This city now doth, like a garment, wear
The beauty of the morning; silent, bare,
Ships, towers, domes, theatres and temples lie
Open unto the fields, and to the sky;
All bright and glittering in the smokeless air...

William Wordsworth must have got up very early in the
morning of that summer day in 1802; before the citizens had
lighted their fires. London had been notorious for two centuries
and more for the sea-coal smoke from the thousands of domestic
hearths, lying low upon its thoroughfares. Wordsworth wrote
his sonnet on Westminster Bridge 10 years before the official
opening of the Regency, and nearer 20 years before John
Nash's attempt to make the Regent's capital a place of imperial
majesty. The City sky-line was still the sky-line of Sir
Christopher Wren, dominated by the white silhouette of the
ancient Tower, the soaring dome and golden cross of St Paul's,
and the pinnacles of the City churches. The whole panorama
bore the tint of warm red-brick. It was still the London that
Canaletto had painted in the 1760s. The bridge on which
Wordsworth stood, however, was a landmark in the transforma-
tion of medieval London into a modern city. Westminster
Bridge may be said to have founded the great English tradition
of bridge-building that was to go on with Smeaton, and
Telford, and the Rennies, even though its builder was a Swiss.
Charles Labelye had built it, and it was promoted by the ninth

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