A bird’s eye view of 3 Bridges
illustration published in the London News in 1859, showing the 3 bridges,
Nine Elms Railway Station, designed by William Tite, president of the RIBA. He also designed the Royal Exchange in Bank Junction.
Like all budding historians I love maps. Just like a text, painting, model, or any other media, they can show what a place looked like or how people of the time saw it and what they chose to depict.
Here’s a map I will return to over and over again, trying to figure out each building, pointing out extant and long gone structures. By the 1850s, balloon flights were a common feature of the London skyline, so it is possible the artist took to the sky to overview the area. The perspective is slightly skewed, particularly the north west section (top left - notice how the Royal Hospital Chelsea looks like is about to roll down the image!). This type of technical inaccuracy is quite deliberate and helps to show features in the background, which otherwise would be hard to see or depict.
The most detailed depictions are clearly the buildings in the foreground, which on the Vauxhall and Battersea bank are of industrial nature. However, I think the artist has shrunk the area and stripped it off some features, perhaps to simplify the image. I will need a higher resolution photograph, as I’m not quite sure where the Nine Elm Station is in the picture. This station was built in 1838 and was the original terminus of the London and Southampton Railway Company. With the opening of Waterloo Station in 1848, the Nine Elms Station was closed to passengers and used from then on as a goods yard station, although Queen Victoria and Prince Albert still used it to travel to Osborne House on the Isle of Wight. Just left off the clearing in the bottom left is the railway line running parallel, with a steam train and its smoky plume making its way west.
Also missing are the Heathwall Sewer (culverted in 1866), which ran parallel to Wandsworth Road and flowed into the Thames on the border of Nine Elms and Vauxhall. The above map (1840) shows how the railway line runs in a straight line from the top right corner towards Clapham Junction, whereas our illustration does away with the Sewer and other water features (Docks and the Millpond) and has the railway line further away from the bank of the Thames and meander west.
1 - The original Battersea Bridge, built in the 1770s in wood, designed by Henry Holland (Hans Town - Carlton House).
2 - The original Victoria Bridge built in the 1850s , designed by Thomas Page (current Westminster Bridge).
3 - The original Vauxhall Bridge built in the 1810s, designed by John Rennie (2nd stone London Bridge now in Lake Havasu, Arizona).
1 - Pimlico Station. The original terminus for the West End and Crystal Palace Railway line.
2 - Piers being built for the Grosvenor Railway Bridge, which would carry the line to the new Victoria Station opened in 1860.
3 - Holy Trinity Pimlico. This church was built on the current site of Bessborough Gardens, consecrated in 1852 and demolished in 1953.
Pimlico was developed for the 2nd Marquees of Westminster by builder and MP Thomas Cubitt who donated land for the erection of the church. Cubitt also proposed Battersea Park to Parliament in 1846, most likely to develop a route between his own estate in Clapham and Pimlico (road-embankment-bridge).
1 - Battersea Park was inaugurated by Queen Victoria the year before this illustration was published in 1848. Much of the landscaping would take place in the following years. There’s a cluster of moored boat in the distance where the Park’s wharf would have received about 50,000 visitors on Sundays.
2 - The current site of the Battersea Power Station was occupied by the Vauxhall and Southwark Water Company, which in the 1870s was providing the capital’s most polluted drinking water. One contemporary study described it as ‘slightly turbid from insufficient filtration, and contained moving organisms’. Grim!
3 - The river was still very busy with wherry boats, fishing vessels and transport of goods, all along what is nowadays a fairly tranquil stretch of the river.
