Millennium Bridge: Crossing to the Wrong Side of the River

Why is it significant?

Start at the City end of the Millennium Bridge, with the dome of St Paul's at your back, and look south across the water.

Key Facts

Open the walk

Start at the City end of the Millennium Bridge, with the dome of St Paul's at your back, and look south across the water. A thin blade of steel runs ahead of you, hung from cables that sag alongside the deck instead of soaring above it, and on the far bank a brick tower with a single chimney stands like an exclamation mark. That bank is Bankside, and for most of London's history it was the wrong side of the river.

In Shakespeare's day the City behind you was run by sober merchants and aldermen who saw playhouses as nests of plague, idleness and disorder. So the theatres went where the City's rules did not reach. Much of Bankside belonged to the Bishop of Winchester, and his liberty became London's pleasure ground: playhouses, bear-baiting rings, taverns and brothels, a short boat ride from respectability. Londoners crossed by the only bridge, London Bridge, or more often hailed a waterman with a shout of Eastward ho or Westward ho, and were rowed across.

This bridge was the first new crossing of the Thames in central London since Tower Bridge in 1894, and it opened on 10 June 2000. Within hours, it began to sway. As thousands of people walked over, the deck swung gently from side to side; walkers instinctively fell into step with the movement to keep their balance, and that made it worse. The newspapers christened it the Wobbly Bridge, and it was closed after just two days.

The engineers had met a phenomenon they called synchronous lateral excitation, and the cure took almost two years and around five million pounds: dozens of dampers, like giant shock absorbers, tucked away beneath the deck. It reopened in February 2002 and has been steady ever since. It was designed by Foster and Partners with the sculptor Anthony Caro and the engineers Arup, as a blade of light across the river... and in the film of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, Death Eaters twist it into the Thames.

Walk across now, slowly, and glance back from the middle: the bridge frames St Paul's like a picture, which is exactly what it was designed to do. Four hundred years ago you would have made this crossing in a wherry, among hundreds of watermen's boats. At the far end, turn right, towards the huge brick building with the chimney.