Tag Archives: Albert Bridge

Albert Bridge

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The Albert Bridge, opened 1874, was my favorite London bridge.  Who came up with the idea to paint a bridge pink?  The color scheme looks perfect for a nursery and really bizarre for a bridge particularly one named after Prince Albert.  According to Wikipedia, this color scheme is rather new, the bridge having been painted pink, green, and blue in 1991 to increase the visibility of the bridge in foggy and other low visibility conditions.  This is one of those incidents where the facts are disappointing–I had been imagining all sorts of reasons for the color scheme, including that these three colors were Prince Albert’s favorite or that these colors were chosen specially to symbolize aspects of Prince Albert’s personality or accomplishments.

As this sign indicates, the Albert Bridge is not the most structurally sound and the force of troops marching in step could be enough to bring the bridge down.  Despite the structural deficiency of the bridge, it is one of the only bridges across the Thames in London to be still the original structure (more or less).  It has been renovated and reinforced on multiple occasions, but never demolished and rebuilt.

It seems possible to create a convincing argument for how the Albert Bridge symbolizes Prince Albert.  The bridge is unstable and the colors are not traditionally considered masculine.  Prince Albert was a man who struggled as the husband of Queen Victoria.  This marriage suffered from tensions between the idea that the man was the “head” and “ruler” of the family and the fact that in this case the woman was the head and ruler of an entire empire, so how could her husband be the head and ruler of her? (Particularly since he was German and the ruling British classes were very suspicious of and against any influence from the Germans.  “Victoria and Albert” (2001) is a good film about the love and tension in this marriage.)  Prince Albert had to deal with feeling less manly and powerful, at times, than he wished, while the bridge named after him is less strong and serious-looking than most other bridges.

Most of the buildings visible from the Albert Bridge were of new or modern construction and appeared to be used mostly for residential or office use.  One industrial site was visible to the west past the Battersea Bridge in the form of a factory near Chelsea Harbor.  There were also many boats parked in the Thames near the Albert Bridge; I don’t know if they were houseboats, fishing boats, or something else.

              

Battersea Bridge

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The Battersea Bridge was the first bridge in London that I walked across.  The bridge, built in 1890, connects the London neighborhoods of Kensington & Chelsea (north of the river) and Wandsworth (south of the river).  The north side had traditional, classic architecture, but the south side had some newer developments.  From the bridge looking west, I saw a bridge for the tube and several modern developments.  To the east, I saw the Albert Bridge, the Battersea Power Station, and the Shard tower then under construction.

I enjoyed this bridge.  I appreciated its simple, yet stately design.  The traffic was low, though this might have had more to do with the time of day (Sunday afternoon) than any other factor.  There were two sights near the bridge that particularly caught my attention.  The first was a statue of Sir Thomas More on the north side, with gilded face and hands, a style not familiar to me.  The second was a seemingly random statue of a flying goose just off the south end of the bridge.

The name of Battersea intrigued me, so I did a Google search to try and find the origin of the name.  The result was that there is no known origin.  The possibilities included an Anglo-Saxon term meaning Badric’s Island, battles that were fought in the river at low tide when the river was fordable, and an evolution of spellings from a term meaning St Peter’s water or river.