At 4.55 in the morning, London jumped.
Not metaphorically.
It jumped.
Beds jumped. Windows jumped. Doors jumped. People jumped out of those beds. Horses panicked. Elephants panicked. Giraffes panicked.
And somewhere above Regent’s Canal, several tons of bridge briefly ceased to be a bridge.
London calling.
London Walks connecting.
This is London.
This is London Walks.
Streets ahead.
Story time. History time.
And this morning we’re going canal-side.
For a very good reason.
Because this year marks the 50th anniversary of London Walks’ canal walks.
Fifty seasons.
We’ve taken more than 19,000 walkers along London’s waterways. We’ve run more than 1,200 canal walks. We now have 28 different canal walks, with another one in the offing.
So yes, we know these towpaths.
And one of the great moments on the Regent’s Canal walk comes when you reach a handsome classical bridge on the northern edge of Regent’s Park.
Macclesfield Bridge.
Though nobody with a taste for a good story should call it that.
Its other name is much better.
Blow-Up Bridge.
And today, October 2nd, is why.
October 2nd, 1874.
Picture London asleep.
It’s not yet five in the morning.
No traffic roar. No aircraft overhead. No phones glowing beside beds. No Underground trains rattling beneath the streets.
Regent’s Park is black and still.
And moving slowly through that darkness is a little procession of working boats.
This is the London canal system doing what it was built to do.
Carrying stuff.
London was fed, heated, built and supplied along these waterways.
Coal. Timber. Grain. stone. Food. Raw materials.
The railway age had arrived, certainly, but the canals were still in business.
And there was one great advantage.
A canal boat could plod along continuously, day and night, at about walking pace.
Slow.
Cheap.
Dependable.
That morning a little train of boats had left the City Road Basin at about three o’clock.
Out front was the steam vessel Ready.
Then came the Jane.
Then the Dee.
Then the Tilbury.
Behind her came the Limehouse.
And finally the Hawksbury.
Six vessels nosing westward through sleeping London.
Think of the soundscape.
The quiet chug of the tug.
Water licking the brickwork.
A rope tightening.
Wood creaking.
Maybe a sleepy word exchanged between boatmen.
Otherwise silence.
The Tilbury was carrying a decidedly mixed shopping basket.
Sugar.
Nuts.
Strawboard.
Coffee.
Two or three barrels of petroleum.
And approximately five tons of gunpowder.
I’ll just give you that list again.
Coffee.
Nuts.
Petroleum.
Five tons of gunpowder.
What could possibly go wrong?
The powder had been made at Waltham Abbey in Essex and was being sent north for blasting purposes.
And astonishingly, carrying petroleum and gunpowder together was apparently not regarded as especially remarkable.
Victorian health and safety.
Different planet.
The boats moved past the Zoological Gardens.
Past sleeping animals.
Past sleeping keepers.
Past sleeping houses.
And shortly before five o’clock the Tilbury reached Macclesfield Bridge.
The bridge crossed the canal at the North Gate of Regent’s Park, roughly opposite Avenue Road.
It was a substantial structure.
Brick.
Iron.
Classical detailing.
Cast-iron columns.
The sort of thing built with Victorian confidence that seemed to say, quite firmly, “I shall be here for several hundred years.”
The Tilbury moved underneath it.
And then London exploded.
BOOM.
Five tons of gunpowder went up beneath the bridge.
Not beside it.
Not near it.
Underneath it.
Imagine setting off an enormous bomb in a brick and iron tunnel.
The Tilbury disappeared.
The bridge effectively disappeared.
A great column of smoke and flame punched upwards.
Ironwork, bricks, timber and cargo were hurled through the air.
The canal became a gigantic crater of wreckage.
One of the other barges sank.
Another was wrecked.
Trees along the bank were torn and scorched.
A gas main broke.
A water main broke.
A sewer burst.
The gas caught fire.
Water poured away.
The canal itself was blocked by a mountain of rubble said to be about twenty feet high.
Twenty feet.
That’s getting on for the height of a two-storey house.
And this all happened in darkness.
At five minutes to five in the morning.
The blast travelled east and west along the canal cutting like violence being fired down the barrel of a gun.
People a mile away lost windows.
In some streets there was scarcely an intact pane of glass.
Doors were blown in.
Ceilings came down.
Furniture was smashed.
Shops were gutted.
One piece of stone was reportedly hurled about 500 yards and buried itself in a garden.
And people were thrown out of bed.
Actually thrown out of bed.
Now put yourself there.
You’re asleep.
Deep asleep.
October morning.
Dark outside.
And suddenly the room moves.
The window comes in.
The house lifts.
There’s a detonation unlike anything you’ve ever heard.
Then crashing glass.
Screaming.
People running into the street in nightclothes.
Some wrapped in blankets.
Nobody knows what’s happened.
That’s important.
We know what happened.
They didn’t.
For those first few minutes it might have been anything.
An earthquake.
A railway catastrophe.
A gasworks going up.
The military magazine exploding.
And this being the 1870s, another possibility was immediately whispered.
Fenians.
An Irish Republican bombing.
Fear gets to work very quickly when nobody knows what’s happening.
And now, because London never wastes an opportunity to turn catastrophe into theatre, pan the camera east a little.
London Zoo.
The animals had been asleep too.
Not any more.
The great explosion rolls across the Zoological Gardens.
Glass breaks.
Aviary frames buckle.
And suddenly the zoo erupts.
The contemporary report is wonderful because it gives us the cast list.
Elands.
Antelopes.
Giraffes.
Elephants.
And a rhinoceros.
All, we’re told, showing “great excitement”.
Great excitement!
That may be one of the grand Victorian understatements.
Five tons of gunpowder have just gone off next door.
I’d be showing great excitement.
Picture it.
Elephants trumpeting.
Antelopes crashing around.
Giraffes doing whatever giraffes do when several tons of Regent’s Park suddenly take to the air.
A rhinoceros deciding that something extremely unsatisfactory has occurred.
And above them, birds everywhere.
Because part of an aviary had been damaged.
About a dozen little birds got out.
Think about that image.
London is staggering around in its nightshirt.
Regent’s Park is smoking.
A bridge has vanished.
The canal is full of masonry.
And twelve small birds have unexpectedly been granted their freedom.
Good morning, London.
Off you go.
There was another fear.
What if the larger animals escaped?
The Horse Guards came up from Albany Barracks.
Police arrived.
The Fire Brigade arrived.
Crowds arrived, naturally.
Because this is London.
If something enormous has just exploded, half the population runs away from it and the other half comes along to have a look.
Fortunately the great beasts remained contained.
No lions padding down Avenue Road.
No rhinoceros heading for Baker Street.
No elephant wandering into St John’s Wood.
But for a little while that morning you can understand why people worried.
Closer to the bridge the destruction was appalling.
The North Lodge of Regent’s Park was virtually demolished.
Six people were inside.
Extraordinarily, they survived with relatively minor injuries.
One man woke to discover that an entire wall of his bedroom was no longer there.
That’s a fairly brisk way to start the day.
And then there were the men on the Tilbury.
Charles Baxton, the steerer, about 35 years old.
William Taylor, a labourer, about 25.
And the other unfortunate souls aboard.
There was no chance.
Bodies had to be dragged from the canal.
One wasn’t recovered until the afternoon.
The blast had simply obliterated their boat.
And this is where the story changes key.
Because it’s very easy to enjoy the extraordinary details.
The flying bridge.
The shaken rhinoceros.
The people in nightshirts.
The escaped birds.
But working canals were dangerous places.
The men who moved London’s cargo lived with water, machinery, darkness, cold, heavy loads, fire and, sometimes, astonishingly hazardous cargo.
This was their workplace.
And on October 2nd, 1874, one journey through Regent’s Park never made it beyond Macclesfield Bridge.
Nobody ever established with certainty what started the fire.
A lamp?
A match?
Petroleum vapour?
We don’t know.
But the disaster helped concentrate minds wonderfully.
The following year brought the Explosives Act of 1875 and tighter regulation of explosives and how they were handled.
And Macclesfield Bridge?
Well, this is London.
We rebuild.
The bridge went back up.
Indeed, parts of the old bridge survived.
Those magnificent cast-iron columns had been made at Coalbrookdale in Shropshire, one of the great birthplaces of the Industrial Revolution.
They were reused.
And here comes the little physical detail I love.
Because you can go there today and read the story with your fingers.
In the days when barges were horse-drawn, the towing ropes rubbed against those iron columns.
Day after day.
Boat after boat.
Year after year.
And the ropes cut grooves into the iron.
After the explosion the columns were re-erected.
Some were turned around.
So today you can find old rope grooves where, logically, rope grooves shouldn’t be.
They’re fossilised movement.
Victorian traffic written into iron.
That’s what I love about walking London.
The past isn’t somewhere else.
It’s under your hand.
And Blow-Up Bridge is a perfect London Walks place.
You stand there today and it’s peaceful.
Water.
Trees.
Ducks.
Joggers.
Houseboats.
Somebody walking a dog.
Maybe a cyclist ringing a bell at you.
Regent’s Park looking about as composed and respectable as London knows how to look.
And unless somebody tells you, you would never imagine it.
At 4.55 on an October morning, that tranquil little stretch of canal became one of the loudest places on Earth.
A barge vanished.
A bridge went skyward.
Houses shook.
Londoners ran screaming into the streets.
Elephants trumpeted.
A rhinoceros had a very bad morning.
And a dozen little birds flew off into the dawn.
All of which brings me back to those canal walks.
Fifty years of them this year.
Fifty seasons of taking people beside London’s waterways.
And there’s a reason they have such pulling power.
A canal is a corridor through the back of London.
That’s the magic.
You leave the road.
You go down a flight of steps.
And suddenly the city changes.
Traffic noise falls away.
The angle changes.
You’re looking at the backs of buildings.
Old warehouses.
Gardens.
Bridges.
Locks.
Tunnels.
You’re travelling through London at water level.
And the stories are waiting every few hundred yards.
Industrial London.
Literary London.
Regency London.
Working-class London.
Engineering London.
Wildlife London.
And occasionally, spectacularly, exploding London.
One final thought.
Macclesfield Bridge was built to carry people across a canal.
But its greatest historical distinction came from something underneath it.
Which isn’t a bad metaphor for London.
Look underneath.
That’s where the good stuff is.
London calling.
London Walks connecting.
This is London.
This is London Walks.
Streets ahead.
And today’s word of the day?
Detonation.
From the Latin tonare, “to thunder”.
Put de in front of it and you get the idea of thundering forth.
Detonation.
A pretty good word for what happened at 4.55 in the morning on October 2nd, 1874.
Though if you’d been the rhinoceros at London Zoo that morning, you probably wouldn’t have bothered with the Latin.