118 KEW GARDENS 



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 round- 

 about 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 



