There is music to go with this post (as in, don't click if you are at work with the sound turned up) courtesy of the lovely Seth Lakeman: Spotify or YouTube.

What symbolizes the shift from one age to another?  London is full of buildings dating from medieval to modern; almost a thousand years of history is visible on her streets between The Tower and Westminster.  The city has been endlessly recycled through times of immediate and dramatic change such as the Fire and the Blitz, but also the gradual changes of decay and renewal.  The result is London's unique patchwork effect, but that can make it hard to see the wood for the trees.  So, in searching for a symbol of London's transition from the Georgian into the Victorian period, I stopped looking at onshore London and turned my attention to the river. 

London's naval history is spectacular and possibly at its most glorious during the Age of Sail.  By 1830, iron ships powered by steam had begun to dominate both Britain's waterways, and the surrounding seas.  Wooden ships would become increasingly redundant until the late 19thC revival of the clipper.  Thus, many whose families had previously been involved in shipbuilding turned instead to ship-breaking.  Henry Castle, born to a ship-building family in 1808 would try to make his fortune in Australia before returning to Rotherhithe in the late 1830s.  Realizing that more and more wooden ships were being decommissioned, he set up a ship-breaking business in Rotherhithe and on Baltic Wharf, Millbank (it would later open a branch far to the east for dealing with large ships in deeper water). 

Castle's ship-breakers would come to symbolize so many elements familiar to anyone interested in the history of London through the ages.  The place was awash (as the photos testify) with the hulks of wooden ships who'd outlived their usefulness, being stripped down and recycled (some were burned on the foreshore and the metal remnants scavenged for scrap afterwards).  Legend has it that Turner's Fighting Temeraire was being towed to Castle's yard in his famous picture.  Henry Castle and his family became famous for using this recycled timber to make garden furniture which could be produced on the same day to an individual's request. 

London's antiquarian history is fascinating, and Castle's in particular were keen to collect figureheads from old ships (I found the scale of the figures surprising).  In perhaps one of the most telling stories of the move from sail to steam, from Georgian to Victorian, the Navy found that the figureheads, so absent from iron ships, had been a source of morale and inspiration for sailors who wanted these figureheads preserved.  They found themselves in an awkward position, forced to deal with a new breed of 'salvage' dealers who knew the value of a 15ft high wooden woman.  Castle's would go on to found a no-doubt impressive 'naval' museum at Millbank, maintained until the company hit financial hardship not long after these photos were taken in the early 20thC. 

There are many aspects to 'Lost London' but Castle's perhaps best represents the sweeping away of an age: Georgian London's sea-going might as Victorian London's deckchairs.

As much as I try to emphasize how much of the Georgian London remains around us, some parts of old London are gone and sometimes that loss is vast both in terms of physical scale and historical significance.  London Bridge is one of those losses and the end of its most magnificent (and inhabited) period came during the 18th century. 

The bridge that now joins the North to the South Bank is little more than an ugly but useful advertisement for the properties of concrete, but three centuries ago, London Bridge was a busy village in its own right with a church, houses, shops, gardens, roof terraces and plenty of traffic.  The image in the gallery shows the bridge in what was probably its heyday in the mid-17thC and the arrows indicate points of interest, such as the wooden piers protecting the stone ones from the current, the heads on pikes on the south side, the different kinds of river-craft on either side and the location of Billingsgate fish-market on the north side.
 
The history of London Bridge would make an enormous post, and one reaching from c.993 to present day, so way outside my remit.  However, throughout the 18thC the bridge was in decline: the houses were cleared from it in 1758 when the weight of traffic became too enormous and the bridge suffered constantly with gridlock.  Despite repair efforts, it was clear that the 19-arch London Bridge was failing and that a new bridge needed to be designed to replace it.  A competition in 1799 saw Thomas Telford's design chosen, although it would take years for it to become a reality. 

As soon as plans were announced to replace the bridge, London's antiquaries got busy, documenting the history of the bridge and recording both the memories of those who knew it, and the artifacts and relics found as the bridge was repaired and later destroyed.  It's easy to think of a rush to preserve the past being an entirely modern phenomenon, but the 18thC saw the beginning of an awareness of, and (more accurate than in earlier periods) recording of London's history.  Many were genuinely sorry to see the beginning of the end for the old bridge, even though it would take almost seventy years to come about.  What follows here is a few of the observations made by London's antiquaries (and published in the Gentleman's Magazine) on the passing of perhaps her most fantastic and forgotten thoroughfare.