Crossing the bridge to work

Text 1: The Morning Tide, by Samuel Greatorex

An original newspaper report written in a nineteenth-century voice; a period simulation, not an archival document.

Let any reader stand at the Surrey end of London Bridge between eight and nine of a weekday morning, and he will witness a spectacle unequalled in Europe. Some thousands of clerks, in black coats and tall hats, pour across the bridge towards the City like a river in flood, and all in the same direction. Nobody strolls. Nobody stops. A man who pauses to tie his bootlace is in danger of being trampled by the battalion behind.

It is a curiously silent multitude. There is the tramp of feet and the rumble of the omnibuses, but scarcely a voice. Each man looks straight before him, as though the others did not exist, and I am told that a clerk may cross beside the same companion every day for twenty years and never learn his name.

Below them the river glitters with the morning sun, full of barges, sails and gulls, as fine a sight as any in the kingdom. In half an hour of watching, I did not see one man in all that host turn his head to look at it.

Text 2: Rush Hour on Foot, by Abigail Nwosu

An original contemporary blog.

Every weekday at half past eight I join the human river that flows across the bridge from the station to the business district. Thousands of us, in dark coats and trainers, with lanyards and takeaway coffees, all going the same way at the same speed. If you stop to check your phone, someone walks straight into the back of you and sighs.

What always strikes me is how quiet it is. You hear footsteps, buses and the occasional siren, but hardly anyone speaks. Everyone has headphones in and eyes fixed on the far end of the bridge. There is a man with a red umbrella I have walked beside, more or less, every morning for three years. I have no idea who he is.

And beneath us is the river, which on a clear morning is genuinely beautiful, silver and wide, with boats and cormorants and the light bouncing off the water. I made a resolution last month to stop halfway and look at it every day. So far I have managed it twice. Nobody else ever does.

Both writers describe crowds walking to work across a city bridge.

What are the similarities between the writers’ descriptions of the commuters and the scene?

Draw on evidence from both texts to support your answer.