Waterloo Bridge

Stand still for a moment and feel the wind. On Waterloo Bridge it almost always comes off the water, cool and damp, carrying the smell of the river and the faint diesel of passing boats. Below you, the Thames runs wide and grey-green. Buses rumble past at your back. And in front of you, the whole of London opens up.

This is one of the best places in the city simply to look. The river bends here, so the bridge sits on the outside of a curve. That gives you two long views at once. Turn east, and the dome of Saint Paul's Cathedral rises above the towers of the City. Turn west, and you see the Houses of Parliament, the London Eye, and the long sweep of the Embankment.

The bridge under your feet is not the first one here. The original Waterloo Bridge was designed by the Scottish engineer John Rennie. It was built of granite, with nine elegant arches, and it opened in 1817. The date was chosen with care: the second anniversary of the Battle of Waterloo, where British and allied armies defeated Napoleon. The bridge was named as a national victory monument.

Rennie's bridge was much admired. A popular story says the Italian sculptor Antonio Canova called it one of the noblest bridges in the world, worth travelling a great distance to see. The exact words are often quoted, but the story is better treated as a well-loved anecdote than a precise record. What is certain is that painters loved it too.

Around the turn of the twentieth century, the French painter Claude Monet stayed at the Savoy Hotel, just upstream on the north bank. From his window, he painted Waterloo Bridge again and again. He worked in fog, in smoke, in morning haze and in low winter sun. In those canvases, the arches almost dissolve into coloured light. If you visit on a misty day, you may see exactly what he saw.

But the old bridge had a hidden weakness. After the medieval London Bridge was replaced downstream, the river began to flow faster. The stronger current scoured away the riverbed around the piers of Waterloo Bridge. Over the years, the foundations began to settle. By the 1920s, the bridge was clearly in trouble, and after long public argument, the decision was made to pull it down in the 1930s.

The new bridge was designed by the architect Sir Giles Gilbert Scott, the same man behind the red telephone box and Battersea Power Station. Look at its shape. Instead of many heavy arches, there are five long, shallow spans. The lines are clean and almost horizontal. It was a modern design for a modern city, made of reinforced concrete rather than carved granite.

Then came the Second World War. Construction continued through the Blitz, when German bombs fell on London night after night. The bridge itself was hit during the war. Even so, it opened to traffic in stages, partly in 1942 and fully in 1945. It was the only Thames bridge in central London built during the conflict.

Here is the surprise most visitors miss. With so many men away fighting, a large part of the workforce on this bridge was made up of women. For decades, their contribution was hardly recorded, and the bridge's nickname — the Ladies' Bridge — was passed on mostly as river folklore. In recent years, historians have searched through photographs and records and confirmed that women really did help to build it.

Now look down at the surface of the bridge itself. The concrete has a pale, slightly warm colour. Scott chose a finish that is washed clean each time it rains, so the bridge stays light rather than turning black with soot. That was a quiet but practical idea in a city that, at the time, was still full of coal smoke.

The bridge also carries a darker story. In 1978, a Bulgarian writer named Georgi Markov was waiting for a bus near here. He felt a sharp sting in his leg. He died a few days later, and investigators concluded he had been poisoned with a tiny pellet. The case is often remembered as the umbrella murder, one of the strangest episodes of the Cold War in London.

At either end, the bridge connects two very different worlds. To the north stands Somerset House, a grand eighteenth-century building now used for art and events. To the south lie the concrete buildings of the Southbank Centre and the National Theatre. Under the southern end of the bridge, there is often a secondhand book market. Tables of paperbacks and old maps sit out beside the river, sheltered from the rain.

The bridge has also lived in songs and films. A 1940 Hollywood film starring Vivien Leigh took its name from the bridge. And many Londoners link this view with the Kinks song Waterloo Sunset, from the 1960s, which describes watching the river and the sunset from somewhere very close to here. On a clear evening, you will understand why.

So before you walk on, take one more look in each direction. The dome to the east. Parliament to the west. Boats passing below the concrete spans that women helped to build in wartime. The wind is still coming off the water. The buses are still rolling past. And the river keeps moving under you, just as it did under Rennie's granite arches more than two centuries ago.