Construction of London Bridge

The London Bridge that crosses the Thames today is a concrete box-girder bridge that was built between 1968 and 1972 and opened by Queen Elizabeth II in March 1973. It replaced a nineteenth-century stone bridge designed by John Rennie, which had begun to sink under the weight of modern traffic. That older bridge was dismantled and sold to an American businessman, Robert McCulloch, who had it rebuilt at Lake Havasu City in Arizona. The site has carried a crossing since Roman times, and the medieval bridge, completed in the early thirteenth century and lined with houses and shops, was the only bridge over the Thames in London until 1750. The present structure is a plain functional bridge, often mistaken by visitors for the more ornate Tower Bridge.

Open on the timeline