Tower Bridge, London, 1950s — Traffic Crossing North Tower

Archive & AtlasEstablished · MMXXIII

Tower Bridge, London, 1950s — Traffic Crossing North Tower — Archive & Atlas

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Tower Bridge, London, 1950s — Traffic Crossing North Tower — Archive & Atlas

Unattributed 1950–1959

AA-2026-8EBB4C

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Tower Bridge in the 1950s was simultaneously one of the most recognized structures on earth and a working piece of Victorian hydraulic infrastructure that London used every day without much ceremony. A heavy lorry loaded with yellow freight pushes through the north tower arch ahead of a rounded postwar saloon car, the two of them sharing the roadway the way Londoners shared everything in that decade — without complaint and without quite enough space.

The Gothic stonework overhead, all mock-medieval battlements and pointed dormers, was designed in 1894 to convince the public that a steel bascule bridge could look sufficiently ancient to stand next to the Tower of London. It worked well enough that most visitors in the 1950s assumed the bridge itself was medieval, which was exactly what the architect had in mind.

Pedestrians pick their way along the footway to the right, coats on in the way that suggested this was summer. The whole scene has the quality of a city that had survived something enormous and was getting on with it — the lorry has a delivery to make, the car has somewhere to be, and nobody is stopping to admire the architecture.

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