Lillie Bridge (Fulham)

Lillie Bridge
Lillie Bridge from West Brompton station
Carries	A3218 road
Crosses	West London Line
Locale	London, England, United Kingdom
Characteristics
Design	Road bridge
Material	steel and brick
History
Designer	Sir John Fowler, 1st Baronet
Opened	1860

Lillie Bridge is a road bridge that links Old Brompton Road in the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea with Lillie Road in the London Borough of Hammersmith & Fulham. It crosses two railways: the West London Line on the London Overground and the Wimbledon branch of the London Underground at West Brompton station.

Its history goes back to at least the 18th-century when there was a wooden foot-bridge, called 'Gunter's Bridge' after landowner and confectioner James Gunter (1731-1819), over a tributary of the Thames river, variously called Counter's Creek, or Counter's ditch (or sewer), that separated the parishes of Fulham and Kensington at this spot. A Magistrates' enquiry into the bridges of the County of Middlesex, set up in 1820, described it thus:

Footbridge of Wood called Gunter's Bridge in the Footpath between Earls Court and Walham Green. [...] This bridge has been built upwards of Fifty Years and is kept in repair at the joint expense of Kensington and Fulham Parishes. [...] The tide flows to a considerable distance above this Bridge.

A stone and brick structure was built in its place, when Counter's Creek was converted into the Kensington Canal in 1826. It opened for trade in 1828. Remnants of the bridge beneath the current road bridge are still visible from platform 4 on the Overground Line at the neighbouring station. The new bridge was subsequently named after Sir John Scott Lillie, the Peninsular War veteran and inventor and early 19th-century developer on the Fulham side, who was also involved with the canal project. Its railway associations go back to 1838 under the supervision of engineer, Robert Stephenson. The canal bridge was used to carry the road over the railway to the London and North Western Railway yard which had replaced the canal basin and wharves behind Reckitt Street, Fulham.