The first Hungerford Bridge, designed by
Isambard Kingdom Brunel, opened in 1845 as a
suspension footbridge. It was named after the then
Hungerford Market, because it went from the South Bank, specifically a northern point of Lambeth, soon close to
London Waterloo station to that place on the north side of the Thames, specifically to the market (later Charing Cross Station) about 200 yards or metres east of
Trafalgar Square partly in the parish of
Saint Martin in the Fields, Westminster, the spire of which can be seen from the bridge. In 1859 the original bridge was bought by the
Charing Cross Railway Company, who obtained the '''''' (
23 & 24 Vict. c. cxlvii) to allow them to extend the
South Eastern Railway into a new
Charing Cross railway station. The railway company replaced the suspension bridge with a structure designed by Sir
John Hawkshaw, comprising nine spans made of
wrought iron lattice girders, which opened in 1864. The chains from the old bridge were re-used in
Bristol's
Clifton Suspension Bridge. The original brick pile buttresses of Brunel's footbridge are still in use, though the one on the Charing Cross side is now much closer to the river bank than it was originally, due to the building of the
Victoria Embankment, completed in 1870. The buttress on the South Bank side still has the entrances and steps from the original steamer pier Brunel built on to the footbridge. In the mid-1990s a decision was made to replace the footbridge with new structures on either side of the existing railway bridge, and a competition was held in 1996 for a new design. Further justification for new footbridge structures on the west flank and east flank was that the brittle
wrought iron support pillars of Sir John Hawkshaw's railway bridge were vulnerable to impact from riverboats. ==The Golden Jubilee footbridges==