London Bridge, London England

Categories

Special Collections > Keystone Slides

Type

tiff scanned file from original glass slide

Description

There is a number of bridges in London across the Thames. Beginning upstream they are in the following order: Westminster, Waterloo, Blackfriars, Southwark, London, and Tower. This list does not include several railroad bridges. The oldest and busiest of the bridges named is the London Bridge. It was completed in 1831. It is 928 feet long and 63 feet wide. It consists of 5 arches built of granite. The lamp posts that are on the bridge are made of the cannon the English once captured from the French. The traffic on the bridge is heavy at all times. It is bewildering to a stranger on a Bank Holiday. Every day more than 100,000 people walk over the bridge, and more than 20,000 vehicles cross it. You can figure for yourself the amount of traffic it carries in a single year. Nobody knows when the first bridge was built across the Thames near the place where London now stands. But there has been a London Bridge since 1209. The old bridge stood below the present one. It had houses on it in which many people lived. When Elizabeth was Queen of England, the Lord Mayor of London lived in a house on London Bridge. This same Lord Mayor's daughter fell off the bridge into the water. A young servant of the Lord Mayor leaped in and saved her. Of course they were afterwards married, and the young man became the Earl of Leeds. One of the customs of earlier days does not make such a pleasant tale as the love story. Kings and queens were powerful then, and the heads of their courtiers were not very safe. A man might be imprisoned in the Tower one night. Next day his head would be fixed on a spike on London Bridge. The skulls were warnings to all evil-doers. Keystone ID: 2101 Note: All titles, descriptions, and location coordinates are from the original Keystone Slide documentation as supplied by the Keystone View Company. No text has been edited or changed.

Rights

Copyright by the Keystone View Company. The original slides are housed in McConnell Library's Special Collections.