Image:

Thomas Shotter Boys' painting titled Blackfriars from Southwark 1842

Situated along the bank of the River Thames in London, Blackfriars is a historic site with religious and theatrical significance. The relatively small area can be found between St. Paul’s Cathedral and The Temple, the name of London’s legal district which houses the Royal Courts of Justice. Blackfriars began in the 13th century when the Black Friars—named as such because of the black colored mantles they wore over their white habits, but also known as Dominicans—established a friary there. The Dominicans were a mendicant group founded by St. Dominic, a Catholic priest who is known as the patron saint of astronomers. Their friary “was built in 1278 at the end of Fleet Street and the boundary of Ludgate” and also held meetings of Parliament under Edward II in 1311, Edward IV in 1471, and Henry VIII in 1523 (History - Blackfriars Priory School). The 1529 inquiry into the marriage of Catherine of Aragon and Henry VIII famously took place before the Black Friars as well. In 1538, “Henry VIII dissolved the friary, and the grounds and buildings were sold off. One notable buyer was James Burbage in 1596, who purchased the grounds for the creation of the Blackfriars Theatre” (Burns). The playhouse—the second of its kind after the one constructed by Richard Farrant in 1576—was built on the bones of the old friary and put to use by theatre companies such as Shakespeare’s Kings Men, but, in 1642, the Puritans closed Blackfriars Theatre and the building was subsequently demolished in 1655 (Blackfriars – The Lost City Of London – Before The Great Fire Of 1666). 

Blackfriars Bridge was the third bridge constructed to cross the River Thames. Designed by architect Robert Mylne, “the first pile was driven in 1760, it was made passable as a bridleway in 1768, and was opened to traffic in 1769” (Blackfriars Bridge and Blackfriars Road). Mylne’s Blackfriars Bridge is described in the 1844 edition of Mogg’s New Picture of London and Visitor’s Guide to its Sights as having a length of 995 feet with the carriage-way being 28 feet and each footpath taking up seven feet. It was additionally stated that the bridge “consists of nine elliptical arches…. The whole of this structure is of Portland stone. It commands some interesting views both up and down the river, and from the east side the towering majesty of St. Paul's Cathedral is seen to great advantage” (Victorian London - Thames - Bridges - Blackfriars Bridge). Nearly one-hundred years after it was built, the first Blackfriars Bridge was so decayed that civil engineer Joseph Cubitt was commissioned to draw up plans for a replacement. John Timbs in his 1867 book Curiosities of London describes the building of the new Blackfriars Bridge by writing, 

At length, the Court of Common Council resolved to build a new Bridge upon time site of the old Bridge, but much wider; and the design of Joseph Cubitt was selected - to consist of five iron arches, surmounted by an ornamental cornice and parapet, and the iron floor covered with a layer of concrete, and paved with granite; each of the four piers having a massive column of red polished granite. A temporary wooden bridge 900ff. in length, having three arches of 75ft. span for the river traffic; the carriage-way is 26ft. wide, and above it, at an elevation of 16ft., two footways, each 9ft. wide, were erected: the old bridge was then closed, and its demolition commenced forthwith; the rubble and masonry above the arch-turnings was nearly 20,000 tons weight. The cost of this Bridge, four equestrian statues, and the temporary bridge, is stated at 265,600l., or 3l. per foot super. At 150 feet eastward an iron lattice girder bridge had been constructed for the London, Chatham, and Dover Railway (Victorian London - Thames - Bridges - Blackfriars Bridge).

The piers of the bridge were ornamented with carved freshwater and saltwater birds and floral designs can be found in the ironwork of the arches. The Blackfriars Bridge of the modern-day was built from 1884 to 1886 although “it looks rather different from the way it looked in the past [as it] was originally built to carry the Holborn Viaduct Station Company Railway over the river” (The Blackfriars Bridges, London).

The Thames itself, by the time that David Copperfield was written by Charles Dickens, was a cesspool. For centuries, it had served as the refuse dump for all of London’s citizens, and, as the city grew under the industrial age, so too did the amount of putrid waste being left in its waters. These years of waste removal via the Thames all came to a head in the 1800s. Prior to the turn of the 19th century, 

it had been clean enough for salmon to be caught and for Lord Byron to swim by Westminster Bridge. By the early 1830s, it was a very different river. In 1834, the English wit and cleric Sydney Smith told Lady Grey: "He who drinks a tumbler of London water has literally in his stomach more animated beings than there are Men, Women and Children on the face of the Globe” (Jeffries). 

By the summer of 1853, the problem had reached crisis levels and has since become known as The Great Stink. That year, a heatwave had scorched London, allowing the human, animal, and industrial waste to cook and fester under the hot sun. It was so oppressive that first-hand accounts tell of “ men struck down with the stench, and of all kinds of fatal diseases, up-springing on the river’s banks” (Lemon). English chemist and physicist Michael Faraday was an outspoken supporter of cleaning up the Thames. His letter to the editor of The Times newspaper included such disgusting details as a description of  “how he had tossed pieces of paper into the water which had almost immediately disappeared proving that ‘the whole of the river was an opaque pale brown fluid’ and that the river was nothing more than ‘a real sewer’” (Lemon). Cholera and typhoid ran rampant as a result of the hazardous conditions of the water, though the science of the time believed in the miasma theory—the belief that illness is caused by impure air rather than viruses and bacteria. According to records, “after cholera arrived from India, there were epidemics in London in 1832, 1848, 1849, 1854 and 1866, in which thousands died” (Jeffries). However, it was not the illness, but the ever-present stench that caused massive outrage from the public at large and led Parliament to sign into law a bill that would build a sewage system and create embankments on either side of the Thames. With these measures in place, the Thames was eventually allowed to recover naturally. 

By the 19th century, Blackfriars, much like the rest of England during the Industrial Revolution, was a bustling place. It was also home to a large population of poor and working-class people. On the other side of Blackfriars Bridge from the site of the Black Friars friary and along Blackfriars Road, George Peabody established Peabody Square, a group of tenement buildings that would house working-class families (Peabody Square). A  number of warehouses populated the banks of the Thames near Blackfriars at this time as well. In all, it was a place where history met industry. 

Works Cited: 

Burns, Sarah. “Blackfriars.” Medieval London, https://medievallondon.ace.fordham.edu/exhibits/show/medieval-london-sites/blackfriars. 

"Blackfriars Bridge and Blackfriars Road." Survey of London: Volume 22, Bankside (The Parishes of St. Saviour and Christchurch Southwark). Eds. Howard Roberts, and Walter H Godfrey. London: London County Council, 1950. 115-121. British History Online. 11 September 2020. http://www.british-history.ac.uk/survey-london/vol22/pp115-121.

"Blackfriars – The Lost City Of London – Before The Great Fire Of 1666". The Lost City Of London, 2019, https://lostcityoflondon.co.uk/tag/blackfriars/. 

"History - Blackfriars Priory School". Blackfriars, https://blackfriars.sa.edu.au/blackfriars/history/.

Jeffries, Stuart. "Water, Super-Sewers And The Filth Threatening The River Thames". The Guardian, 2014, https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/jul/22/water-thames-victorian-london-150-years-sewer-system. 

Lemon, Johanna. "The Great Stink". Choleraandthethames.Co.Uk, http://www.choleraandthethames.co.uk/cholera-in-london/the-great-stink/. 

"Peabody Square". Victorianweb.Org, 2005, http://www.victorianweb.org/art/architecture/london/57.html

"The Blackfriars Bridges, London". Victorianweb.Org, 2016, http://www.victorianweb.org/technology/bridges/42.html.

"Victorian London - Thames - Bridges - Blackfriars Bridge". The Dictionary Of Victorian London, https://www.victorianlondon.org/thames/blackfriarsbridge.html.