Chelsea Bridge

Chelsea Bridge is a suspension bridge built between 1934 and 1937 by the London County Council Engineers under Sir T Peirson Frank, with Rendel, Tritton and Palmer as consultants. Holloway Brothers were the contractors, and George Topham Forrest of the LCC served as consulting architect.

The bridge has a central span of 107.3 metres, side spans of 52.4 metres, giving a total length of 212.7 metres, and is 25 metres wide. The foundations for the piers were constructed in steel-sheet-piled cofferdams on the positions of the earlier bridge, but were entirely new, formed of steel and concrete. The existing abutments were strengthened due to weakness in the ground, which led the engineers to design a self-anchoring type of suspension bridge, in which tensile stress generated by the cables is resisted more by stiffening girders than by abutment anchorages.

The piers are clad in granite above the water line. The bridge uses mild steel transverse beams, but high tensile steel in the wires of the suspension cables and in the flanges of the stiffening girders—one of the earliest such applications, predating the first British standard. The towers supporting the hexagonal-section suspension cables carrying the six-lane roadway are of steel box plate construction supported on rocker bearings. The deck is of high tensile steel box girder construction, an early use of the technique in the United Kingdom.

The bridge is painted mostly white with red trim and greyish blue along the balustrades. It is embellished with five sets of lampposts on either side, decorated with golden galleons, and smaller bulbs fixed into the swooping metal supports. The four tall turrets at either end of the bridge feature heraldic designs: a golden galleon with two shields underneath marked with different symbols, crests of Middlesex and other counties around London, and a series of doves holding olive branches.

Chelsea Bridge opened on 6 May 1937, opened by the Prime Minister of Canada, W L Mackenzie King, as the construction work had used Douglas fir from British Columbia. The decision to use only materials from the United Kingdom or Commonwealth countries reflected a practice adopted in several public buildings of the 1930s.

The first bridge on the site was authorised by Act of Parliament in 1846 and built between 1851 and 1858 to complement the new Battersea Park. Designed by architect Thomas Page, the suspension bridge was described at the time as "the most beautiful of the bridges that crossed the Thames". Tolls were initially payable but public complaints that "the government gave a park to the people but placed a toll-bar at the gate to keep them out" led to their removal in 1879, when the Metropolitan Board of Works acquired ownership. The bridge was never formally named and was known as "the Victoria" after its official opening in March 1858 by the Prince Consort and the Prince of Wales. The name changed to Chelsea Bridge coinciding with further strengthening in 1880, following earlier strengthening works in 1863–4. By the 1920s its replacement was seriously considered, but financial crises delayed action until 1935, when the bridge was demolished following Royal Commission on Cross River Traffic recommendations of 1926.