Tower Bridge When Was It Built

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Why did it take eight whole years? Well, London in the 1880s had a problem: the East End was getting swamped with traffic, but the Thames was still a busy highway for ships. You couldn’t just slap up a normal bridge—it would block the boats. So the city held a design competition in 1876 (fancy, right?), but nobody liked any of the entries. Classic bureaucracy.

Finally, a guy named Horace Jones—the city architect—partnered with engineer John Wolfe Barry (yeah, that Barry family of architects) to dream up a bridge that could lift. The result? A combined suspension and bascule bridge—those two giant leaves that go up like a drawbridge. Construction started in 1886, and they had to dig 70-foot-deep pits for the piers into the riverbed. Imagine doing that without modern machines—just men, scoops, and a lot of swearing.

The Sticky Part: Money and Men

Building a monster bridge in Victorian London was pricey. The total cost shot up to about £1.2 million—that’s like hundreds of millions today. And get this: over 400 workers sweated away on the site, with 10 men tragically losing their lives during construction. They didn’t get sick days or a safety harness—just a pat on the back and a pint of ale, probably.

Meanwhile, the public hated the design at first. Critics called it “pretentious” and “a circus act”—can you believe it? They thought the neo-Gothic stone cladding on the steel skeleton was cheesy. Irony: now tourists queue for hours to take selfies with that same “cheesy” facade. Londoners, you never learn.

Stunning vintage photos show Tower Bridge through the decades, from its