Mapo Bridge

Where it sits. Mapo Bridge carries eight lanes of traffic across the Han River between Mapo District on the northern bank and Yeongdeungpo District on the southern, landing on Yeouido, the island that holds the National Assembly and Seoul's original financial district. It is a little over a kilometre long. Seoul Subway Line 5 runs directly beneath it in a tunnel under the river bed, between Mapo and Yeouinaru stations, so a train passes under the deck every few minutes without any surface sign of it.

The story behind it. The bridge opened in 1970, in the first great wave of Han River crossings built as Seoul expanded southward from the historic core, and originally carried the name Seoul Bridge before being renamed for the district at its northern end. It was widened and substantially reconstructed as traffic grew and standards changed. Its position matters: it sits at the point where the river bends and the Yeouido skyline rises on the southern bank, which makes it one of the better places in the city to see how the two halves of Seoul relate to each other.

A bridge with a difficult reputation. From 2012 the city and a corporate sponsor rebranded Mapo Bridge as the Bridge of Life, printing conversational messages along the railing and installing motion-activated lighting, in an attempt to intervene in the number of people who came here in distress. The campaign was widely reported internationally and won design awards; it was also, subsequently, widely questioned, as attention appeared to increase rather than reduce the number of incidents. The city has since shifted toward physical barriers, camera monitoring, staffed rescue posts and a boat station beneath the span. The episode is a genuine part of the bridge's recent history and is discussed openly in Seoul, and it is worth knowing before arriving that this is a working piece of public infrastructure with a serious institutional presence on it, not a novelty installation.

On screen. Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015) staged the central action of its Seoul sequence here. With sections of the deck closed to traffic, the production filmed the pursuit of the truck carrying the stolen regeneration cradle: Captain America fighting Ultron on the roof of the moving vehicle, and Black Widow riding out on a motorcycle through the traffic. The shoot ran over about two weeks in the spring of 2014 and was one of the largest foreign productions ever permitted to close roads in central Seoul. As with the rest of the film's Korean material, the geography is assembled rather than observed: the chase cuts from Mapo Bridge to Gangnam-daero, to the Cheongdam Bridge, to the Sangam district, and the underground and rail sections were shot separately, with a substantial share of the sequence completed as visual effects and on stages in England. What is genuinely Seoul is the deck itself, the river beneath it and the skyline in the plates.

What you actually see today. Both sides of the bridge carry a pedestrian walkway, separated from traffic, and the crossing takes about fifteen minutes at a steady pace. Walking north to south, Yeouido builds ahead: the IFC towers, Parc1, the dome of the National Assembly and the older broadcasting blocks. Looking upstream, the Bamseom islets sit in midstream as a closed ecological reserve, a migratory bird sanctuary that no one is permitted to land on, which is an unusual thing to find in the middle of a capital city of ten million. Downstream the river widens toward Seogang and Yanghwa. At night the bridge and the towers behind it are lit, and long-exposure photography from the walkway is common.

Getting there and timing. Mapo station on Line 5 sits at the northern approach; Yeouinaru station on the same line serves the southern end and the riverside park. The Hangang cycle and pedestrian path runs beneath both approaches, so the bridge can be combined with a walk or a rented bicycle along the water. Access to the walkway from the parks below is by stairs at several points and by a longer ramped approach at others, which makes step-free access possible but not direct. Early April is the strongest single reason to be at the southern end, when the Yunjungno cherry avenue behind the National Assembly comes into flower and the whole island fills for a week. Otherwise, dusk on a clear evening is the moment the crossing is worth making on foot.