WHAT'S ON
Bridge is a free exhibition of artworks responding to the capital's crossings showing at the Museum Of London Docklands, West India Quay. We have selected four of the works from the exhibition with words of explanation or evocation.
"This image is William Henry Fox Talbot's photograph of the first Hungerford bridge designed by Brunel. It's the oldest photograph in the museum's collection (1845). Fox Talbot effectively invented modern photography. His great breakthrough was to work from negative to a positive which could be reproduced. It's very frail but the photograph lasted longer than its subject."
Senior curator Francis Marshall
Museum of London
"So if you were stood on the London Bridge this would be underneath your feet. We're looking along the length of the bridge. You're in this tunnel and it feels like you're underground then you're on this girder looking at these boats passing underneath. No-one realises you're there."
Photographer and adventurer Lucinda Grange
• Why London's bridges are more than just pieces of engineering
"Giovanni Battista Piranesi is famous for a group of prints called Imaginary Prisons in which he visualises these incredible architectural structures. One of things I liked about this print (1766) is that he made Blackfriars Bridge into one of these fabulous structures from his own imagination."
Senior curator Francis Marshall
Earth has not anything to show more fair:
Dull would he be of soul who could pass by
A sight so touching in its majesty:
This City now doth, like a garment, wear
The beauty of the morning; silent, bare,
Ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples lie
Open unto the fields, and to the sky;
All bright and glittering in the smokeless air.
Never did sun more beautifully steep
In his first splendour, valley, rock, or hill;
Ne'er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep!
The river glideth at his own sweet will:
Dear God! the very houses seem asleep;
And all that mighty heart is lying still!
Composed upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802
William Wordsworth
Images: © Museum Of London
