The Millennium Bridge at Twenty

The popularity of architecture or infrastructure can often be informally measured by its adoption into the push and pull of urban life. At the Bridge, city authorities resorted to retrofitting ball-shaped obstacles that infamously deck every barrier and handrail at its approaches – like bracelets – to discourage skateboarding. And staff from the Tate used its northern threshold as a surface on which to chalk slogans protesting against Covid-19 related redundancies at the museum. These adoptions and adaptations are evidence of its role as part of the public realm; it has become a place to send a message.

The whippet-thin bridge, which seems to exude a kind of restless energy, is an object that, despite the effort that it makes to keep from interfering with the sublime view of St Paul’s from the Thames, has changed the way that London looks, works and feels. That is partly because of its physical presence. It is a kind of umbilical cord connecting north and south banks of the river. It has brought life both to the previously empty north bank, where the tourist crowds once went no further than the churchyard boundary of the cathedral, and to the Southwark side of the river. But it has also changed the way in which we think about London and how we understand the experience of moving through it.

The bridge is literally and metaphorically – and with a force of 2,000 tonnes – pulling the two sides of London together.

The fundamental structural principle of a suspension bridge – and that is what the Millennium Bridge is, albeit an exceptionally shallow one – is that cables are held in tension to support the deck and the weight of the traffic on it. In this case, the cables, anchored in concrete on the north and south sides of the river, have been designed to handle the weight of 5,000 people at any one time, while never rising more than 2.3 metres (7.5 feet) above the deck of the bridge, which itself is just four metres (13 feet) wide. In other words, the bridge is literally and metaphorically – and with a force of 2,000 tonnes – pulling the two sides of London together.

According to property experts, the central London office market can now be defined by analysing the geography of four places: the West End, the City, Midtown and East London. They describe London Bridge and Waterloo as constituent parts of the City, with the Millennium Bridge at the centre. Twenty years ago, it is inconceivable that they could have been defined in such a way. That they can now be presented so confidently as part of the City is a measure of how much more fluid London has become and not just a fanciful idea put forward by property agents. Consider, for example, that the Financial Times sold Bracken House, its headquarters under the shadow of the dome of St Paul’s, in 1988, moved to Southwark Bridge Road, and thirty-one years later went back to Bracken House, replacing the Japanese bank that had based itself there in the intervening period. The geography of a city that was once rigidly divided between its north and south banks, has fundamentally altered.

The Millennium Bridge is far from solely responsible for this shift in perceptions. The creation of the London Overground network, piecing together fragments of nineteenth-century railways has, perhaps, done most in stitching north and south together, transforming Hoxton and Dalston in the east, and Acton in the west. But the Bridge is the most visible, positive symbol of a changing London.

The opening of the bridge coincided with a period of rapid development that saw both sides of the Thames sprouting clusters of high rise towers. On the north bank, the towers are mostly offices, while on the south they have tended towards residential or hospitality. The south bank has been minded to build its offices on a lower scale than its neighbours to the north. Mostly, they take the form of ten- and twelve-storey blocks such as the Blue Fin, immediately inland of Tate, or Palestra to the south of Blackfriars Bridge. But for those who are not tuned in to the different demands on fenestration, they look pretty much the same.

The Bridge is the most visible, positive symbol of a changing London.

The views from the Bridge offer the most visible expression of the densification of central London, a phenomenon that can be measured by the fall and rise in the number of those living there. The number living inside London’s political boundaries just before the Second World War was 8.1 million. That had fallen to only 6.8 million in 1991. Then, something startling happened: London put on more than a million people in under a decade and, by 2011, the total was back to its pre-war peak.

To cross the bridge from south to north is to experience the gradual revelation of the dome of St Paul’s cathedral. Counterintuitively, walking in the other direction you found yourself apparently moving west to east, toward the Houses of Parliament. Making the crossing to the south is to understand, in a visceral way, that – whatever the diagrammatic London Underground map (or our own mental maps) may make us think – the Thames unfolds as a sequence of great sweeping crescents, rather than a stuttering series of latitudinal steps and straight lines. That undulating path puts Sloane Square physically south of the Shard, and locates Foster + Partners’ work at Southwark’s Imperial War Museum almost as far north as its Sackler Galleries for the Royal Academy.

The negotiations and thinking that went into the making of the bridge are in themselves a model for what can be achieved from a collaborative approach to city making. In 1996, when the idea of the bridge first began to take shape, there was no mayor of London, and there were very few organisations whose role it was to take a city-wide view. Southwark was only beginning to emerge from a period in which it saw its role as the defensive protection of working class jobs in the borough. A policy that had seen it try to stop the building of the Globe Theatre and discourage the Design Museum from moving into a redundant banana ripening warehouse at Shad Thames. The idea of a bridge linking Southwark with the north bank was a sign of a new approach. That it was then realised so effectively was a demonstration of the potential of planning to achieve positive results, rather than, as so often seemed the case, to be a blunt and reactive instrument used to stop negative things from happening.

What really defines the Millennium Bridge is its specificity. The Bridge was not the result of a city adopting a readymade solution from elsewhere. It was not London trying to build a version of New York’s High Line, or importing the idea of an urban cable car from Caracas or Bogotá. As much as Tower Bridge, the Millennium Bridge has a form and alignment that emerged from the unique circumstances of its position. At the north end, it is exactly on axis with the cascade of steps that lead up toward St Pauls; the structural solution for the bridge is shaped from a concern not to intrude on that view. On the south side of the river the bridge consciously avoids the obvious move of adopting the same strategy; it is not focussed directly on the redundant chimney of the power station turned Tate, but approaches it at an oblique angle.

Twenty years on, the Millennium Bridge is perceived as much as a precision achievement in urban intervention as it is an architectural and engineering marvel it its own right. Its formal moves are aligned to clear pedestrian routes and to make movement easier. But they are also attuned to the experience of the individual, connecting them to the river, the riverside walk and the throngs of people in shared public spaces, rather than unceremoniously depositing them directly at the door of the museum. It is this deft response to both psychogeography and more conventional geography that has made the Millennium bridge such a successful landmark.