A walk through Chiswick

All the Royal Parks were closed today because of forecast high wind, so I went up the river to Hammersmith and walked through Chiswick to Barnes and back, taking only the small camera as I thought it would be too windy to use a long lens. In fact the wind was no more than a fresh breeze, barely enough to ruffle a Carrion Crow on a post near Hammersmith Bridge.

The present bridge was designed by the indefatigable and ubiquitous Sir Joseph Bazalgette and opened in 1887, replacing an earlier bridge of 1827 by Tierney Clarke which had been damaged by a boat running into it. The towers rest on Clarke's original foundations.

It is not one of Bazalgette's more successful works. The bridge towers stick out into the roadway, causing bottlenecks at both ends as you can see in this early photograph (though it was clearly taken later than 1900 as claimed where it's displayed on the bridge).

It was also not strong enough for modern traffic and has had to be closed for repairs several times, including a closure in 2000 after damage by an IRA bomb. In 2019 serious cracks were found, and since then it has been closed to motor traffic, though it remains open to pedestrians and cyclists. Repairs are under way at the usual glacial pace of modern works.

The tide was right out and you could walk on to the shore in several places. The backwater between Chiswick Eyot, a small and uninhabited island, had temporarily dried up, so you could look down it.

Mostly the birds were a pretty ordinary lot. There were an occasional Pied Wagtail ...

... and Grey Heron to bring variety to the usual Mallards and Black-Headed Gulls.

Cormorants and Mute Swans made a black and white contrast.

There were the inevitable Egyptian Geese.

However, there were two interesting sights. An enormous Great Black-Backed Gull stood on the shore of the Thames at Chiswick, with a Lesser Black-Back next to it to give an impression of its size. These birds have a wingspan of 5ft 6in (1.7m).

There was a surprising number of Teal. Here are a few of them, but they were present along a mile of the shore.

Despite the horrible wet and windy weather, hardy rowers were out on the Thames, chivvied by coaches from the ease of motor boats.

Chiswick Mall is a motley collection of houses, some of them dating from the 18th century. It is a desirable and expensive location despite frequent flooding at spring tides.

Plaques along the way record among other things the construction of the first working electric telegraph by Sir Francis Ronalds in 1816. Needless to say, his invention was rejected by Sir John Barrow, Secretary at the Admiralty, as being 'wholly unnecessary'.

Although the wire. which was made of iron, was eight miles long it didn't go anywhere: it was strung back and forth across Ronalds's garden as this contemporary print shows.

A small artistic community included William Morris. This plaque is to Edward Johnston, designer of the font still used by Transport for London for all signs on the Underground. It actually uses his font, which on first glance looks rather like the well known Gill Sans, which indeed it influenced, but note the curly lower case L added for legibility. The related font used for British road signs also has a letter like this.

Houseboats at Chiswick Pier.

I crossed the river on to the south bank at Barnes railway bridge, which has a footway that you can see in this picture.

The bridge was designed by Edward Andrews and opened in 1895. It's made of wrought iron, and was a replacement for an earlier structure of 1849 by Joseph Locke made of cast iron, which was abandoned in the wake of the Tay Bridge disaster of 1879 which made all cast iron structures suspect (readers will know of William McGonagall's immortal poem on the event -- he was much mocked but he was a genuine poet of the people).

Locke's bridge was actually perfectly sound and is still standing though unused. Not knowing the history at the time, I neglected to photograph it, but there's a picture here.

I returned via the Leg o' Mutton nature reserve where there was little to see, just some Coots and a flock of Long-Tailed Tits which were too high in the trees to photograph. However, there was a Robin to add a final bit of colour to a grey day.