Composed upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802
Earth has not any thing to shew more fair:
Dull would he be of soul who could
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
Open to the fields, and to the sky;
All bright and glittering in the
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!
'Earth has not anything to shew more fair." A French visitor, if allowed to visit the enemy's capital during the brief lull in hostilities afforded by the Peace of Amiens in 1802, would probably not have agreed with Wordsworth's encomium on London as it looked early on the morning of September 3, 200 years ago. London was not then, any more than it is now, a conventionally beautiful city. It did not have the big public buildings and palaces of Paris, nor the antiquities that made grand tourists flock to Rome.
London was unplanned, chaotic, diverse. Its appearance, when seen across the wide River Thames, owed more to the exigencies of commerce than to the grand gestures of monarchs. Yet, it was a city of great power and wealth - the "mighty heart" of a struggling, but expanding maritime empire - which a Romantic poet attuned to the sublime beauty of wild landscape and ruined abbeys could see was something extraordinary and astonishing.
Two centuries on, the view from Westminster Bridge is very different, yet London is still not the tourist brochure's idea of a beautiful city. It still lacks, mercifully, the wide, straight, boring boulevards that Napoleon III later cut through Paris and it does not have the rich mix of Gothic and baroque crammed into a medieval street pattern that makes Prague so glorious. London remains a mess: a product of thwarted ideals, pragmatism and stupidity, a city that has largely survived the megalomaniac visions of architects and town planners. Despite the disappearance of the British Empire, it remains a great city; a world city; a city that, as those who really know it know, is endlessly rich, fascinating and compelling. If William Wordsworth could return today, there is still much that he would recognise and delight in, while surely being amazed - even shocked - at some of the changes.
For a start, Westminster Bridge itself has been rebuilt. The arched structure on which Wordsworth stood was only London's second bridge across the wide Thames (the first was the ancient London Bridge). Designed by Charles Labelye, a Swiss engineer, and opened in 1750, it was of immense civic and strategic importance. Dogs were not allowed upon it and, indeed, during Wordsworth's lifetime - the period in which brutal penal legislation was most viciously imposed in Britain - a child could be executed for either stealing a sheep or, as a notice warned, for damaging Westminster Bridge.
By the early 19th century, however, the original bridge's foundations were causing problems and between 1854 and 1862 Labelye's stone bridge was replaced with the present wide-span cast-iron structure by Thomas Page. Sir Charles Barry acted as consultant on the design and the detail - notably the splendid triple lamp-standards - is Gothic, intended to harmonise with the New Palace of Westminster, then nearing completion at one end of the bridge.
The advent of the palace - an astonishing pile rising straight from the river on its own embankment, the masterpiece of Sir Charles Barry and Welby Pugin, and the finest monument of the Gothic Revival anywhere in the world - is the most striking change since 1802 in the immediate vicinity of Westminster Bridge. In Wordsworth's day, the Middlesex bank of the Thames was occupied by a ramshackle collection of medieval buildings, dominated by the roofline of Westminster Hall, which once constituted a royal palace and which had been adapted to house Parliament. In 1834, two years after the passing of the great Reform Bill, most of these buildings went up in a seemingly symbolic conflagration, sweeping away the anomalies and abuses of the past (but fortunately sparing the great hall, with its spectacular hammer-beam roof).
The New Palace of Westminster, at once backward-looking and dependent upon the new technology that would characterise the forthcoming Victorian age, was the result of an architectural competition. And so far had the sensibility of the Romantic movement - to which Wordsworth so notably contributed - penetrated public consciousness that it was felt that the new building should represent England's and Britain's history, and Parliament insisted that "the style be Gothic or Elizabethan".
In 1802, the towers of Westminster Abbey and the dome of St Paul's were the capital's principal landmarks. Today, we have the distinctive spires of Westminster, the most Romantic of skylines, to represent London and, therefore, England.
The towers of Westminster Abbey are, of course, still to be seen rising behind the Houses of Parliament. Indeed, most of the "towers, domes, temples" that Wordsworth could see in 1802 still stand today - although not all are visible, owing to the taller buildings that have risen in the past half-century. To the south were - and are - the four strange towers rising at the corners of Thomas Archer's weird baroque Church of St John, Smith Square; to the north was - and is - the familiar, seminal steeple of St Martin-in-the-Fields by James Gibbs. He also designed a succession of "vertical features", as architects call such things these days, along the line of the Strand: St Mary-le-Strand, richly baroque; and the steeple on Wren's church of St Clement Danes.
And then, seen across the low-lying South Bank and the disconcerting right-angled bend in the river, came the fantastic skyline of the City of London as recreated by Sir Christopher Wren after the Great Fire of 1666. It was a sight that impressed even foreign visitors as they first saw London from Southwark: the medieval towers and spires of 50-odd churches all cleverly rebuilt, but now translated into the new Classical language and all gathered around the supreme monument on the horizon, the serene dome of St Paul's. Rising above the blocky mass of the cathedral and high above the surrounding rooftops, this was the greatest and most beautiful of domes - later copied by the Americans for the Capitol and even by the French on what is now the Pantheon.
Some of the steeples seen by Wordsworth were brought down in the later 19th century as the sites of City churches were sold to pay for new ones in the suburbs. For one of the greatest changes since 1802 is that the City of London is no longer residential. Most, however, survive. And what also survived until the 1960s was that wonderful skyline, dominated by St Paul's. It was a sight which proclaimed that, important as the financial wealth and vigour of the City may have been, London still respected a civilised hierarchy in its architecture and propriety still demanded that the visible symbols of religion dominate the view. No longer. Wren's steeples now struggle to be seen amid the tall commercial blocks that reflect the victory of cynical modernism in the architectural profession and, despite the planners' official respect for the vista from Westminster Bridge, even the dome of St Paul's has lost its dominance.
This is by far the worst change that has taken place since 1802 and, since the centre of Paris remains largely unsullied by high-rise buildings, it is one that is hard to defend. Yet, since both the current Prime Minister and the Mayor of London seem besotted with the virile architectural expressions of big business, it may well be that we won't see Wren's cathedral at all in a few years' time.
Nevertheless, London was always a commercial city. The ships that, along with theatres and temples, "lie open to the fields, and to the sky" were merchant vessels and the heart of London was still a port. The Thames then sported a forest of tall masts and its banks were lined not with embanked gardens and promenades, or even long, open quays, but with a profusion of jetties, wharves and warehouses. Commercial activity dominated Wordsworth's panorama.
An irregular profusion of wharfs ran south of the Palace of Westminster and - after the brief interval of the riverside gardens of aristocratic houses and the Privy Garden, where Whitehall Palace once stood - wharfs and jetties and industrial buildings resumed as the background to the river to the north. In the middle distance, by Hungerford Stairs, was the blacking factory where the young Charles Dickens spent such an unpleasant time a few decades later.
Even the one great public building that rose directly from the river - the new Somerset House, designed for official government offices and learned societies by Sir William Chambers in the 1770s - had its rusticated basement pierced by a great arched watergate to allow small merchant vessels to reach the warehouses placed ingeniously below its grand courtyard.
Somerset House still stands, of course, and is still visible from Westminster Bridge, its calm horizontal magnificence still outshining such vulgar interlopers as Shell Mex House, which sports a ridiculous giant clock, instead of an elegant dome. What is sad is that its near neighbour the Adelphi, the only other large and unified architectural composition to give distinction to the banks of the Thames in Wordsworth's day, has disappeared.
The Adelphi was an elegant and unusual property speculation designed and built in the 1770s by those brilliant Scotsmen on the make, the Adam Brothers - adelphi is Greek for brothers. Facing the river, rising above an arcaded basement that contained wine-vaults and coal wharfs, was Royal Adelphi Terrace, a smart, symmetrical group of houses that may be responsible for the perverse English nomenclature of "terrace" for what the Americans still properly call "row houses". All gone, alas, for most of the Adelphi came down in the 1930s to be replaced by a second-rate piece of art deco. Only a few houses and the premises of the Royal Society of Arts survive today.
The masts of all those sailing ships have also long gone - apart from those on the few permanently moored vessels that now serve as bars and restaurants - along with the wharfs and jetties, for the watergates of Somerset House are now left high and dry by the Victoria Embankment. The construction of this great civic improvement in the 1860s has made an enormous difference to the view that Wordsworth admired.
Given London's traditional dislike of large-scale planning and the importance awarded to property rights, it is extraordinary that such a scheme ever got off the ground. But the stench from the increasingly foul and polluted Thames was sometimes so bad that sittings of the House of Commons had to be adjourned.
So the engineer Joseph Bazalgette was allowed to connect all the sewers and the sewage-filled rivers that flowed into the Thames into one great outfall sewer, which runs along the shore and out to the east, and then to clothe it with a massive granite embankment wall, ornamented with characteristic cast-iron dolphin lamp-standards designed by Timothy Butler.
What was typical of the way London was (and is) governed is that no sooner had the Metropolitan Board of Works finished the Victoria Embankment than it was promptly dug up again for the brick-lined underground railway cutting that now carries the District Line beneath the road surface.
Other stretches of granite embankment followed over the next century, always finished with those same lamps bearing the date of completion. But the first section was the smooth curve from Westminster Bridge to Blackfriars Bridge. As inspection of old maps reveals - and the position of the York Watergate, all that remains of York House in the Strand, behind Embankment Gardens confirms - the Thames was once much wider here.
The regularity of the Victoria Embankment, with its riverside road, its trees and its occasional gardens, makes central London seem a truly Continental city, but the strange variety of the buildings that have risen up behind - above all, the fairytale gables of Whitehall Court, which belie its true identity as a mere block of flats - could surely only have been tolerated in England.
Another great change since 1802 is the construction of many more bridges. When Wordsworth stood on Westminster Bridge, he could see the hump of Robert Mylne's stone arched Blackfriars Bridge in the distance - London's third, opened in 1769 - but nothing nearer. To the south (for Westminster Bridge runs east-to-west), both Lambeth and Southwark bridges had yet to appear; to the north, no bridge yet ran radially across the great curve of the river.
The first to be constructed was Waterloo Bridge, a superb Doric structure designed by the great Scots engineer John Rennie, completed in 1817 and named after the recent final victory over Napoleon.
Three decades later came one of London's most beautiful, but shortest-lived bridges, the Hungerford Suspension Bridge, designed by the genius who built the Great Western Railway and the Clifton Suspension Bridge, Isambard Kingdom Brunel. It connected the rebuilt Hungerford market with the South Bank, but it was a commercial failure. It was replaced in the 1860s by an ugly iron structure that carried the South Eastern Railway into Charing Cross.
The rest of the story is sad, but all too typical: despite its universally recognised hideousness, endless proposals for its replacement and a direct hit by a flying bomb in the Second World War, the Hungerford Bridge continues to spoil the majesty of the view from Westminster today; while it is Rennie's original Waterloo Bridge that has gone, even though it was recognised as a supreme work of art, once described by the great Italian sculptor Canova as "the noblest bridge in the world - alone worth coming from Rome to see".
The excuse for its demolition was inadequate width and collapsing foundations, but it could have been saved. The foul deed was done by Herbert Morrison (Peter Mandelson's grandfather) as leader of the London County Council. But at least the replacement bridge of 1937-42 is a fine thing.
When Wordsworth extolled the beauty of London from Westminster Bridge, he was, of course, looking west and north. He was most certainly not admiring the Surrey side of the river behind him, for there was practically nothing there to command his attention. London is one of those cities that is divided, rather than united, by its river and in 1802 the South Bank largely consisted of marshy open land (which allowed Wordsworth to see across to the skyline of the City), with a sprinkling of wharfs and jetties by the river.
The only building of any scale or antiquity was Lambeth Palace, the London residence of the Archbishop of Canterbury, in its grounds to the south. Otherwise, there was just the beginning of urban development beyond the eastern end of the bridge, where, just off the Westminster Bridge Road, stood Astley's Amphitheatre, the celebrated home of equestrian displays and circus performances.
The development - and redevelopment - of the South Bank is, then, surely the principal change since Wordsworth's day. The building of brick terrace houses began soon after 1802, encouraged by the construction of the new bridges and their new feeder roads converging on St George's Circus in Southwark. For a time, the area was mildly respectable, but the opening of Waterloo station in 1848 soon pulled the area down, with the results described in Michael Sadleir's historical novel, Forlorn Sunset.
But none of that could be seen from the bridge. What could be seen was the tall shot tower and the Lion Brewery, but both were sacrificed after the Second World War for the Festival of Britain and the subsequent construction of the South Bank arts centre. The only notable survivor from that era is the noble Coade-stone lion that once stood proudly on the parapet of the 1830s brewery. It now commands the north-eastern corner of Westminster Bridge.
Eventually, London began to notice the South Bank and realised that it was as fine a site for public buildings as the opposite bank of the Thames. First came St Thomas's Hospital, opposite Parliament, with its separate "pavilions" built according to Florence Nightingale's principles in the late 1860s (when central London must have been one huge building site). Mercifully, not all of these have been replaced by the repellent new blocks faced in lavatorial white tile.
And then, after the turn of the century, on the opposite side of the Westminster Bridge approach, came the proud classical headquarters of the London County Council, designed by Ralph Knott - a magnificent building, paid for by the ratepayers of London, which Mrs Thatcher's government, to its shame, denuded of its purpose and Blair's has failed to restore to proper civic use.
With the LCC shifting the centre of gravity of the capital, architects, planners and politicians began to replan the South Bank, envisaging it reborn with giant boulevards, a rebuilt Waterloo station and public buildings. Nothing happened, however, until wartime bomb damage and subsequent clearance made it possible for the South Bank littoral to become the scene of the Festival of Britain in 1951 - that witty and inspiring exhibition of the New Architecture whose success contrasts so tellingly with the failure of the pathetic Millennium Dome half a century later. It also - again unlike the Dome - left something worthwhile behind afterwards, in the shape of the Royal Festival Hall.
It is the South Bank and the site of the Festival of Britain that now provides the biggest - or at least tallest - change to the view since Wordsworth's day, for County Hall is now overwhelmed by the London Eye. Indeed, this elegant piece of engineering now dominates almost every distant view of London, dwarfing the Shell Tower and the other overweening post-war blocks, as well as the towers of Parliament and Westminster Abbey. Many object to such a thing looming so large in the very heart of the capital, but I am not one of them. True, a giant wheel would never have been tolerated in the centre of Paris, but London is a much more enterprising, unconventional and interesting city.
Furthermore, this biggest of big wheels seems perfectly to symbolise the state of Britain at the start of the Millennium. It is a structure intended purely for pleasure that allows us to go round and round in circles and overshadows the national parliament from which seriousness as well as power is rapidly receding. Besides, the London Eye is beautiful - and, in 2002, a much better vantage point for appreciating the glories of London than Westminster Bridge.