Walton Bridge: The Story of Six Crossings

Six bridges have crossed the Thames between Walton and Shepperton since the middle of the eighteenth century, and the site has a longer memory than that: a ferry is recorded operating here from at least the early seventeenth century, before any bridge existed at all. Few river crossings in Surrey have been rebuilt so often, or painted by so many serious artists along the way.

The first bridge, and Canaletto

The first bridge at Walton was built between 1748 and 1750, a timber structure carrying the road across to Shepperton. It stood for little more than thirty years before being dismantled in 1783, but it left behind one of the town’s most improbable claims to fame: in 1754, the Venetian painter Canaletto, then working in London, painted it. The painting shows a bridge in a distinctly rococo, almost oriental style, rising from the Surrey bank in a way that looks more like a garden folly than a piece of road infrastructure. The painting itself now hangs at Dulwich Picture Gallery, which means the definitive image of Walton’s first bridge lives a few miles from Walton but has never actually returned to it.

The second bridge, and Turner

A second bridge replaced the first in 1788, built this time in brick and stone rather than timber, a more conventional and durable structure that lasted over seventy years, into 1859. It too attracted a major painter: J. M. W. Turner sketched and painted the bridge in 1805, during one of his Thames sketching tours, a reminder that this stretch of the river was considered worth a serious artist’s time twice within a single generation.

The Victorian girder bridge and its wartime damage

The third bridge, built in 1864, was a girder structure carried on stone piers, with a brick viaduct across the flood plain on the Walton side. Part of that Victorian viaduct still survives today, a solid reminder of the bridge that stood here through most of the Victorian and Edwardian periods and into the Second World War. The girder bridge did not survive the war undamaged: it was hit during bombing in 1940, in the same period that saw Luftwaffe raids target the aircraft works at nearby Brooklands, and the damage left the bridge under weight restrictions for years afterwards.

Temporary bridges, twice

The damaged Victorian bridge was eventually replaced by a fourth, deliberately temporary structure in 1953, built to keep traffic moving while a permanent solution was worked out. It ended up serving far longer than intended, eventually reduced to pedestrian and cycle use only before being demolished in 1985. A fifth bridge, opened in 1999, was again conceived as a temporary replacement while a permanent scheme was finalised, and it too ran into early problems that required resurfacing work. Walton spent the better part of the twentieth century’s second half crossing the Thames on structures that were never meant to last, which makes the eventual permanent replacement feel overdue rather than simply welcome.

The current bridge

The sixth and current Walton Bridge opened on 22 July 2013, at a cost of some £32.4 million. It is a single-span, parabolic tied-arch bridge, and it was reported at the time as the first bridge of its kind heading up the River Thames without piers standing in the water itself, a genuine piece of modern engineering rather than a like-for-like replacement. It carries the A244 across to Shepperton and has quickly become one of the most recognisable pieces of modern architecture in Walton, visible for a considerable distance along the towpath in both directions.

Walking to the bridge

The bridge sits immediately downstream of Cowey Sale, Walton’s principal riverside meadow, and is the natural landmark to head for on any riverside walk from the town centre. The Thames Path runs directly beneath it on the Walton bank, and the surviving Victorian viaduct from the third bridge is still visible a short distance from the current crossing, one of the few tangible fragments left of the bridge’s two-hundred-and-fifty-year rebuilding history.