Tower Bridge

Where it sits. Tower Bridge crosses the Thames just downstream of the Tower of London, linking Tower Hill on the north bank with Bermondsey and Shad Thames on the south. It is one of five London bridges owned and maintained by the City Bridge Foundation, a charitable trust founded in 1282 and still funding the crossings from its own endowment rather than from taxation. It carries the London Inner Ring Road, which makes it the boundary of the congestion charge zone, and about 40,000 crossings a day. It is regularly confused with London Bridge, the plain concrete span half a mile upstream — a confusion that produced the durable urban legend about an American buying the wrong bridge.

How it was built. The bridge was constructed between 1886 and 1894 to a design by the City architect Horace Jones, engineered by John Wolfe Barry with the assistance of Henry Marc Brunel. The problem it solved was specific: 39 per cent of London's population lived east of London Bridge — a population the engineers compared to Manchester on one side and Liverpool on the other — but any fixed crossing would have cut off the Pool of London, the working port between the Tower and London Bridge, from shipping. The answer was a combined bascule and suspension bridge, 940 feet long including the abutments, with two towers 213 feet high linked by high-level walkways so foot traffic could cross while the road deck was raised. The Gothic stone cladding was applied over a steel frame, partly to harmonise with the Tower of London next door. Edward, Prince of Wales, and Alexandra, Princess of Wales, opened it on 30 June 1894. The bascules were originally raised by hydraulic power from steam-driven pumping engines; the system was converted to electro-hydraulic operation in 1972. Until 1960 the structure also worked as a cantilever bridge.

On screen. Tower Bridge has been filmed from every angle for a century, but two productions stand out for what they actually did with it. In Brannigan (1975) — John Wayne's only British-produced film, shot on location around London and at Shepperton in 1974 — Wayne's Chicago detective jumps a yellow Ford Capri across the half-raised bascules. The stunt was achieved with scale models of both the car and the bridge, and it captured the structure in the drab paintwork it wore before the red, white and blue Silver Jubilee scheme was applied in 1977. Four decades later, Spider-Man: Far From Home (2019) staged its entire climax at the bridge: Sony Pictures Imageworks built a digital model of the structure for the fight, and although the intention was to render only the sections in shot, roughly 80 per cent of the bridge ended up fully detailed because so much of it appears through the sequence. The finale is worth knowing about precisely because it is a digital build — what you see on screen is a reconstruction, not a location shoot. The bridge also provided the climax of the ITV series Dempsey and Makepeace in 1985, filmed in the dockside area alongside it.

What you actually see today. The Tower Bridge Exhibition takes visitors up the north tower, across both high-level walkways and down the south tower to the Victorian engine rooms, where the original coal-fired boilers, steam pumping engines and accumulators that once drove the bascules are preserved and explained. Since 2014 a section of the west walkway floor has been glazed, so you stand on toughened glass 42 metres above the road and watch buses and pedestrians pass beneath you. The walkways also give the best framed view of the Pool of London — HMS Belfast moored upstream, City Hall's former glass ellipsoid on the south bank, the Tower's White Tower and the City cluster behind it. Lift times are published in advance: the bascules still rise roughly 800 times a year for tall vessels, which have priority over road traffic, and watching a lift from the north bank takes about ten minutes end to end and costs nothing.

Getting there and timing. Tower Hill on the Circle and District lines is five minutes from the north end; London Bridge and Bermondsey serve the south. The classic photograph is taken from the riverside terrace of Shad Thames or from Butler's Wharf on the south-east side, where the warehouse frontage frames the towers; the light there is best in the early evening in summer, when the sun is behind the photographer. From the north bank, the Tower of London's outer wall gives the postcard alignment. The exhibition has lifts in both towers and level access along the walkways, making it one of the more accessible historic attractions in London, and the road deck itself has wide pavements on both sides that are free to cross at any hour.