Bridges No.26 - Kew Bridge

Kew Bridge has a lot of history tied up in it reflecting the changing nature of business, the nobility and royalty in this part of West London. Kew has also been a popular crossing point through history. There have been three bridges here and prior to all of them a horse-drawn ferry. It was the Tunstall family, led by Robert Tunstall, who owned and operated the ferry service, that petitioned Parliament for permission to build a bridge at Kew. Work began on the first bridge in 1758 by John Barnard who had previously worked on Westminster Bridge. It was inaugurated on 1 June 1759 by George, the Prince of Wales. It was George's father Frederick who took a lease at Kew House in 1731 and rebuilt it. This is now Kew Place, and the Royal Botantic Gardens grew up around it.

Like other private bridges of the time, Kew Bridge charged a toll. The opening of the bridge, and its connections with the Prince of Wales resulted in much excitement. 3,000 people used the bridge on its first day open to the general public. Even so, new London bridges still attract the crowds as we saw with the Millennium Bridge. Barnard's bridge consisted of two stone arches next to each bank connected together by 7 timber arches. But because the bulk of the bridge was wooden it suffered from both barge stikes and river scour and prooved costly to keep in good repair. It only stood for 30 years.

In 1782 the son of Tunstall, also called Robert, received consent to replace the bridge and work commenced in June 1783. James Paine designed the new bridge following his previous work upstream at Richmond. The new bridge was constructed entirely out of stone (Portland and Purbeck) and opened on 22 September 1789. Once again George had the honour of opening it, but now in his capacity as King George III.

In 1819 the bridge was sold at auction to a Mr Robinson for £23,000 and then in 1873 it was purchased by the Metropolitan Board of Works for £57,000. Tolls were then lifted, but an arched entrance was erected on the Brentford side of the bridge. By the 1890s, however, the bridge was struggling to handle the increasing weight of traffic. It was also prooving too narrow for more modern vehicles and was too steep on the northern side. The engineer Sir John Wolfe Barry recommended that a new bridge should be built.

A new bridge was then commissioned jointly by Middlesex and Surrey County Councils (Kew was then outside the offical London boundary - the then London County Council area being much smaller than today's Greater London area). John Wolfe Barry was retained to design the bridge alongside another engineer Cuthbert A Brereton. Easton Gibbs & Son were the building contractors. It is built from granite sourced from the far ends of the country - Cornwall and Aberdeenshire. The bridge is decorated with the crests of the two counties of Surrey and Middlesex.

The third and present day bridge was opened in May 1903 and as was becoming tradition at Kew, royalty opened it. This time King Edward VII and Queen Alexandra did the honours by laying the final coping stone. Following the opening the bridge was renamed as the King Edward VII Bridge, but this prooved unpopular (and probably too much of a mouthful to say) and the name quickly reverted back to Kew Bridge.