Westminster Bridge seems a very recent structure as compared to that of London, but it is the next in point of date. The growing importance of Westminster as the seat of the Court and Parliament had made the necessity for an approach to the south side of the Thames, independent of the circuitous and narrow ways of London, long apparent. In the reign of Charles II. the question was seriously considered, to the alarm of the Mayor and Corporation of the city, who feared that their vested interests were endangered, and "that London would be destroyed if carts were allowed to cross the Thames elsewhere"; but, knowing their man, they devoted some of their ample funds to secure that monarch's successful opposition to the scheme. In the middle of the eighteenth century, however, when there was no Stuart to buy off, the idea was revived, and in 1739, one Monsieur Labelye, a Swiss engineer--English engineers having, apparently, not sufficient experience--commenced a new stone bridge. His mode of putting in his foundations may have been scientific, but was certainly simple. The bridge piers were partly built in floating barges moored above the place where they were to be permanently erected. The barges were then sunk, their sides knocked out, and the piers completed. It is needless to say that the result was not satisfactory, and for years before the old bridge was pulled down many of its arches were filled up with a picturesque, but inconvenient, mass of shoring. Whether Henry, Earl of Pembroke, who laid the foundation stone, and of whom it was said no nobleman had a purer taste in architecture, was in any way responsible for the design, we cannot tell; but a French traveller of discrimination, who criticised the work after its completion, came to the conclusion that the peculiarly lofty parapets with which the bridge was adorned were so designed that they might check an Englishman's natural propensity to suicide by giving him time for reflection while surmounting such an obstacle. It will be noticed in our illustration (fig. 4), which is also taken from a painting by Scott, that the piers are crowned by alcoves, which provided a shelter from the blasts which blew over the river and from the mud scattered from the roadway. These were, doubtless, a survival of the spaces left above the cutwaters of mediæval bridges as refuges for pedestrians from vehicles when the roadways were very narrow, and those who remember the old wooden bridges of Battersea and Putney can appreciate their value.