50 Fun Facts About London Bridge

In which US state does the London Bridge of 1831 stand today, re-erected beside a desert lake in 1971?

Arizona has been its home since the bridge reopened in Lake Havasu City. Only the outer stonework made the trip; it clads a new concrete core.

Robert McCulloch, the American who bought London Bridge in 1968, had made his name selling which machines?

Chainsaws built his fortune, starting with the first one to carry his name in 1948. He wanted the bridge to lure home buyers to the desert city he had founded.

Rumour says Robert McCulloch thought his 1968 purchase from the City of London was which grander landmark?

Tower Bridge is the landmark in the story, but the buyer and the councillor who arranged the sale both flatly denied it. He knew exactly which crossing he was paying for.

Which monarch's funeral plan was codenamed Operation London Bridge and drawn up decades before it was needed?

Elizabeth II had her funeral planned from the 1960s, and the details were revised many times before 2022. A coded phrase about the bridge was to tell the prime minister.

Which animals may Freemen of the City of London supposedly herd across London Bridge by ancient right?

Sheep are the animals in the tradition, said to recall Freemen bringing flocks to market without paying the bridge toll. In modern times flocks have been walked across for charity.

Which Scottish rebel's head was the first recorded on a spike above London Bridge, back in 1305?

William Wallace was executed for treason in London, and his head began a grim tradition that ran for more than 350 years.

A traffic rule imposed on crowded London Bridge in 1722 may be the origin of which British habit?

Driving on the left may go back to the order that carts keep to one side of the roadway, though historians offer it as only one possible origin.

Who built the very first London Bridge, a timber crossing put up around AD 50?

The Romans bridged the Thames as part of their road network, and the trading settlement at the northern end grew into Londinium.

Which 1956 musical may owe its title to the refrain of the nursery rhyme London Bridge Is Falling Down?

My Fair Lady echoes the words that close each verse, and nobody is sure who the lady was. Candidates include two medieval queens and the Virgin Mary.

Why did the City of London decide in the 1960s that the London Bridge of 1831 had to go?

It was sinking, by about an inch every eight years, under traffic its builders never imagined. By 1924 one side already sat several inches lower than the other.

The chapel on Old London Bridge honoured which archbishop, drawing pilgrims bound for Canterbury?

Thomas Becket was a Londoner born in Cheapside, and a penitent Henry II ordered the stone bridge after his killing. Pilgrimages officially began at the chapel.

Which disaster burned London Bridge's waterwheels yet was kept from Southwark by a gap among the bridge's houses?

The Great Fire of 1666 met a firebreak: houses lost in a smaller blaze 33 years earlier had never been fully replaced, so the flames could not cross.

Legend says Old London Bridge was built on packs of what, after a tax on it helped fund the work?

Wool was taxed by Henry II to meet the enormous cost of building in stone, and the levy probably inspired the tale that the piers stood on woolpacks.

An old saying about the rapids under Old London Bridge held that only which people passed beneath it?

Fools alone risked it, because the piers held back the tide and the water could drop six feet between them. Some who tried to ride those rapids drowned.

What were traitors' heads dipped in before being set on pikes at London Bridge, to help them last?

Tar kept the weather out, and the heads were boiled as well. A German visitor in 1598 counted more than thirty of them above the gate.

Which timber feature of Old London Bridge, set among its stone arches, stopped being opened in the 1470s?

A drawbridge was one of the crossing's defences, along with a stone gate at the southern end. The building that guarded it later made way for a grand prefabricated house.

Which American singer topped the Billboard Hot 100 in 2006 with her debut solo single, London Bridge?

Fergie filmed the video in London, yet the crossing that appears in it is a different, more photogenic one a little way downstream.

Which glass skyscraper by the architect Renzo Piano opened in 2012 next to London Bridge station?

The Shard was first named after the bridge itself, and Piano took his cues from the railway lines beside the site and the masts of sailing ships.

Which famous place to buy food sits just south of Southwark Cathedral at the southern end of London Bridge?

Borough Market descends from stalls first recorded in 1276 at the foot of the bridge, before the traders were moved further along the High Street.

What was dug beneath the relocated London Bridge only after builders had finished it on dry land?

A boat channel was dredged under the arches once the bridge stood complete, turning the peninsula it led to into an island.

Which shortcut between two oceans did the ship carrying London Bridge's stones take on its way to California?

The Panama Canal carried the cargo, about 10,000 tons of facing blocks, from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Trucks hauled it the rest of the way inland.

Which stone, quarried at Haytor on Dartmoor, was used to build the London Bridge that opened in 1831?

Granite from Haytor began its journey on a tramway whose rails were cut from the same rock, shaped to guide the wheels of horse-drawn wagons.

Which Scottish engineer, designer of Waterloo Bridge, drew up the five-arch London Bridge opened in 1831?

John Rennie did not live to see it: his sons built the bridge from his design after his death. It beat a rival plan for one enormous iron arch.

Which king opened the new London Bridge in 1831 and gave his name to the street leading to it?

William IV and Queen Adelaide sat down to a banquet in a pavilion put up on the bridge itself, and the northern approach road still carries his name.

Which former Lord Chancellor's head was fixed on London Bridge for a month in 1535 after he defied Henry VIII?

Thomas More would not accept the king as supreme head of the Church. His daughter Margaret Roper later recovered the head.

The closely spaced piers of Old London Bridge slowed the Thames enough to help which winter festivals happen?

Frost fairs were held on the frozen river itself, the last of them in 1814. Once the old piers were gone the tide ran freely and the Thames became far less likely to freeze.

What fell off Old London Bridge into the Thames in 1481, drowning five men?

A public latrine with several seats gave way and took its users with it. The bridge had two of these conveniences, one near each end.

Which Dickens novel features a secret night meeting on London Bridge that leads to a young woman's murder?

Oliver Twist has Nancy meet Mr Brownlow and Rose Maylie there to help the boy. A spy follows her, and Bill Sikes kills her for it.

A stone alcove from Old London Bridge at Guy's Hospital now shelters a statue of which poet, once a student there?

John Keats studied at Guy's from 1815 to 1816 to become an apothecary. The alcove, one of fourteen added to the bridge around 1760, came to the hospital in 1861.

Which T. S. Eliot poem likens the commuters flowing over London Bridge to the damned souls of Dante's Inferno?

The Waste Land appeared in 1922 and also praises the church at the bridge's northern end. Its final verse borrows from the nursery rhyme about the bridge.

Which grand building on Old London Bridge was made in the Netherlands and shipped to London in pieces in 1578?

Nonsuch House arrived as a kit of parts, with every timber marked so that it could be put back together correctly on the bridge.

A 1729 crossing at which riverside spot ended London Bridge's reign as the only road over the lower Thames?

Putney got the second bridge, a timber toll crossing first known as Fulham Bridge. Until then nothing else spanned the river below Kingston.

Which Tube station at the northern end of London Bridge is linked underground to Bank station?

Monument opened in 1884, and an escalator link joined it to Bank in 1933. The station at the southern end simply shares the bridge's name.

London Bridge station opened in 1836 as the terminus of a railway carried on brick arches to which place?

Greenwich was the far end of a short local line, and its long viaduct cost more than planned. London Bridge is the oldest railway station in the capital's central fare zone.

Whose revolt in AD 60 may have destroyed the first London Bridge along with the young town around it?

Boudica burned Londinium, but the town and its bridge were rebuilt, and it went on to become the capital of the province.

In the 1985 TV film Bridge Across Time, whose spirit reaches America inside a stone from London Bridge?

Jack the Ripper falls into the Thames with the stone in 1888, and the murders resume a century later in the desert. David Hasselhoff plays the detective.

What did the waterwheels installed under London Bridge's northern arches around 1580 supply to the City?

Piped water flowed into the City through wooden mains once the wheels had pumped it up high. The scheme was the work of a Dutchman named Morris.

The present London Bridge, opened in 1973, is which type of bridge, built from prestressed concrete?

Box girder construction gives it three plain spans. The old bridge stayed open while the outer girders went up on either side of it.

At which California port were the stones of London Bridge unloaded before trucks took them into the desert?

Long Beach received them from a brand-new ship that would otherwise have sailed empty, so the buyer paid only its running costs for the voyage.

Which Viking, later a king and a saint, is said in Norse verse to have pulled down London Bridge in 1014?

Olaf Haraldsson was fighting on the English side, and the church named for him beside the bridge gave Tooley Street its name. English chronicles do not confirm the attack.

Which Kentish rebel leader fought the citizens of London in a night battle on London Bridge in July 1450?

Jack Cade styled himself the Captain of Kent. He fled after the fight and was caught four days later, and his head joined the others above the bridge gate.

Which priest began the stone London Bridge in 1176 and was buried in its chapel before the work was done?

Peter of Colechurch died in 1205, four years before the bridge was finished, having paid for the chapel himself. Bones thought to be his were found there in 1832.

Which City of London dignitary travelled to the American desert in 1968 to re-lay London Bridge's foundation stone?

The Lord Mayor of the day, Sir Gilbert Inglefield, did the honours that September, and a successor attended the rededication three years later.

What struck London Bridge in June 1984, badly damaging both itself and the bridge?

A Royal Navy warship, the frigate HMS Jupiter, hit the bridge as she was leaving the Pool of London after a visit to the capital.

Two stone alcoves saved from Old London Bridge have sheltered walkers in which London green space since 1860?

Victoria Park in the East End took two of the pedestrian alcoves added in the 1760 refit, and the mark of the bridge's owners is still carved inside them.

Which actor walks against the rush-hour tide of commuters on London Bridge in the 2002 film About a Boy?

Hugh Grant crosses from north to south while the morning crowd pours the other way, from the station into the City.

Who met the entire £4 million cost of the present London Bridge, which opened in 1973?

A medieval charity, Bridge House Estates, paid for it all. Centuries of tolls, rents and gifts had made it rich enough to rebuild the bridge without public money.

King John chose a monk famed as a bridge builder to finish London Bridge; which country was Isembert from?

France supplied the expert: Isembert took over in 1202, while the original builder was still alive, and the bridge was finished seven years later.

Which British singer starred in a 1972 American TV special celebrating London Bridge's new home in the desert?

Tom Jones boards a bus in London and is magically carried to the newly opened bridge. Jennifer O'Neill co-starred in the variety show.

Which chief minister of Henry VIII fell from favour in 1540 and had his head set on a spike on London Bridge?

Thomas Cromwell had run the government since 1534, and Henry is said to have regretted losing him afterwards.