Blow-Up Bridge: The Gunpowder Blast of 1874

Why is it significant?

Notice the fluted cast-iron Doric columns supporting Macclesfield Bridge as you pass beneath its stone arch into Regent's Park. Canal workers and Londoners call this spot by a much more dramatic name: the Blow-Up Bridge.

Key Facts

Open the walk

Notice the fluted cast-iron Doric columns supporting Macclesfield Bridge as you pass beneath its stone arch into Regent's Park. Canal workers and Londoners call this spot by a much more dramatic name: the Blow-Up Bridge. In the early morning hours of October second, eighteen seventy-four, this quiet leafy cutting was the scene of the loudest man-made explosion in London's nineteenth-century history.

A steam tug was towing a convoy of heavy barges through the canal. The third barge in line, named the Tilbury, was carrying five tons of black gunpowder destined for quarry blasters, alongside barrels of raw petroleum and flammable benzoline. Just as the barge passed directly under this bridge, a crewman's oil lamp sparked, or perhaps a stray coal cinder from the tug's funnel landed on a loose powder cask.

The blast was catastrophic. The Tilbury was instantly obliterated. The explosion tore the massive cast-iron bridge to shreds, shattered thousands of glass windows in Marylebone and Mayfair, and woke citizens as far away as Whitehall. In the neighbouring London Zoo, terrified birds screamed, cage doors rattled, and a dazed giraffe bolted around its paddock.

Miraculously, when Victorian engineers rebuilt the bridge, they salvaged the heavy iron columns from the muddy canal bed. Look closely at the fluting on the stone-facing pillars: the craftsmen accidentally re-erected several of them upside down! If you trace the iron ridges with your fingers, you are touching original cast metal that survived being blown across the treetops into the park.