Hostname: page-component-76fb5796d-vfjqv Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-25T21:14:42.032Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

‘A very mortifying situation’: Robert Mylne’s struggle to get paid for Blackfriars Bridge

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 April 2016

Roger Woodley
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

In February 1760, Robert Mylne (1733–1811) was declared the winner of the competition for the design of a new bridge to be erected at Blackfriars, London. Work on the foundations began immediately. There were delays in the building programme, certainly, but they were not serious and there were good reasons for them. The bridge was fully opened to traffic in November 1769, and was widely admired, both for the aesthetic of its appearance and its commercial success and general usefulness (Fig. 1). Why then should it have taken over six years, until March 1776, to settle the architect’s bill? This article explores possible answers to the question by considering what parts of the project might have gone wrong, or what other reason would explain the City’s prevarication.

Type
Research Article
Information
Architectural History , Volume 43 , 2000 , pp. 172 - 186
Copyright
Copyright © Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain 2000

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Notes

1 The research to address this question was undertaken as part of the author’s doctoral thesis, Robert Mylne (1733–1811): the Bridge between Architecture and Engineering (London University, Courtauld Institute, 1998). The best detailed account of the building of Blackfriars Bridge remains Ruddock, Ted, Arch Bridges and their Builders 1735–1835 (Cambridge, 1979)Google Scholar.

2 Quoted in Colvin, , Biographical Dictionary of British Architects 1600–1840 (1995), p. 681 Google Scholar and elsewhere. For the first established reference see note 3 (but this source was probably biased).

3 In ‘A History of Architecture in Great Britain’, The Civil Engineer and Architects Journal, Vol. X (1847), p. 340.

4 Many of the early letters of Robert Mylne to his father Thomas in Edinburgh, and to his brother William, as well as his important office diaries (inaccurately reproduced in Robert Mylne 1955 by A. E. Richardson), are to be found in the Mylne Family Archive (MY FAM) in the British Architectural Library — RIBA, London. The letter referred to here is BAL 4/50 of 23 February 1760.

5 Obituary in Gentleman’s Magazine, 1789, pp. 1154-55.

6 The pamphlet Observations on Bridge Building and the Several Plans offered for a New Bridge, by Publicus, appeared in January Г760. It was severely critical of all the competition entries except Mylne’s, which it praised extravagantly. This naturally led to its authorship being attributed to him, a charge he neither denied nor confirmed; he certainly must have colluded in its composition.

7 From letter of 18 August 1759 to Thomas Mylne (BAL 4/46).

8 Report of 19 September 1767 to ‘The Worshipful Committee for the Building the Bridge from Blackfriars’ in the Surveyor’s Book (fol. 192), Box 9 in the Mylne Archive in the British Architectural Library.

9 See diary entries of June 1770 for Ladbroke. Addington Place, Surrey, was designed for Trecothick from 1772.

10 For example with the proprietors of the Gloucester and Berkeley Canal and (in the later stages) the Duke of Argyll at Inveraray.

11 For example, with Edward Southwell at King’s Weston, the Archbishop of Canterbury and the New River Company.

12 To clarify this point, it needs to be recognized that the central arch of a bridge, for navigational purposes, should span the deepest part of the channel, but also by definition, for the purposes of symmetry and aesthetics, needs to be in the middle of the structure. At Blackfriars, where the northernmost arches covered only gravel at low water, the construction of the embankment extended the northern approach over some of this gravel ‘into’ the river, to place the central arch where the channel was deepest.

13 The movement at Westminster, where the arches were semicircular, had nothing to do with construction, but was attributable to inadequate foundation of a particular pier.

14 A notable quotation is Boswell in Life of Johnson (1791), where he recounts the story of Dr Johnson’s involvement in the press correspondence in 1759 about Mylne’s elliptical arches. Boswell’s own view is, ‘whoever has contemplated this elegant and airy structure, which has so fine an effect, especially on approaching the capital on that quarter [i.e. from the south-east] must wonder at [Sir John Hawkins’] unjust and ill-tempered censure; and I appeal to all foreigners of good taste, whether this bridge be not one of the most distinguished ornaments of London.’

15 From the Surveyors book, see note 8 above, fol. 52.

16 Examples outside London include the work at King’s Weston, near Bristol and Cally, Dumfries and Galloway; in London, Almack’s Club, St James’s.

17 Baldwin left Mylne’s office in 1766, and in 1787 published a series of engravings of the construction of Blackfriars Bridge, drawing presumably on his own memory or revisiting Mylne’s office.

18 From M. Grosley’s Tour to London (1772), Vol. 11, quoted in Britton, and Pugin’s, Illustrations of the Public Buildings of London, vol. 1 (1825)Google Scholar.

19 The custom was for individuals due by rotation to perform the office of Sheriff to pay a fine in the event of their declining to do so.

20 The reports are Crosby: Mayor of 22 January 1771 and Sawbridge: Mayor of 15 February 1776 in the City of London Record Office. They were printed on the authority of the Common Council and are for the most part, but not always, a record taken verbatim from its own minutes or those of the Bridge Committee.

21 Report of 22 January 1771, p. 3.

22 Report of 15 February 1776, p. 18.

23 Printed as appendix 3 to the Common Council report of 22 January 1771.

24 See Woodley, Roger ‘Professionals: Early Episodes among Architects and Engineers’, in Construction History, vol. 15 (1999)Google Scholar.

25 Mylne specifically includes this architectural responsibility under ‘Surveyor’, as if to suggest that terraced housing did not call for the design skills of an architect — a common enough assumption perhaps.

26 Report of 22 January 1771, p. 16.

27 Preceding this attendance at the Common Council, there is an unexplained gap in meetings of the Bridge Committee — none between January and June 1771, whereas the usual pattern was for the committee to be convened monthly.

28 Report of 15 February 1776, p. 16.

29 In 1758, Robert Mylne had been the first Briton, and the first protestant, to win the silver medal of the Concorso dementino of the Accademia di San Luca in Rome. This had been greeted with acclaim in some quarters, including Edinburgh, but such youthful successes invariably create enemies somewhere.

30 From London and Westminster Improved (1766), pp. 64/5.

31 There was later some architectural work in this post: for example in 1769 the Company’s warehouse at Dorset Stairs was destroyed by fire and Mylne was well placed to design a new structure within his embankment scheme. He also designed houses for staff.

32 For detail see Lewis, Lesley, Art Bulletin, Vol. XXXIX (1947)Google Scholar and Bristol’s, Kerry doctoral thesis, James ‘Athenian’ Stuart (1713–1788) and the Genesis of the Greek Revival in British Architecture (London University, Courtauld Institute, 1997), pp. 336/42Google Scholar.

33 Report of 15 February 1776, p. 18.

34 Bridge Committee minutes of 19 March 1776. The identity of the objectors is not made clear, but an unusually large number of committee members was present.

35 Diary reference: 20 March 1776.