Bridges No.14 - Grosvenor Bridge

Next we have another railway bridge, this one being the main line into Victoria Station. Firstly a note about the photo above. The eagle-eyed amongst you may notice that this is taken from the north bank, whereas all my other pictures to date have been taken from the south bank during my walk along the Thames Path. However, because of the diversion around Battersea Power Station, you never actually walk past Grosvenor Bridge. Now I did spy a little path under the Chelsea Bridge, and this may have given me the opportunity to take a photo from the south bank, but it was a hot day, and I just wanted to get on. So instead I've borrowed the photo above from the nice people at Wikipedia.

Grosvenor Bridge also goes by the name of Victoria Bridge (logically really) and it was the first railway bridge in London. Work began on the bridge in June 1859 for London, Brighton & South Coast Railway (LB&SCR). The designer was John Fowler and he was required to build a bridge whose piers aligned those of Chelsea Bridge, just a few hundred yards upstream. The build time was remarkably quick, with the first services using the bridge in the summer of 1860.

LB&SCR often leased out its tracks to other rail companies, one such company being the London Chatham & Dover Railway (LCDR). The two companies started to work closer together and jointly worked on a second bridge immedatley alongside the first. The new bridge was designed by Sir Charles Fox, but it was always intended that it should match the original. The extended bridge opened in 1866 and was now 100 feet wide.

But the demand placed on the railways grew ever more and it became necessary to build a third bridge. This occured in 1907 and widened the bridge to 174 feet, enough to accommodate ten tracks.

Extensive replacement work took place between 1963-67 by the engineering company Freeman, Fox & Partners. This involved the replacement of each track and the bridge beneath it. On this basis Grosvenor Bridge is really ten bridges in one!