London Bridge
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50 free London Bridge trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
London Bridge is the crossing everyone can sing about and few can picture. It is not the one on the postcards. It is the plain-looking span nearby, and it has the longer and stranger story: there has been a bridge on this spot for most of two thousand years, and for centuries it was the only way to walk into the City from the south. This quiz turns the best London Bridge fun facts into questions. It covers who first bridged the river here, the medieval bridge crowded with shops and homes, the gruesome warnings displayed above its gate, the fires and near disasters, and the Victorian replacement that was sold and rebuilt thousands of miles away. It also takes in the nursery rhyme, the royal codename, and the bridge's turns in poetry, pop music and film. It suits quiz hosts looking for a Jeopardy-style round on one landmark, teachers planning a London lesson, and anyone about to visit. Every answer comes with a short explanation, so you finish with stories worth retelling.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01In which US state does the London Bridge of 1831 stand today, re-erected beside a desert lake in 1971?
Arizona
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.
Q 02Robert McCulloch, the American who bought London Bridge in 1968, had made his name selling which machines?
Chainsaws
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.
Q 03Rumour says Robert McCulloch thought his 1968 purchase from the City of London was which grander landmark?
Tower Bridge
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.
Q 04Which monarch's funeral plan was codenamed Operation London Bridge and drawn up decades before it was needed?
Elizabeth II
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.
Q 05Which animals may Freemen of the City of London supposedly herd across London Bridge by ancient right?
Sheep
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.
Q 06Which Scottish rebel's head was the first recorded on a spike above London Bridge, back in 1305?
William Wallace
William Wallace was executed for treason in London, and his head began a grim tradition that ran for more than 350 years.
Q 07A traffic rule imposed on crowded London Bridge in 1722 may be the origin of which British habit?
Driving on the left
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.
Q 08Who built the very first London Bridge, a timber crossing put up around AD 50?
The Romans
The Romans bridged the Thames as part of their road network, and the trading settlement at the northern end grew into Londinium.
Q 09Which 1956 musical may owe its title to the refrain of the nursery rhyme London Bridge Is Falling Down?
My Fair Lady
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.
Q 10Why did the City of London decide in the 1960s that the London Bridge of 1831 had to go?
It was sinking
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.
Q 11The chapel on Old London Bridge honoured which archbishop, drawing pilgrims bound for Canterbury?
Thomas Becket
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.
Q 12Which disaster burned London Bridge's waterwheels yet was kept from Southwark by a gap among the bridge's houses?
The Great Fire
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.
Q 13Legend says Old London Bridge was built on packs of what, after a tax on it helped fund the work?
Wool
Q 21Which shortcut between two oceans did the ship carrying London Bridge's stones take on its way to California?
Panama Canal
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.
Q 22Which stone, quarried at Haytor on Dartmoor, was used to build the London Bridge that opened in 1831?
Granite
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.
Q 23Which Scottish engineer, designer of Waterloo Bridge, drew up the five-arch London Bridge opened in 1831?
John Rennie
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.
Q 14An old saying about the rapids under Old London Bridge held that only which people passed beneath it?
Fools
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.
Q 15What were traitors' heads dipped in before being set on pikes at London Bridge, to help them last?
Tar
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.
Q 16Which timber feature of Old London Bridge, set among its stone arches, stopped being opened in the 1470s?
A drawbridge
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.
Q 17Which American singer topped the Billboard Hot 100 in 2006 with her debut solo single, London Bridge?
Fergie
Fergie filmed the video in London, yet the crossing that appears in it is a different, more photogenic one a little way downstream.
Q 18Which glass skyscraper by the architect Renzo Piano opened in 2012 next to London Bridge station?
The Shard
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.
Q 19Which famous place to buy food sits just south of Southwark Cathedral at the southern end of London Bridge?
Borough Market
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.
Q 20What was dug beneath the relocated London Bridge only after builders had finished it on dry land?
A boat channel
A boat channel was dredged under the arches once the bridge stood complete, turning the peninsula it led to into an island.
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.
Q 24Which king opened the new London Bridge in 1831 and gave his name to the street leading to it?
William IV
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.
Q 25Which former Lord Chancellor's head was fixed on London Bridge for a month in 1535 after he defied Henry VIII?
Thomas More
Thomas More would not accept the king as supreme head of the Church. His daughter Margaret Roper later recovered the head.
Q 26The closely spaced piers of Old London Bridge slowed the Thames enough to help which winter festivals happen?
Frost fairs
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.
Q 27What fell off Old London Bridge into the Thames in 1481, drowning five men?
A public latrine
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.
Q 28Which Dickens novel features a secret night meeting on London Bridge that leads to a young woman's murder?
Oliver Twist
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.
Q 29A stone alcove from Old London Bridge at Guy's Hospital now shelters a statue of which poet, once a student there?
John Keats
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.
Q 30Which T. S. Eliot poem likens the commuters flowing over London Bridge to the damned souls of Dante's Inferno?
The Waste Land
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.