Google Street View of Waterloo Bridge
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Location: Waterloo Bridge, London, United Kingdom.
Waterloo Bridge:
Waterloo Bridge is a road and foot traffic bridge crossing the River Thames in London, between Blackfriars Bridge and Hungerford Bridge. The name of the bridge is in memory of the Anglo-Dutch and Prussian victory at the Battle of Waterloo in 1815. Thanks to its location at a strategic bend in the river, the views of London (Westminster, the South Bank and London Eye to the west, the City of London and Canary Wharf to the east) from the bridge are widely held to be the finest from any spot at ground level.
History of Waterloo Bridge:
The first bridge on the site was designed in 1809-10 by John Rennie for the Strand Bridge Company and opened in 1817 as a toll bridge. The granite bridge[1] had nine arches, each of 120 feet (36.6 m) span, separated by double Grecian-Doric stone columns and was 2,456 feet (748.6 m) long, including approaches. Before its opening it was known as 'Strand Bridge'. During the 1840s the bridge gained a reputation as a popular place for suicide attempts. In 1841, the American daredevil Samuel Gilbert Scott was killed while performing an act in which he hung by a rope from a scaffold on the bridge.[2] In 1844 Thomas Hood wrote the poem The Bridge of Sighs about the suicide of a prostitute there.[3] Paintings of the bridge were created by the French Impressionist Claude Monet and the English Romantic, John Constable. The bridge was nationalised in 1878 and given to the Metropolitan Board of Works, who removed the toll from it.
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