In 1823-4, when George Rennie designed New London Bridge, London was probably two hundred times as big as was Montauban in the fourteenth century; and certainly the Thames was not inferior to the Tarn as a historic inspiration. Yet Rennie failed to understand the importance of being large in scale. In less than fifty years his work was “insufficiently wide for the traffic”;[109] and since then, on a good many occasions, we have been asked to disfigure London Bridge with overhanging footpaths. “London can well afford to pay for new bridges, but can by no means afford to part with a single object of real beauty.”[109] For Rennie’s bridge, despite all errors of scale, has points of charming interest. Her roadway has a graceful curvature that delights the eye, her arches have an excellent shape, and the variation in their size could not well be bettered.[110] Later we shall see (p. 325) that much money was ill-spent on hammer-dressing the whole external face of the masonry; but an engineer with a very weak feeling for scale was afraid to use either scabbled stone or stone with a rough-axed facing. Rennie learnt all that he could learn by studying fine models of style, such as the Roman bridge at Rimini, but his own equipment as an artist was terrene. Would that we had in England an old bridge equal to the Pont des Consuls! Would that old London Bridge had been delivered down to our sixpences and shillings! Yet I suppose we must consider ourselves lucky in the fact that historic bridges in Great Britain, though much inferior to those on the Continent, are fairly numerous in districts where there has been but little increase of traffic. We possess three bridges with defensive gateways (Stirling, Warkworth, and the Monnow Bridge at Monmouth); five with chapels, or with relics of chapels (St. Ives in Huntingdonshire, Derby, Bradford-on-Avon in Wiltshire, Wakefield, Rotherham); and many good specimens exist of bridges with angular recesses built out from parapets and forming part of the piers.[111] These recesses were designed not only as shelter places for wayfarers, but because they lessened the cost of production, inasmuch as they gave width to narrow footways; and so their value in an old bridge is very similar to that of bay-windows in cottage rooms.