London Bridge and its Houses, c. 1209-1761

By Dorian Gerhold

London Bridge lined with houses from end to end was one of the most extraordinary structures ever seen in London. It was home to over 500 people, perched above the rushing waters of the Thames, and was one of the city’s main shopping streets. It is among the most familiar images of London in the past, but little has previously been known about the houses and the people who lived and worked in them. This book uses plentiful newly-discovered evidence, including detailed descriptions of nearly every house, to tell the story of the bridge and its houses and inhabitants.

With the new information it is possible to reconstruct the plan of the bridge and houses in the seventeenth century, to trace the history of each house back through rentals and a survey to 1358, revealing the original layout, to date most of the houses which appear in later views, and to show how the houses and their occupants changed during five and half centuries. The book describes what stopped the houses falling into the river, how the houses were gradually enlarged, what their layout was inside, what goods were sold on the bridge and how these changed over time, the extensive rebuilding in 1477-1548 and 1683-96, and the removal of the houses around 1760.

There are many new discoveries - about the structure of the bridge, the width of the roadway, the original layout of the houses, how the houses were supported, the size and internal planning of the houses, the quality of their architecture, and the trades practised on the bridge. The book includes five newly-commissioned reconstruction drawings showing what we now know about the bridge and its houses.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Oxbow Books
• Release date: Oct 31, 2021
• ISBN: 9781789257526

Dorian Gerhold

Dr Dorian Gerhold is an independent historian, and was formerly a House of Commons Clerk. He has written about carriers and stage-coaches, industrial history, Westminster Hall, London’s suburban villas, urban cartography, Chancery records and Putney (where he lives). He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and of the Society of Antiquaries, and a member of the Council of the London Topographical Society.

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LONDON BRIDGE AND ITS HOUSES, c. 1209−1761

Detail from Anthonis van den Wyngaerde’s panorama of London in about 1544, showing London Bridge from the south-east.

LONDON BRIDGE AND ITS HOUSES, c. 1209−1761

DORIAN GERHOLD

New revised edition

Originally published in 2019 by the London Topographical Society

Published in the United Kingdom in 2021 by

OXBOW BOOKS

The Old Music Hall, 106–108 Cowley Road, Oxford, OX4 1JE

and in the United States by

OXBOW BOOKS

1950 Lawrence Road, Havertown, PA 19083

© Oxbow Books and the author 2021

Hardback Edition: ISBN 978-1-78925-751-9

Digital Edition: ISBN 978-1-78925-752-6

A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Control Number: 2021939544

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission from the publisher in writing.

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Contents

Author’s acknowledgements

Abbreviations and notes on house numbering, measurements and currency

1. Introduction

The bridge

Plans and views

2. Reconstructing the bridge and its houses

The roadway

Widths and depths of the houses

The cross buildings

Reconstructing the plan of the bridge and its houses

Piers and hammer beams

3. The houses from c 1209 to 1358

Origins

The houses in 1358

The ‘hautpas’ of 1358

4. The major buildings

The chapel

The stone gate

The drawbridge tower

Other structures

5. The houses from 1358 to 1633

Houses on new sites

Merging of plots

Rebuilding of houses

The house with many windows

Nonsuch House

Enlarging the houses

Landlord and tenants: leases

Landlord and tenants: repairs and rebuilding

6. Inside the houses in the seventeenth century

Cellars and shops

Upper rooms

Services

7. Fires and rebuildings 1633–82

The fire of 1633

The new building of 1645–49

The Great Fire of 1666 and the sheds

8. Trading on the bridge

The fourteenth and fifteenth centuries

The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries

Bridge customers

Booksellers

From the 1680s to the 1750s

9. Families and community

Bridge families

The bridge population in the late seventeenth century

Community

10. The great rebuilding of 1683–96

The northern end

Growing traffic and the keep-right rule

The middle part and the drawbridge houses

South of the stone gate

The new houses

11. From the fire of 1725 to the removal of the houses

The fire of 1725

The falling in of leases in the 1740s

The new houses of 1745

Managing the existing houses

Removing the houses

Survey of the houses on London Bridge, 1604–83

Appendices

1. Reconstructing the plan of London Bridge

2. The reliability of the views of the bridge

3. Tracing the bridge houses back to 1358

4. The hearth tax of 1664–66

5. Rents on the bridge

6. The northern end of the bridge

Notes

Image credits

AUTHOR’S ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS (FROM THE FIRST EDITION)

I am grateful to the Council of the London Topographical Society for agreeing to publish this book. Sheila O’Connell, as LTS editor, has been extremely helpful, as have Linda Fisher and Steve Hartley of Scorpion Creative. The Comptroller and City Solicitor’s Department, especially Tina Armstrong and Ann Harrison, made it possible for me to examine the leases of the bridge houses. Caroline Barron kindly read and commented on the text, as did Peter Cross-Rudkin for sections with engineering content. Staff at London Metropolitan Archives have as usual been unfailingly helpful. Staff of many other organisations were helpful in providing images. John Goodall of Country Life magazine commissioned the reconstruction drawings that form Figures 15 and 21, and I am fortunate to be able to use the excellent drawings by both Stephen Conlin and Pete Urmston. Others who have helped in various ways have included Jeremy Ashbee, Stewart Brown, David Harrison, Derek Keene, James Nye, Robert Peberdy, Andrew Roberts and Timothy Walker. My wife Lis has been sympathetic towards my sudden obsession with London Bridge and provided much encouragement throughout.

Note on the revised edition

It has been a pleasure working with Oxbow Books on this new edition. Only minor changes have been made to the text. All the original illustrations are included, and three have been added.

ABBREVIATIONS

BHJ LMA, Journals of the bridge estates committee (e.g. COL/CC/BHC/01/001 becomes BHJ, 001; BHJ, A, is LMA, CLA/007/EM/05/01/001)

BHP LMA, Papers of the bridge estates committee (e.g. COL/CC/BHC/03/001 becomes BHP, 001)

BHR LMA, Bridge House rentals and accounts (e.g. LMA,CLA/007/FN/02/001 becomes BHR, 001)

BHV 1 Bridge House views 1647–67, LMA, COL/CCS/CO/06/003

BHV 2 Bridge House views 1675–82, LMA, CLA/007/EM/06/04

CCLD City Corporation, Comptroller’s City Lands deeds, Bridge House (e.g. COL/CCS/RM11/02699 becomes CCLD, 02699)

Harding Vanessa Harding and Laura Wright (eds), London Bridge: selected accounts and rentals, 1381 – 1538 , London Record Society, vol. 31 (1995)

Home Gordon Home, Old London Bridge (1931)

Journals LMA, Journals of the Common Council

LLT Ancestry website, London land tax, Bridge Ward [accessed on 4 December 2018]

LMA London Metropolitan Archives

Repertories LMA, Repertories of the Court of Aldermen

Sharpe LB R.R. Sharpe, Calendar of letter-books … City of London … Letter-Book C (1901) (and subsequent volumes for Letter-Books E to K (1903–11))

Stow C.L. Kingsford (ed.), A survey of London by John Stow (1908), 2 vols

Survey Survey of the houses on London Bridge, 1604–83, pp. 143–66 below

TNA The National Archives

Watson Bruce Watson, Trevor Brigham and Tony Dyson, London Bridge: 2000 years of a river crossing , MOLAS monograph 8 (2001)

Note on house numbering

In this book, PE and PW refer to houses on the east and west sides of the principal or northern part, ME and MW to those on the middle part and SE and SW to those on the south part. The houses were known by their signs rather than by numbers, but these tended to change, so they are given numbers here. The numbers are those in Figure 14 and in the Survey (e.g. ME1 or SW13), with A and B added for formerly separate houses which were later merged. Note that, on the principal part, the layout changed several times upon rebuilding, so the same house number relates to a different point on the bridge according to whether it is up to 1633, between 1645 and 1666 or after 1682.

Note on measurements and currency

There are 12 inches to a foot. One foot is equivalent to 0.3048 metres. There were 12 pence in a shilling and 20 shillings in a pound. Pounds, shillings and pence are expressed in the following form: £12.6s.8d.

Fig. 1 John Norden’s view of the east side of the bridge in 1597–98. It is dedicated to Sir Richard Saltonstall, who was Lord Mayor in 1597–98, and bears the arms of Saltonstall and the City. In the foreground a boat has overturned and its passengers are in the water, probably after making the dangerous passage through the arches.

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

Views of London Bridge lined with houses from end to end are among the most familiar images of London in the past. Up to the late seventeenth century they show a higgledypiggledy collection of houses apparently developed piecemeal (Frontispiece and Figs 1–2). Thereafter a more regular set of houses lined the bridge, until these were eventually removed in 1757–61 (Fig. 84). The very familiarity of the views has perhaps dulled our sense of the extraordinary fact that 500 or more people lived directly above the Thames, with the water rushing through the arches below them. The equivalent of a small town was perched on the bridge, and probably some people lived their entire lives there. Inhabited bridges were common in western Europe from medieval times until the eighteenth century, but none was as long as London Bridge.¹

Little has been written about the houses, and some important questions remain unanswered. When were the buildings in the views constructed? How were they prevented from falling into the river? How were they organised internally? How did they change over time? Who occupied them? What were the advantages of trading on the bridge? Also, the views show only the backs of the houses facing away from the bridge, and nothing has been known for certain about their fronts facing the roadway.

The houses are in fact unusually well documented, and some of the most valuable sources have not previously been exploited. Apart from the views, there are the extensive records of the Bridge House, which maintained the bridge and owned the buildings on it. These include annual or near-annual rentals in house-by-house order back to 1460, listing the leaseholders, together with rentals of 1358 and 1404–21.² Accounts of expenditure also go back to 1460, and less informatively, with a gap, to 1404, and provide much useful information, especially about the rebuilding of houses.³ However, the rentals and accounts are of limited value without knowing exactly where the individual houses were. For this, the leases, which are plentiful from the early seventeenth century onwards, are essential. From about 1604 to 1660 almost all of them list the rooms in each dwelling with their dimensions, providing a detailed survey of nearly all the houses on the bridge, and of some at more than one date (see the Survey below). Only one of them has ever previously been used, and that in an unsatisfactory way without the dimensions.⁴ There is especially good coverage for the 1650s, when all the bridge houses were re-let. The other new source, and the single most illuminating document, is a table of measurements drawn up in 1683 covering most of the houses then standing, hitherto unnoticed among the papers of the committee which managed the Bridge House estates.⁵ As explained below, the leases and the table of measurements are the key to understanding the information in the rentals and accounts.

Fig. 2 View of the west side of the bridge in the Pepys Library, Cambridge, referred to in this book as the Pepys view. The date is unknown, but it cannot be earlier than 1590 (the date of the mills at the south end) or later than 1633 (when the principal part was burnt), unless compiled from earlier materials.

With this evidence the questions posed above can be answered, and we can greatly increase our understanding of the houses and the community they contained. Much of what the documents tell us is surprising, and contrary to what has previously been believed about the bridge. The measurements of 1683 will provide our starting point, but first the bridge itself and the views and plans of it must be introduced.

The bridge

London Bridge, linking the City to Southwark and southeast England, was the only fixed crossing of the Thames downstream of Kingston-upon-Thames until 1729. There were earlier timber bridges, but the first with stone arches was built between about 1176 and 1209, at the time when such bridges were becoming common in England.⁶ Timber used in the southern abutment was felled in 1187 or 1188, and a datestone of 1192 was found ‘in the arch work’ in a cellar close to the north end in the eighteenth century.⁷ This was the bridge that remained in use until 1831, and on which the houses stood. It was about 150 feet east of the present London Bridge (see Fig. 106). Its length was 926 feet, and it had nineteen piers linked by nineteen arches and a wooden drawbridge.⁸ It is usually said to have been built by Peter of Colechurch, who was chaplain of St Mary Colechurch in the City and had earlier rebuilt London’s wooden bridge. However, it is possible that his main role was as fundraiser rather than builder, at least from 1202 until his death in 1205. In 1202 King John intended Isembert of Saintes to complete the bridge and add houses to it, and Isembert may well have done so, though there is no direct evidence of him coming to London. Isembert had experience of building bridges in France, and had constructed houses on the bridge at La Rochelle to help pay for it.⁹

Fig. 3 Reconstruction drawing by Museum of London Archaeology of three stages of the bridge’s construction.

Fig. 4 Reconstruction drawn by Peter Jackson in about 1970 showing the bridge under construction, demonstrating the challenging conditions under which the bridge was built. The bridge in the background reflects an earlier belief, since disproved, that the preceding timber bridge was further east.

Constructing a bridge over such a large river was a major undertaking, comparable to building an important cathedral or castle. There is no evidence that before the nineteenth century anyone was capable of building coffer dams (watertight structures to exclude water from an area of riverbed) in the Thames at London. Instead, piles were driven into the riverbed from a boat at low tide, creating an enclosure that could be filled with rubble (forming the base of the pier) and across which planks could be laid to provide a firm working surface. Larger piles could then be driven in to form the ‘starling’ around the pier, after which the pier could be completed, with its stone facing (Figs 3–5). The starlings were essential, because the method of construction meant that the piers had relatively shallow foundations, which would soon have been undermined without the starlings. The price paid for this was that a great part of the river’s flow was obstructed: at high tide, when the starlings were covered, the width of flow was reduced to 508 feet, and at low tide, when the starlings were exposed, it was reduced to 237 feet, only 26% of its full width.¹⁰ The bridge was almost a dam, and, depending on the tide, the difference in the level of the water upstream and downstream could be as much as 5 feet; Ned Ward wrote in about 1700 of ‘the frightful roaring of the bridge water-falls’.¹¹ The river flowed with great force through the arches, scouring the foundations, and constant and expensive maintenance of the starlings was necessary throughout the bridge’s life. To build a bridge that endured for more than six centuries in such conditions and with such limited technology was an immense achievement (Fig. 6). Only twice in that long history, in 1281 and 1437, did parts of the structure collapse (five arches and two arches respectively), a better record than many major bridges.

The arches seemed unnecessarily small to later generations, and the piers unnecessarily numerous and wide (from north to south).¹² In fact the arches were slightly larger than was usual at the time, averaging about 24 feet, compared with usually less than 18 feet. Only from about the mid-thirteenth century were much larger bridge arches built, mainly in northern England.¹³ Wide piers made it easier to build one pier at a time, as they could more easily withstand unequal loads on their two sides, and it was less likely that the collapse of one pier would endanger neighbouring ones. In the eighteenth century Hawksmoor suggested that the exceptionally large pier on which the bridge’s chapel stood was intended as a buttress, which would withstand shocks such as the collapse of an arch and prevent such a collapse spreading.¹⁴ The number of piers and arches increased the cost of maintaining the bridge but, as we shall see, made it easier to build houses on it, and the houses provided revenue for maintenance.

Fig. 5 William Knight’s cross-section of several piers and arches of the bridge in 1826–27, during the removal of a pier and its adjoining arches, showing the relatively shallow piles of the piers and the deeper ones of the starlings.

At first the administration of the bridge may have been a shared responsibility of lay officials, described as the warden and proctors, and the ‘brethren and chaplains ministering in the chapel of St Thomas’ on the bridge. From 1282 onwards that responsibility belonged to the bridge wardens – from 1311 two in number and chosen from among the citizens of London.¹⁵ They headed an organisation known as the Bridge House, which operated under the supervision of the City and never became an independent body.¹⁶ It had premises just east of the bridge in Southwark. The bridge was the first in England known to have had a permanent endowment.¹⁷ Three-quarters or more of its revenues in the fifteenth century came from the rents of its properties on the bridge and elsewhere and from quit rents, the rest being the income from the Stocks Market and from tolls on carts passing over the bridge and boats passing under the drawbridge. The houses on the bridge were a third of the rents, and therefore about a quarter of total revenue, though this was of course the gross income, ignoring the cost of building and maintaining them.¹⁸

Fig. 6 Reconstruction drawn by Peter Jackson in about 1990 showing the bridge in about 1600. Some changes would be needed to reflect subsequent research, especially the greater length of the piers and the buildings on them, but the drawing brilliantly captures the audacity of laying a ribbon of stone across such a powerful river.

Fig. 7 Outline plan of the bridge. North is at the top. The starlings are not shown.

By the time views began to be drawn of the bridge in the sixteenth century, it bore three major buildings and four groups of houses (Fig. 7). The most important building was the chapel, standing on by far the largest pier and dedicated to St Thomas Becket. On the second pier from the Southwark end was the stone gate, which was one of the City’s defensive gates. Five piers north of that was the tower from which the drawbridge was operated, later replaced by Nonsuch House. The drawbridge allowed ships to pass to and from quays upstream, notably Queenhithe, and was an important defensive feature, though it had almost entirely fallen out of use by the late fifteenth century.

All the houses had shops on the ground floor. The largest group was at the north end, stretching from St Magnus’s church, which adjoined the northern abutment, to an open space known as the Square. These houses were usually described as the principal east part and the principal west part of the bridge, though that terminology died out after the fire of 1633. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries the principal part yielded as much rent as all the other houses. The next group of houses lay between the Square and the drawbridge, and was known as the middle east part and the middle west part. Between the drawbridge and Southwark was ‘the end of the bridge’, where there were two separate groups (usually treated as one) either side of the stone gate. The two groups will be referred to here as the drawbridge houses and the houses south of the stone gate, or together as the south part. The individual houses were known by their signs rather than by numbers, but these tended to change, so they are identified in this book by the part of the bridge (PE and PW for the principal part, ME and MW for the middle part and SE and SW for the south part) followed by the number used in Figure 14 and the Survey.¹⁹

The whole of the bridge was in the City’s Bridge Ward Within, forming three ‘precincts’, corresponding to the south, middle and principal parts of the bridge, except that the precincts containing the south and principal parts included a few additional houses. The south part was in the parish of St Olave, Southwark, and the other two parts were in St Magnus parish, the dividing line being at the drawbridge.

Traffic over the bridge was so important to London that works that required it to be closed were usually carried out at night.²⁰ When the drawbridge had to be replaced in 1722, resulting in the bridge being closed during the day, the watermen undertook to provide thirty extra boats.²¹ But the bridge was not just a way of crossing the river: it was also an important part of London’s identity. It dominated the view of anyone approaching London along the Thames and was a constant presence to people on the river or the waterfront. It was a place for pageants and for ceremonial entrances to the City. Its maintenance was the largest single collective endeavour of London’s citizens, many of whom made bequests towards it in their wills, and it symbolised their wealth and corporate identity.²²

Foreign visitors were loud in their praise, at least in the sixteenth century. According to a Frenchman, L. Grenade, in 1578, it was

a great and powerful bridge, the most magnificent that exists in the whole of Europe. It is … completely covered with houses which are all like big castles. And the shops are great storehouses full of all sorts of very opulent merchandise. And there is nowhere in London which is more commercial than this bridge. … I reiterate that there is no bridge in the whole of Europe which is on a great river like the Thames and as formidable, as spectacular and as bustling with trade as this bridge in London.²³

For Grenade it was one of the four most impressive structures in London, along with St Paul’s Cathedral, the Royal Exchange and the Tower of London. A visiting Moravian in 1597 described London Bridge as ‘one of the finest bridges in the whole of Europe for size and beauty’. For a German visitor in 1592, it was a ‘beautiful long bridge, with quite splendid, handsome and well-built houses, which are occupied by merchants of consequence’.²⁴

Plans and views

What was probably the first plan of the bridge was drawn for the Bridge House in 1587 by Arthur Gregory, who worked for Francis Walsingham.²⁵ It has not survived, and nor have the plans drawn in connection with the removal of the houses in 1757–61.²⁶ There are three surviving plans of part or all of the bridge, all of them highly informative in different ways. That of 1633, made on the orders of the Privy Council following a fire, shows the northern abutment and the first seven piers and starlings, including the roadway (widened after the fire) and what seem to be the cellars in the piers (Fig. 8).²⁷ South of that it omits the piers and starlings but shows the roadway and buildings for a short distance. It is to scale, and is helpful for reconstructing the houses on the north part of the bridge both before and after 1633. For example, without it we would not know that the roadway curved slightly between the principal and middle parts of the bridge. A plan of about 1725, also drawn following a fire, provides an outline of the properties south of the stone gate (Fig. 114).²⁸ Though not to scale, it is invaluable for reconstructing the layout of the houses there. It reveals, for example, that the southernmost house on the east side in the rentals was well south of the bridge abutment and not contiguous to other Bridge House property. The third plan covers the whole bridge, and is to scale, but it shows only the piers and starlings and not the roadway or houses. It was drawn by the engineer, Charles Labelye, in 1746 to promote his proposal to cut the cost of maintenance either by improving the piers and reducing the size of the starlings or by removing every other pier and starling (Fig. 9).²⁹ It has been used in this book as the basis for the reconstruction plan. Only one of the three plans shows both piers and roadway, and none shows both piers and houses in relation to each other. Reconstructing the houses and how they were supported therefore requires the bringing together of information and measurements from different sources, as discussed in Appendix 1.

Fig. 8 The plan of the north end of the bridge drawn for the Privy Council in 1633 after the fire of that year. North is to the right. In the burnt area, covering the seven northernmost piers, it shows the starlings, the piers and the roadway, together with the waterworks to the west. The black shapes are almost certainly cellars. Further south, the piers and starlings are not shown, but the roadway and houses are, including the chapel house, though not with much accuracy. The roadway in the burnt area is shown 20 feet wide, as the Privy Council was demanding, and two lines mark the six-foot wide footway it wanted on each side. The plan is particularly informative about the layout on the northern abutment (see Appendix 6).

Fig. 9 Charles Labelye’s plan of the starlings and piers of the bridge as they were in 1746. North is to the left. The houses are not shown, but this is the only plan of the whole bridge before the houses were removed and other alterations were made around 1760.

Fig. 10 Detail from Wenceslaus Hollar’s Long View of London in 1647.

There are many views of the bridge and houses before the 1680s, but some are highly inaccurate, such as the famous one by Claude de Jongh,³⁰ and almost all had to simplify the complicated jumble of houses too much to be of great value. Four of the views are reasonably detailed and comprehensive, although even these, where they show the same features, do not always agree, and they do not always seem to correspond to the lease descriptions. Wyngaerde’s drawing of London in about 1544 looks at the east side of the bridge from a point high up to the south-east, showing some features that were soon to disappear, such as the drawbridge tower and the chapel (Frontispiece). Norden’s view of the east side was drawn in 1597−98 (Fig. 1). The west side of the bridge also features in his general view of London in 1600, though the bridge houses are much simplified (Fig. 45). An anonymous view in the Pepys Library (referred to here as the Pepys view) shows the west side in detail (Fig. 2). Its date is unknown, except that it is after waterwheels were set up at the south end of the bridge in 1590 and before a fire destroyed the houses at the north end in 1633, unless of course it was compiled wholly or partly from earlier work. It shows the houses in perspective, which is highly informative. Fourthly, there is Hollar’s Long View of London in 1647, showing in detail the west sides of the middle and south parts (Fig. 10). The reliability of these views is examined in Appendix 2.

For the bridge after the 1680s, the most comprehensive image is Sutton Nicholls’s print of 1711, showing both sides (Fig. 84). There are also drawings and paintings, including those by Samuel Scott and Canaletto (Figs 98, 99).

CHAPTER 2

Reconstructing the bridge and its houses

In 1683, just before the houses on the middle part and the drawbridge houses were rebuilt, a detailed set of measurements was made of them, probably by William Leybourn, who dominated surveying in London from about 1669 to 1694.¹ As indicated above, a document containing those measurements has survived among the papers of the bridge estates committee (Fig. 11).² It is the single most informative record of the bridge houses, and is crucial for understanding the structure of both the bridge and the houses and for reconstructing a plan of them. Among other things, it states the width of the roadway at various points, the width of each house, the depth of each house and the breadth of their ‘cross buildings’ above the roadway. Some other measurements have also survived from this period.

The roadway

Strype stated in 1720 that the width of the roadway across London Bridge was from 12 to 14 feet, and one later writer made it only 12 feet wide on average.³ In 1831 it was observed that cellars at the south end left space for a roadway 12 to 14 feet wide.⁴ However, Strype was writing long after the bridge had been widened, and the assumption made in 1831 that the width between the cellars was the width of the roadway was not a safe one.⁵ The contemporary measurements indicate that the roadway was in