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This road, which leads from the Great North Road into London, goes under the bridge not across it. In 1809 an engineer Robert Vazie obtained an Act of Parliament to raise £60,000 to construct a 230-metre tunnel and cutting through Highgate Hill “and thus underpass the notoriously steep gradient”. In accordance with early 19thCentury practice, the tunnel was known as an archway and hence the company formed to construct it was called the Highgate Archway Company. This name also lent itself to the name of the road and the later bridge. Work finally got underway in 1810, watched by 800 spectators who had come to see the start of the dig. Work had been progressing well having reached 40 metres, when on April 13, 1812 disaster happened and the tunnel collapsed as a result of the company not using enough bricks in the lining and the poor quality of the cement. This was not the first project that had ended in ignominy for Vazie, some years earlier he had been involved in a tunnel under the Thames, which also ran into problems and was later abandoned. Now, for a second time in his career the tunnel scheme was scrapped. It was suggested that the route should instead be a cutting, which in part already existed on account of the previous work and the collapsed tunnel. With this decided there remained another problem. The ancient byway on Hornsey Lane which ran between Hornsey and Highgate, ran along the top of the hill. To counter objections a viaduct was proposed and hence the Highgate Archway was conceived. The original stone bridge was designed by John Nash. Archway Road was opened on August 21, 1813 as a toll road. “Tolls were ‘not exceeding’ 6d per horse and carriage and 3d for horse or mule not drawing a carriage and 1d for a pedestrian.” The tollgate, which was at the corner of Lidyard Road was removed when the tolls ceased in 1871. As for the bridge, in 1897 it was demolished as part of the widening of Archway Road. Its replacement a “graceful iron bridge,” designed by Sir Alexander Binnie, was completed in 1901. Not long after its completion it earned the unfortunate moniker “London’s Bridge of Sighs” because of the occasional suicide. Jerry White in his seminal history of the city, London in the 20th Century writes that the “new bridge [was] a symbolic gateway to London from the north.”
