Hungerford Bridge

Below is the Hungerford Bridge photography portfolio. You can read more about the bridge below, or head straight to the thumbnails to view the images.

Hungerford Bridge is really three bridges. In the middle is the railway bridge that carries trains into Charing Cross, a plain steel lattice on iron piers, built by John Hawkshaw and opened in 1864. On either side of it are the two footbridges known together as the Golden Jubilee Bridges, opened in 2002 and hung from slender white pylons that lean out over the water. They are what people photograph, and what people mean when they talk about crossing Hungerford Bridge.

The railway bridge replaced a suspension footbridge by Isambard Kingdom Brunel, opened in 1845 to bring people across the river to Hungerford Market on the north bank, where Charing Cross station now stands. When Brunel’s bridge came down its chains were taken to Bristol and used to complete the Clifton Suspension Bridge, which he had designed but not lived to finish. Two of his brick piers remain in the river, holding up the railway to this day.

The old footway that ran alongside the railway was narrow, dim and best avoided after dark. The footbridges that replaced it changed the walk between the South Bank and the West End more than anything else built in the area, and the view from them, downstream to St Paul’s and upstream to Westminster, costs nothing and beats most of the paid ones.

In a panorama the bridge is the crossing directly beside the London Eye, and the white pylons of the footbridges are what catch the eye. In the Millennium Wheel image in black and white the lattice of the railway bridge shows clearly, and Waterloo Bridge is the next crossing along.

Click any of the thumbnails below to explore the Hungerford Bridge images and the London panoramas it appears in.