In 1769, the Kew Chapel of ease was promoted to be a parish Church. Some ten years before this, Kew had another rise in life by the building of a bridge, under an Act of Parliament obtained by the owner of the ferry. There had also been a ford at low water. The first wooden bridge was a somewhat makeshift structure, which after a quarter of a century or so became replaced by another, standing to the beginning of the present century, when a new Kew Bridge was opened by Edward VII., the old one condemned as too steep of access. Its bridge gave Kew an advantage not easily realised by our generation. Putney Bridge was only a little older, though a bridge of boats had been thrown across the river there at the time of the Civil War. Westminster Bridge was not built till 1738, an improvement hotly opposed by various vested interests, the cry being that it would ruin the City as well as the watermen. For centuries, unless by water, the Thames could not be crossed between London Bridge and Kingston. This fact explains the roundabout manner of Sir Thomas Wyatt’s attack upon the City in that ill-managed insurrection against the Spanish marriage that cost Lady Jane Grey’s head as well as his own. In my youth, at least, one was apt to take one’s notion of his proceedings from Harrison Ainsworth’s _Tower of London_, where a desperate storm of the Tower is described, with fierce hand-to-hand fighting, on the model of a like scene in _Ivanhoe_. But this was all imagination. As a matter of fact, Wyatt failed to get across London Bridge, the drawbridge in the middle having been taken up and the gate beyond being stoutly guarded against his advance. The Southwark people, who had welcomed him to the Borough, begged him to be gone when the Tower guns were turned upon their homes. Setting out in the morning, hampered by cannon to be dragged along through miry ways, he did not get to Kingston till well on in the afternoon. Here, too, the bridge had been broken, but its defenders fled from his guns; some sailors swam across to fetch back barges moored on the farther side; the gap was hastily repaired with planks; then before midnight he was able to continue his march. A gun breaking down delayed him at Brentford, then perhaps the Kew people were for the nonce rather thankful not to have a bridge, as that force passed by to assail London on the Middlesex side. So must they have been in the next century, when across the river they could hear the shouts and shots with which Royalists set Roundheads flying through the narrow streets of Brentford.