London Bridge, London

Photogravure by Donald Macleish from Wonderful London by St John Adcock, 1927.

Unreal City, Under the brown fog of a winter dawn, A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many, I had not thought death had undone so many. Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled, And each man fixed his eyes before his feet. Flowed up the hill and down King William Street, To where Saint Mary Woolnoth kept the hours With a dead sound on the final stroke of nine.

TS Eliot, from The Waste Land, 1922

This photograph shows Monday morning traffic over London Bridge as commuters arrive in the City from London Bridge station and the southern suburbs.

This photograph was published soon after The Waste Land was first published. Indeed, the fellow with the hat on the left in front of the cyclists might even be TS Eliot.

The early 20th Century journey to work in the City over London Bridge is symbolic in Henry WIlliamson's Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight sequence of a loss of innocence, and the expansion of London's rape of the English countryside. Williamson grew up in Brockley in Lewisham, and when he left school at 17 he was forced to endure this journey for nine months to the offices of the Sun Assurance company in Leadenhall Street before he joined up to the London Territorials at the start of the First World War and was shipped over the channel to participate in the First Battle of Ypres.