Waterloo Bridge: The Finest Non-inspiration

To pick up where I left off with the London bridges I walked earlier this year, the next bridge is Waterloo Bridge.  (The last one I discussed was Jubilee Bridge on July 10.)  The Waterloo Bridge was the most boring bridge in London, though I didn’t realize it at the time.  When I got home however, I realized I only took two pictures from it and hadn’t taken any of the bridge itself.  The picture above was one I took from the Jubilee Bridge to show the downriver view from the bridge, which happens to include the Waterloo Bridge.

I was expecting that the London Bridge would be boring.  Sometime before my trip, I mistakenly identified the Tower Bridge as the London Bridge.  The discussion that ensued, in which I was corrected, led me to believe that the London Bridge was plain and uninteresting and as such, I was not the first to mistake the Tower Bridge for it.  While the London Bridge itself was boring and like the Waterloo Bridge lacked the colors and sculpture found on the other bridges (see the examples of the Albert Bridge and Vauxhall Bridge), it there were many interesting things to see from the London Bridge.  While crossing the Waterloo Bridge, I was only inspired to take shots of the downriver and upriver views.

The most interesting thing to note about these views, is in comparing the downriver view from the Jubilee Bridge with the downriver view from the Waterloo Bridge (pictured above) it appears that the new buildings are pushing the classical buildings such as St. Paul’s out of the frame.

When I come across a situation like this, where there isn’t much to say from my experience, I turn to the internet to give me something to fill out with.  I found two intriguing bits in my Google search.  First is that while I found the views from Waterloo Bridge uninspiring, Wikipedia suggests that the views of the city from this bridge “are widely held to be the finest from any spot at the ground level.”  The second is that Hollywood has made two films called “Waterloo Bridge” in 1931 and 1940 in which the main characters meet on the Waterloo Bridge.  The interesting part is that the movie Production Codes changed in between which resulted in two fairly different films–the first about a scarlet woman accidentally killed, the second about a proper woman who commits suicide to save the man she loves from scandal.