Commuters, unglaze your eyes – is the design of London Bridge a ‘scandal’?

Is London Bridge a practical result of post-war planning or a horrific urban eyesore? Your answer may reveal a lot about you, writes Lucy Kenningham

Consider London Bridge. No, not as a sunken-eyed commuter, but as a free-thinking flaneur. Or, if that’s too pretentious for you, take up the binoculars of a foreigner. Seen from a distance, with fresher eyes than the average sunken-eyed City insurance broker, a bridge can be an epic symbol of place. 

Or, indeed, an epic letdown. In the case of this titular one, tourists who travel to see it can barely conceive that London Bridge is in fact their intended destination. Tripadvisor is littered with reviews of the place that read as warnings not to bother. “This is NOT the bridge that opens to let the big boats through!!!” reads one. If you Google image search London Bridge, you will duly be provided with dozens of angles of its drawbridge-flaunting neighbour, Tower Bridge, before you eventually get a picture of a mediaeval iteration of the actual bridge you searched for. You can see where the confusion comes from.

For it is the paradox of a bridge that for its users it is barely noticeable. For commuters, it is unnoticeable. Yet for tourists, it’s there and it’s hideous – in fact it’s a monstrosity. Or is it? What purpose do we want our bridges to achieve? How do our urban environments make us feel?

Sometimes it takes a foreigner to jolt you out of your insular mindset. Or a psycho-geography nerd, but there are fewer of them around. In my case, it was a level-headed Dane who surprised me with her vitriol about London Bridge. “It’s a scandal,” she told me cooly. “It’s hideous compared to the medieval version.” Really?

‘Horrible, brutalist offices’

London Bridge may seem like a large slab of cement that was lobbed over the Thames by city planners with all the pizazz of a hiker chucking a branch over a stream, but it was intentionally built that way.

Only real urban planning nerds will know, but London Bridge is officially a box girder bridge, that is to say a bridge in which the main beams comprise girders in the shape of a hollow box. Some of these box girder bridges are actually quite beautiful, such as the bridge on the A9 near Pitlochry in the county of Perth and Kinross. 

Our London version is made of steel and cement in what could be described as a brutalist style. Brutalism has its defenders. But Ant Breach, associate director at the think tank Centre for Cities, is not one of them. “Before the war, we were normal,” he explains, matter of factly. “But after the war, Britain diverged from Europe with a new discretionary planning system that made development and land incredibly expensive.”

“Suddenly, developers were incentivised to blow up buildings and put up obnoxious, horrible concrete cubes to maximise floor space versus site value.” During the 1960s developers were permitted to demolish and replace buildings with 10 per cent more capacity without any planning permission. This, along with the rise of modernist design, led to estates like the Barbican along with other “horrible, brutalist offices” (according to Breach). 

Breach belongs to an architectural school of thought of which my Dane would presumably approve : that older buildings are better and should be reconstructed when broken or burned. But it’s not that simple – after all, to which time should we be true?

The many shedded skins of London Bridge

In the case of London Bridge, it has had 15 plus iterations, and no one could seriously suggest we hark back to the timber-pile bridge of the original versions, which were repeatedly rebuilt after they inevitably burned or were burned down. The last was built in 1163 soon after which King John unveiled the first stone bridge.

And thus the age of living bridges began (late, admittedly – they had already taken off in Europe in elegant cities like Florence and Venice). Peasants’ revolts occasionally burned the whole thing down – it was often where fights took place between citizens and rebels, and sometimes the rebels would break the bridge to stop it being raised. Yet for much of the period up until 1761, London Bridge had enough homes (500), churches and shopping opportunities to match a small mediaeval town. All with a riverside view. 

Yet over time such village-river living went out of fashion and certain elites cruelly deemed London Bridge a “barbarity”. The houses were all gone by 1762 and the bridge replaced with a wider, sturdier build that was entirely homeless, but catered to commuters.

This new London Bridge was so sought after that, bizarrely, a couple of Americans bought it from us. The City of London Corporation put the iconic, John Rennie-designed landmark up for sale as it was slowly sinking into the river by 2.5cm every eight years. It sold for $2.5m to a US oil baron and a Disneyland designer so that they could rebuild it, brick by brick, in the middle of the Arizona desert (a savvy commercial decision which helped them kick start a thriving new town). It left London with a gaping hole, though, to be filled by the aforementioned brutalist slabs of today.

‘Bridges don’t need to be ugly, they can be an architectural celebration!’

“Bridges don’t need to be ugly. They can be an architectural celebration!” architect Francis Terry, who has designed wonderful images of fantasy bridges (see above for example), told me. His practice specialises in classical Georgian style (presumably he would get on well with King Charles who designed his own town, Poundbury, with designs echoing the same period).

Yet not all experts agree. Peter Wynne Rees, who ran the City of London’s cityscape for three decades, told me he was surprised to hear London Bridge had been called ugly. Functional, yes, he said. Ugly, no? “But I suppose some people coming to London aren’t coming for the reasons of seeing a functional bridge; they’re coming for sightseeing and want everything to be visually entertaining.”

“I’m the man behind the Walkie Talkie and Cheese Grater,” he explained, truthfully. “So I’m all for buildings being visually appealing, but I wouldn’t want them all to be calling for my attention. It would be like a party where everyone’s trying to get your attention at once – totally insupportable.” Quite.

It is ironic that London’s oldest bridge is now one of the most modern. But what is London but a city of paradoxes and a pastiche of eras? Whether London Bridge is a scandal or not, the most important lesson from this whole debacle is that it pays to occasionally shed your commuter skin and take a good look around you.