London's Victorian bascule bridge beside the Tower, its road lifting in two halves to let tall ships through
Open accessfree to visit at any reasonable time
By the 1870s the East End needed a river crossing below London Bridge, but anything low and fixed would have shut ships out of the Pool of London, the stretch of docks upstream. The answer, designed by Horace Jones with John Wolfe Barry as engineer and built between 1886 and 1894, was a bascule bridge: the road is split into two hinged halves that swing up to let tall vessels pass, and they still lift for shipping today. The two towers stand 65 m high and are joined at the top by walkways. Those walkways, now with glass floors, and the original steam engine rooms at the south end make up the ticketed Tower Bridge Exhibition, while walking across the road deck is free. Plenty of visitors call it London Bridge, which is the plainer crossing about 800 m upstream. The Tower of London is beside the north end, and London Bridge station is about 700 m away.
