— Lake
The Bridges
Rustic bridges were once all the rage in urban commons and parks around 1900 (including Battersea Park).
And here's ours:
[A FEW MORE IMAGES OF THE RUSTIC BRIDGE]
Popular as wooden-branch bridges were — they did such a good job of evoking quaint rurality — they were rickety, prone to rot, and required a lot of maintenance. In the 1920s there was another reason for replacing it with a more massive and permanent structure — the need to find useful work for the demobbed servicemen.
But not everyone agreed this sort of public work was a good idea (as in the following article), but all agreed something had to be done if the unemployed were not to "rust" and become prey to "agitators".
Here's a short extract (I have emboldened the reference to the bridge.)
A crowd of several hundred workless men in the neighbourhood of the Battersea Labour Exchange yesterday was a cheerless sight, particularly as most of the men were ex-soldiers. The fact of their being without work is not the worst characteristic. It is that enforced idleness impairs the capacity for effort.
We all know the rusty metals are worthless, or nearly so. Men rust in a similar manner, and when thoroughly rusted are equally useless. Our unemployed are rapidly rusting: that was evident from the appearance of many of those who composed yesterday's crowd.
The remedy is work, not doles. Agitators recognise that, but their ideas with regard to work are crude; they do not trouble to envisage work in relation to its results.
While a man is doing something and he's regularly paid wages, the agitator is satisfied.
Work may be useless, or unnecessary like the building of a bridge over the lake at Wandsworth Common, which is being undertaken because the County Council happen to have a little spare cash.
The editorialist continued:
Unemployment cannot be removed except by productive and economically remunerative operations. Endeavours in other directions [such as the building of the Common's new bridge] are expedients which may be palliative, but generally are nothing but camouflaged pauperisation.
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