H is for Hungerford Bridge #AtoZChallenge

I’m doing the A to Z Challenge in April, using the theme of the UK & Ireland. For H, I wanted to revisit the Hungerford Bridge in London.

The Hungerford Bridge carries trains from Charing Cross station across the River Thames. Of course, a railroad bridge doesn’t usually hold much interest to visitors.

A “weed” on the Hungerford Bridge. The white bits are the supports for the Golden Jubilee Pedestrian Bridge, which I was standing on when I took this photos

What’s special about the Hungerford Bridge are the two pedestrian bridges hung on each side. The Golden Jubilee Bridges were completed in 2002 and named for the 50th anniversary of Queen Elizabeth’s coronation. If you want to walk from Trafalgar Square to the London Eye, this is the bridge that you’ll take across the river.

Rick (on the left) walking across the Thames on the Golden Jubilee Bridge

As someone who grew up in a small river town with an important bridge (because it was the only one for miles) and who lives in St. Louis, a river city, I gravitate toward rivers and the bridges that cross them.

A river keeps me oriented. Even though I live nowhere near the Mississippi River, I always know where it is. I mentally (occasionally, physically) turn myself so that my right shoulder points to the River and, now, I’m facing north and know all of my cardinal directions.

London makes it easy to stay oriented with the Thames by helpfully naming some of its prominent areas after the cardinal directions. We stayed just north of the Hungerford Bridge, across from Southwark. If I walked out the front door of the hotel and turned my back to the River, I was facing north with Westminster on my left and the East End many blocks away on the right.

Does anyone else use rivers to maintain a sense of direction?

Comments

H is for Hungerford Bridge #AtoZChallenge — 3 Comments

Colette B on April 10, 2018 at 5:33 am said:

I think we walked that bridge on the way to the London Eye while I was a parent volunteer accompanying a school trip a good few years ago now. Lovely to see it again. I hadn’t realised that some areas of our capital city were named by insistence of the Pope. I guess that’s what you mean. Perhaps it’s one of the ways ‘cardinal sins’ is one of very few phrases in majority English/British language mentioning the word ‘cardinal’. Unless of course you mean a primordial sense of direction, ie. a natural sense of direction. Hopefully outlouding my thinking isn’t offensive to any others’ religious faith. It was a very interesting moment of my reading this post and attempting to decipher meaning. I’m very happy to caught up with reading your A to Z posts Joy.

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- Joy Weese Moll on April 10, 2018 at 8:47 am said:
  
  The cardinal directions are the four points of the compass — north, east, south, and west.
  
  Why are they called that? I had to look that up in the Oxford English Dictionary. It turns out it comes directly from Latin. Used as an adjective, cardinal means “chief,” but of abstract things — “on which something else hinges or depends, fundamental; chief, principal.” The cardinal directions are the four chief directions — the two poles and the places of sunrise and sunset.
  
  The noun form seems to have derived from the adjective — so, important personages in the church became cardinals.
  
  In a later usage, because cardinals in the church wear bright red hats, we have a common bird in North America called a cardinal because of it’s bright red plumage and a lovely flower Lobelia cardinalis, commonly called cardinal flower, that is bright red.
  
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