Grove Koger
When Maggie and I visited London in 2016 with several members of her family, her sister Lucy treated us all to a tour of the Thames that took us under famed Tower Bridge. In light of recent events, I’ve been thinking about that tour and about such concepts as tradition and continuity and change.
I’ll leave those concepts for another day, but now’s a good time to consider Tower Bridge itself—as it is and as it might have been. As “right” as it looks to us today, the structure could have taken an entirely different shape and taken on an entirely different character. The competition to select a design, held by what was known as the Special Bridge or Subway Committee, drew more than fifty entries, with a proposal from Sir Horace Jones and Sir John Wolfe Barry carrying the day.
More ingenious, perhaps, was the design submitted by Frederick Barnett that you see above. It would have involved two sections of roadway that could be rotated, thus allowing a ship to enter (very, very slowly) from one opened end and then proceed as the roadway behind it closed and the one in front swung open. The design would have allowed vehicles to be diverted from one side of the bridge to the other, thus maintaining a more-or-less constant stream of traffic.
Somewhat similar was the proposal from F.J. Palmer (above) that would have involved sliding sections of roadway. How different the future—meaning, now, the past as well as the present—might have looked!
In any case, construction on Jones and Barry’s design began April 22, 1886. The structure was opened some eight years later, on June 30, 1894, becoming at the time the world’s largest bascule (or draw-) bridge. If you’re as unfamiliar with the term “bascule” as I was yesterday, I’ll mention that the word is French for “balance scale” or “seesaw,” meaning that the mechanism involves the use of counterweights.
I had assumed, by the way, that Tower Bridge was named for its 200-foot supporting towers, but the name comes instead from the nearby Tower of London.
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World Enough 