud, and anon sits enthroned for a brief moment in a clear space of sky. Thus to make a pictorial record of one of the oldest and quaintest of Thames bridges is like writing history, for even as I write old Putney Bridge is vanishing into the past. This subject of bridges, indeed, is rather a sad one for a lover of the Thames. Such as cross the river between Putney and Westminster are chiefly costly disfigurements, their ugliness usually being greater in proportion to their cost and the newness of the date of their construction.
The two bridges Watson so disliked: Left: Thomas Page's Westminster Bridge and R. M. Ordish and Sir Jospeh Bazalgette’s Albert Bridge. [Click on these images for larger pictures.]
There are those who find themselves able to admire the new bridge at Chelsea, which seems to have been suggested by a wild, bemuddled dream of forts and Turkish minarets and Chinese pagodas. From such persons, doubtless, proceeds that “public voice” which has been crying aloud for the destruction of Putney Bridge. They have reason with them, in so far as that they are entitled to complain of the bridge being weak, and dangerous for the crowds on a boat-race day. It is now more than a century and a half since thirty inhabitants of Putney and Fulham advanced £740 each to build a bridge. One suspects that they were men of taste as well as of substance, for this bridge was no commonplace viaduct, intended merely for a utilitarian causeway between the hither bank and the farther. I suspect that when they approved the design, they were looking forward to the day when they would be able to lean their elbows on the top of the quaint triangular buttresses, and perchance to angle for trout therefrom. Until the authorities began to remove it piecemeal a few months ago, the bridge was beautiful alike for form and colour. Nowhere on the Thames banks was there anything equal to the mossy green of its decaying piles. On either side, when the tide is low, there is left exposed a bright strip of pebbly beach; and from hence what is seen of the river and its banks looks much as it must have looked a century ago, before the railway or the paddle-steamer had made Putney quite so familiar to the common cockney.
Far away as it seems from the heart of London, Putney is yet situated, like the home of “he Gardener's Daughter” —
"Not wholly in the husy world, nor quite
Beyond it." [486]
Bibliography
Watson, Aaron. “The Lower Thames —I.” The Magazine of Art. 6 (1882-83): 485-92. Internet Archive version of a copy in the University of Toronto Library. Web. 15 November 2014
Last modified 15 November 2014