In Competition No. 2723 you were invited to supply an updated version of Wordsworth’s ‘Upon Westminster Bridge’.A reading of the sonnet on Westminster Bridge in September 2002, to commemorate its 200th anniversary, was all but drowned out by the roar of the rush hour. A far cry, then, from Wordsworth’s view of a slumbering city, ‘silent, bare’, dominated by St Paul’s, with fields to the south. It was described thus in a diary entry by the poet’s sister: ‘The houses were not overhung by their cloud of smoke & they were spread out endlessly, yet the sun shone so brightly with such a pure light that there was even something like the purity of one of nature’s own grand Spectacles.’The list of unlucky losers is long: John Beaton, Mike Morrison, Josephine Boyle, Dominica Roberts, Jane Dards and Roger Theobald narrowly missed out.
