Albert Bridge

The Thames glistens under a chalk-white sky as the Victorian iron girders of Albert Bridge descend in gentle curves across the water. The bridge’s ornate latticework casts skeletal shadows over the river’s sluggish flow toward the distant Battersea skyline. Puddles of reflected neon from London’s sprawl streak the walkway’s worn planks, creating shifting zones of sickly color. The structure’s lampposts, spaced like sentinels, cast brittle pools of sicklier light over empty benches and discarded cardboard. At the bridge’s midpoint, where the arches frame the water below, the Master stands with a silhouette too precise, too deliberate—his back to the city, the Three Companions crouched below at Cadogan Pier rendered tiny and vulnerable, dwarfed by the bridge’s scale and malice.