In 1845 a suspension bridge, crossing from Hungerford to Lambeth (built under Mr. I. K. Brunel’s supervision), was opened. It consisted of three spans, and two brick towers in the Italian style; the main span, at the time of its erection, was larger than that of any other in the country, and only second to that of the bridge at Fribourg. It cost £110,000, and consumed more than 10,000 tons of iron.[243] In the same year the bridge was sold to the original proprietors for £226,000, but the purchase was never carried out. It was replaced in 1864 by a railway bridge, and the market itself was filled up by an enormous railway station. The market had sunk to zero years before. In 1850 some rogue of a speculator had opened in it a pretended exhibition of the surplus articles rejected for want of room from the glass palace in Hyde Park. It proved a total failure, and swallowed up a vast sum of money and a fine northern estate or two. Latterly it had become a gratuitous music-hall, a billiard-room, and a penny-ice house, conducted by an Italian. The railway station, built by Mr. Barry, the son of the architect of the New Houses of Parliament, faces the Strand. It is of a most creditable design, and the high Mansard roofs, which surmounted the hotel which forms its front, are of a freer and grander character than those of any modern London building. A model of the Eleanor Cross has been erected in the courtyard in front of it. This building is one of the first omens of better things that we have yet seen in our still terribly mean and ugly city. Craven Street was called Spur Alley till 1742.[244] Grinling Gibbons, the great wood-carver, born at Rotterdam, and whose genius John Evelyn discovered, lived here after leaving the Belle Sauvage Yard. Here he must have fashioned those fragile strings of birds and fruit and flowers that adorn so many city churches, and the houses of so many English noblemen. At No. 7, in 1775, lodged the great Benjamin Franklin, then no longer a poor printer, but the envoy of the American colonies. Here Lords Howe and Stanhope visited him to propose terms from Lords Camden and Chatham, but unfortunately only in vain.[245] That weak and unfortunate man, the Rev. Mr. Hackman, who shot Miss Ray, the actress and the mistress of Lord Sandwich, who had encouraged his suit, lived in this street. James Smith, one of the authors of the _Rejected Addresses_,--a series of parodies rivalled only by those of _Bon Gaultier_, lived at No. 27. It was on his own street that he wrote the well-known epigram--[246] “In Craven Street, Strand, the attorneys find place, And ten dark coal barges are moor’d at its base. Fly, Honesty, fly! seek some safer retreat: There’s _craft_ in the river and _craft_ in the street.” But Sir George Rose capped this in return, retorting in extemporaneous lines, written after dinner:--