Westminster Bridge

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

Westminster Bridge crosses the Thames between the Palace of Westminster and County Hall, and it is the bridge that appears in more postcards of London than any other, because of what stands at its northern end. The present bridge opened in 1862. It was designed by the engineer Thomas Page, with Charles Barry, the architect of the Palace of Westminster, advising on the Gothic detailing so that the two would sit together. Seven cast-iron arches carry it 252 metres across the river.

It is painted green, the colour of the benches in the House of Commons, which is the end of the palace nearest to it. Lambeth Bridge, the next crossing upstream, is red for the House of Lords. The convention is real, and it is the easiest way to tell the two bridges apart from a distance.

The bridge it replaced opened in 1750 and was only the second crossing of the Thames in London after London Bridge. That earlier bridge is the one Wordsworth stood on in September 1802 when he wrote that earth had not anything to show more fair. He was looking at a city without a single building over the height of St Paul’s.

From across the river the bridge reads as a green line beneath Elizabeth Tower, with the London Eye at its southern end. In the Palace of Westminster image it crosses the whole foreground, and in the Millennium Wheel picture in black and white the arches are at their most graphic.

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