One man who can fairly claim to have put his stamp on the City of London and yet who is barely remembered is Sir Horace Jones. During his tenure as City Surveyor, a post he held from 1864 until his death in 1888, he was responsible for designing three of the capital’s most distinctive markets.
The first was Smithfield Market, a huge and distinctive building with its colourful ironwork, which took seventeen years to complete over three phases. Completed in 1883, only now is it being replaced, the City’s last remaining wholesale market moving to a £1 billion high-tech site in Dagenham this year (2024). Jones was also responsible for building Billingsgate Market, the world’s largest fish market, which was opened in 1878. The building eventually proved to be impractical for the demands of modern day fish merchants and the market relocated to the Isle of Dogs in 1982. It is now used to host corporate events. The third was Leadenhall Market, completed in 1881, showing Jones’ love of ornate ironwork, and now offering a canopy for the watering holes frequented by insurance underwriters and brokers.
Jones even found time in 1880 to design the Temple Bar Memorial with its striking rampant griffin or dragon, which stands in the middle of the road where Fleet Street takes over from the Strand, marking the original spot where Wren’s Temple Bar stood and the point where the City of Westminster becomes the City of London. His likeness can be found on one of the brass plates adorning the monument.
However, his most iconic contribution to London’s skyscape was a solution to London’s perennial problem, traffic congestion. With London’s continuing expansion ever eastwards and London Bridge being the furthest downriver bridge, there was an ever increasing demand for another bridge to link the City with the Surrey side of the Thames. The problem was where to place it and how it was to operate in a way that allowed Customs House and its surrounding wharfs to operate as before without the risk of disrupting the flow of goods and foodstuffs.
Many designs were submitted for a new bridge, some bizarre, some practical. Jones’ design was essentially a drawbridge using a see-saw principle rather than a chain-lift to raise and lower its enormous bascules, which were powered by hydraulic chambers filled by water pumps, driven by steam. Externally, it was decorated with Gothic looking towers, which echoed its proximity to the more sober Tower of London.
Jones’ design was selected in 1884, the Tower Bridge Act was passed by Parliament on August 14, 1885 and he and his technical partner, John Wolfe Barry, were appointed to superintend construction, which began on April 22, 1886. Rather like Charles Pearson, though, Jones was never to see his project to completion, dying on May 21, 1887. However, Barry saw the project through to its completion and the bridge was finally opened by the Prince and Princess of Wales on June 30, 1894.
The bascules, now powered by electricity, open around 800 times a year, adding in their own unique way, to the traffic chaos of the area. However, a testament to how much the river traffic has declined is the statistic that in its first year of operation the bascules were lifted 6,194 times or about seventeen times a day. Although Tower Bridge did not solve London’s traffic problems, it is a building that is quintessentially London.
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