Westminster Bridge - 'all bright and glittering in the smokeless air'.

Here are two views of the newly built Westminster Bridge, finally opened in 1750,  the only crossing between Putney Bridge and London Bridge, for a city which had grown extensively in the last hundred years.  Both show Westminster Abbey,  viewed from opposite directions.  The simple topographical scene has its charm, (the shimmering light, the reflected arches), but the one taken from Lambeth, on the south bank of the Thames, is a wonderful atmospheric landscape of the Thames traffic and eighteenth century London.  

Westminster Bridge  Antonio Joli (attrib.) c.1750

© Parliamentary Art Collection

Joli came to London in 1744, and was known for his theatre scenery and mural paintings, but he also learnt from his fellow countryman, Canaletto, as this other view of the Thames crossing shows.

Westminster from the River, London  Antonio Joli c. 1750

© Bank of England Museum

The bridge was replaced a century later when it become unstable, but it was from this first Westminster Bridge that the poet Wordsworth saw the city in 1802.

A shadow of love

"That morning in my bunk I had read Wordsworth's great Ode in Palgrave's Golden Treasury.  Palgrave like Scott carried signs of my father's reading in the form of dog-eared pages and knowing so little about him I had followed every clue and so learned enjoy what he enjoyed.  Thus when I first entered the bank as junior clerk I had thought of it in Wordsworth's terms as a 'prison-house' -- what  was it my father had found a prison, so that he double-marked the passage?  Perhaps our home, and my stepmother and I had been the warders.

One's life is more formed, I sometimes think, by books than by human beings: it is out of books one learns about love and pain at second hand.  Even if we have the happy chance to fall in love, it is because we have been conditioned by what we have read, and if I had never known love at all, perhaps it was because my father's library had not contained the right books.  (I don't think there was much passionate love in Marion Crawford, and only a shadow of it in Walter Scott.)"

Travels With My Aunt  Grahame Greene