London Bridge

Stand still for a moment and feel the bridge under your feet. It is smooth, pale concrete, firm and quiet. Below you, the Thames moves fast and brown, pulled by a tide that rises and falls twice a day. Listen, and you will hear buses, footsteps and gulls. Look east, and the blue towers of Tower Bridge rise downstream. Many visitors arrive expecting those towers. This is something different, and in many ways much older.

The bridge you are standing on is plain, and that is part of its story. It opened in 1973, and Queen Elizabeth the Second opened it. It is made of prestressed concrete, which means steel cables inside the concrete pull it tight and make it strong. Three long, low spans carry the road across the river. There are no towers and no statues. It is a working bridge, built to move people and traffic. But it stands on one of the oldest crossing points in the whole city.

The Romans came first. Not long after their invasion of Britain in AD 43, they built a wooden bridge across the Thames close to this spot. Around that crossing, a town grew. The Romans called it Londinium. So in a real sense, London grew up around a bridge. The river here was narrow enough to span, and deep enough for ships. For centuries, there was a bridge at or near this point, rebuilt again and again as wood rotted, burned or washed away.

There is also a story about Vikings. According to a Norse saga, in the early eleventh century a king called Olaf tied his ships to the wooden bridge and rowed hard until it collapsed into the river. Historians debate how much of this really happened. Some people link the tale to the nursery rhyme that children still sing: London Bridge is falling down. The real origin of that rhyme is unknown. But the image of a bridge falling, and rising again, fits this place very well.

In the late twelfth century, work began on something new — a bridge of stone. A priest named Peter of Colechurch led the project, and it took roughly three decades to finish, early in the thirteenth century. Peter did not live to see it completed. This medieval bridge lasted for more than six hundred years. For most of that time, it was the only bridge across the Thames in London. If you wanted to cross the river without a boat, you came here.

Now imagine that bridge as a street. It was lined with houses and shops, some of them several storeys tall, leaning out over the water. Merchants sold goods along its length. Near the middle stood a chapel dedicated to Saint Thomas Becket, the Archbishop of Canterbury who was murdered in his cathedral. Pilgrims on the way to Canterbury could stop and pray here. The road between the buildings was narrow and crowded. Carts, animals and people pushed past each other all day.

The bridge had a darker side too. At the southern gatehouse, the heads of executed traitors were placed on spikes as a warning. The Scottish leader William Wallace was one of the first, in 1305. Later, the head of Thomas More, the statesman and author, was displayed here in 1535. Travellers coming into the city from the south passed beneath them. It is a grim thought, but it shows how important this crossing was. Everyone who entered London this way saw the message.

Here is something many visitors never think about. The medieval bridge stood on many short, thick stone arches. Their bases were wide and close together, so the river squeezed through narrow gaps. At certain tides, the water on one side was higher than the other, and it rushed through like rapids. Boatmen who tried to pass through were said to be shooting the bridge. It was dangerous, and people drowned. Many passengers got out before the bridge and walked around, then climbed back into the boat.

Those crowded arches had another effect. They slowed the river above the bridge. In some very cold winters, the slower water upstream froze solid. Londoners held frost fairs on the ice, with stalls, games and fires right on the Thames. When the old bridge was finally replaced, the river flowed more freely, and the great frost fairs ended. So the shape of a bridge changed the way a whole city spent its winters.

By the early nineteenth century, the old bridge was worn out. Engineer John Rennie designed a replacement, a handsome bridge of granite arches, and it opened in 1831, just upstream of the medieval one. The old bridge was then taken down. For well over a century, Rennie's bridge carried London's traffic. But it was slowly sinking, and the traffic kept growing. By the 1960s, the city needed something wider and lighter.

This is where the story takes a surprising turn. In 1968, the City of London sold Rennie's bridge. An American businessman named Robert McCulloch bought it. The stone was taken apart, numbered, and shipped across the Atlantic. It was rebuilt at Lake Havasu City, in the desert of Arizona, where it still stands today. A popular tale says the buyer thought he was getting Tower Bridge. McCulloch denied this, and the story is best treated as a joke rather than fact.

Now look around you. On the north bank stands the city's financial district, the old Square Mile. Close to the northern end is the church of Saint Magnus the Martyr, which once stood at the entrance to the medieval bridge. To the south, you can see Southwark Cathedral, and above it rises the glass point of The Shard. Downstream, beyond Tower Bridge, the grey warship HMS Belfast is moored. From this one spot, you can see two thousand years of London.

As you walk on, notice how ordinary this crossing feels. Commuters hurry past with coffee. Buses roll by. Few people look down at the water. Yet beneath them lies the reason this city exists at all. Pause at the parapet and watch the river for a moment. It is the same tide the Romans saw, the same water that once roared through the old stone arches. The buildings have changed many times. The crossing remains.