Tower Bridge
An American definitely did buy London Bridge in 1968 but it’s certainly not true, contrary to popular belief, that he thought that he was buying Tower Bridge. The latter may well be London’s most famous but it actually takes its name from the neighbouring Tower of London.
I came to see various behind-the-scenes areas of Tower Bridge by acting as an ‘assistant’ to a friend who is keen to hire a section out for filming. A public exhibition describes the creation of the ‘Special Bridge or Subway Committee’ in 1876 to connect the gridlocked roads on the banks to the east of London Bridge whilst still allowing ships to pass. A design by the City Architect, Horace Jones, and his engineer, John Wolfe Barry, was picked in 1884 but Jones died shortly afterwards.
I’d like to draw an aesthetic parallel between Tower Bridge and a not too dissimilar Brighton structure of the same period – the Clock Tower at the foot of Queen’s Road. According to H. H. Statham, Tower Bridge ‘represents the vice of tawdriness and pretentiousness, and of falsification of the actual facts of the structure’. Sir Nikolaus Pevsner described the Clock Tower as ‘worthless’. Neither is architecturally pure but both work.
Tower Bridge may well be on shaky ground architecturally but as a national landmark, its foundations are solid.
