Introduction

On Saturday 18 November 1750, Westminster Bridge was opened to the public for the first time. By linking Westminster to Southwark, it changed the character of the metropolis and laid the foundation for rapid expansion south of the river. Built of Portland stone in a plain neoclassical style, it was ‘allowed by Judges of Architecture to be one of the grandest Bridges in the World’. That night a procession crossed the new bridge with ‘Trumpets, Kettle-Drums, &c. with Guns firing during the Ceremony’. And on Sunday, ‘Westminster was all Day like a Fair, with People going to view the Bridge and walk over it’. With twelve new salaried watchmen and thirty-two street lights, the bridge set the tone and style for a fifty-year period of civic building in the capital that would include many of the city’s prisons and lock-ups, court houses and workhouses. And while ‘The Pickpockets made a fine Market of it, and many People lost their Money and Watches’, the bridge symbolised a new and more orderly London. But it also reinforced the sometimes brutal character of the systems of justice and social care that governed the lives of London’s working people. It became one of the specific and peculiar places where small crimes were made capital under statute law. Westminster Bridge joined the ‘bloody code’: ‘Persons wilfully and maliciously destroying or damaging the said Bridge … shall suffer Death as Felons without Benefit of Clergy.’ New and old architecture, new and old systems of police and punishment, new and old conceptions of community and social obligation jostled cheek by jowl in the 1750s, pitting innovation against social cohesion and resulting in growing conflict.