Did the London Bridge Ever Fall?
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Hey, guys. Welcome to Overcrest. I'm Chris. And I'm Jake. And this episode is a bridge from
a bridge. It's a bridge from where we were before sports car vacation land to now. And
what I'm going to do is I'm going to play you a song. Okay. I think this is like, this is
like a minute long. I just want you to bear with me and just listen. Are you ready?
I'm ready.
That is the creepiest rendition of that I've ever heard. I tried to find the creepiest one.
And you know this song, Jake. Everybody does. Everybody knows the song.
Kids are singing it. They're clapping their hands. Parents are trying to get their kids to
sing it back to them. But nobody stops to think about what the nursery rhyme really means.
Falling down, burning, collapsing, misery. This is not a nursery rhyme.
Is this Pockets for the Posey? Right? No, no, that's we're on the Rosie.
Oh, you're right. Thank you. Yeah, that's a different. That's also a very, very dark song.
It is. However, not transportation related. You know, I'm trying to keep things
bubonic play. Yes, not not. So this is about a real bridge, Jake.
At one time. The London Bridge. Now, one time. Yes, go ahead. I drove across. Have you?
Not in London. The original. Yeah, we'll get there. I'm going to yell at you and give you a
real hard time about that. At one time, the London Bridge wasn't just a stone
across water. It was a whole neighborhood. Houses, shops, a church, even palaces jammed onto a
skeleton of ancient arches shoved on top of a murky tidal river for almost 2000 years.
Is that what it is? It is. It is the River Thames. That's right. Okay.
For almost 2000 years, it burned, rotted, froze, collapsed, drowned people choked the Thames
and yet somehow held together long enough to carry London itself across time to where we are today.
That's the thing. The miracle of the London Bridge isn't that it stood untouched. It is that it burned,
broke and had to be patched over and over again. It was always in a perpetual state
of falling down, just like the song says. The miracle is, though, through all this
punishment, it still managed to carry the city across the Thames for centuries.
Do we have more history on the song itself? There's not much out there, man.
Like, where did it, when, when? Around the 1600s is where the song kind of started to appear.
Yeah. So the song is from the 1600s. It's a longer song, too.
I don't want to play with all the nursery rhymes. The whole song is about all of these different
calamities, we'll call them. Yeah. But it's also about like holding it up with pins and needles,
holding it up with iron and steel. It's like all about holding the bridge up
because this thing was critical. And that's what we're going to talk about. But first,
we have to go way back and set the stage a little bit. Okay. Okay. First century.
First century. So we're talking thousands of years ago, Jake. Thousands. Which,
fun fact, is not the 1000s. The first century is zero to 999. Yeah. The first, this is, okay,
so we're talking first century. Yes. Zero to 180. Oh, you're right. Yeah. 99. Not 999.
Because that would be, what's a century is 100 years? What's a thousand years? A millennia.
Yes. So to the Romans, Britain was the edge of the world. Think fog, mud, tribes with blue
paint smeared on their skin cold, living in small roundhouses of timber and thatch, farming
grain and herding animals. Their lives organized. Was it a third world country? Like the Romans
were much more civilized. Oh, yeah, absolutely. The English was very uncivilized. Right. Their
lives were organized into warrior clans tied by kinship and ritual. Meanwhile, in Rome, Caesar
was, you know, had come there a hundred years earlier. Yeah. Yeah. He came there. They're
all set up. He won and then he sailed back to Bragg, which left unfinished business.
Enter Emperor Claudius. That's awkward as an enter Emperor Claudius. Enter Emperor Claudius.
You needed to win, man. He needed to win. He was considered weak. He was mocked in Rome as a
stammering, limping scholar rather than a warrior and only made Emperor after the assassination of
Caligula left the Praetorian Guard. You know what the Praetorian Guard is? You always talk about
the Praetorian Guard. I'm held up on Caliglia. Is that where calligraphy came from? Jake? No.
No, no, no. The Praetorian Guard is the Emperor's elite bodyguards who often acted as political
king makers, choosing and even killing rulers. Oh, so it's like the Secret Service, but they don't
work for the ruler. No, the other way around. The Praetorian Guard. The senators snickered
at Claudius, doubting he could lead. So this guy wants glory carved in stone to silence them,
which means what, Jake? Going to war. You always go to war. You want to be carved? You want a statue?
Stone. You got to, yeah, you got, if you wanted to be carved in like... Or you could build a monument
to yourself. Yeah, but it's not the same. Out of stone. If they start throwing tomatoes at it
and stuff, it's not going to... It has a waste of produce. So for context, this is not long
after the crucifixion of Christ, just 40 years. Right. Yeah. The Roman Coliseum won't even
exist for another 30 years. And Britain has resources Rome wants. Tin, lead, iron, grain. I have two.
It has people, of course. That is a big resource. People that they can do what with.
In slave. That's right. That's right. And strategically, it was a threat and left unconquered.
Britain was a perfect base for raids across the channel into the Roman Gaul, which is modern day
France. Yes, France. They had recently conquered that and turned it into a province not too long
earlier. So the Gauls. Yeah. The Gauls. Yeah. Claudius sends four legions. Four legions. How many is
a legion crest? A 10,000. Oh. So he sent 40,000 soldiers. He says more than I expected. Me too.
It's a little out of control for Britain, right? With dudes with blue paint on their faces. Yeah.
He sent war elephants, siege engines. War elephants. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Imagine shield walls crashing
together, iron charging and clanging against iron. Roman pilaf thrown like a hailstorm.
It's like rocks and burning things. Yeah. Yeah. Cassius Dio, a Roman historian describes the Brighton's
swimming their horses across rivers to strike the Romans from the flank. The flight the fighting is
hand to hand. It is brutal. They have spears, swords and the glint of bronze helmets are
half submit submerged in mud and blood. By the way, because I know you're wondering, Jake.
Yes. The average Roman soldier stood around five foot seven.
And those shields. I don't believe it. It's true. Those shields, each scutum, which is what a shield
is called, stood nearly four feet tall. Big enough to cover a man from shoulder to knee
when locked together. However, that's the average Brighton facing them was a little
shorter. Oh. Closer to five foot five. Partly thanks to harder living and less
consistent nutrition, which means Jake would have fit right in. Yes, malnourished and worked hard.
I don't know. Hey, when was the whole brave heart? When did that movie take place? I know that was
the clans of like much later, much, much later Ireland. We're talking. It's like a thousand
years later. Yeah, it's crazy. That's crazy. I'll talk about that in a little while, but
that's much, much later on. On the first day of battle, neither side breaks the Brighton's
fierce and their war paint hold the opposite bank screaming across the water. Roman discipline
keeps the line steady and the Legionnaires dig in behind their scooter, their tower shields,
locking them together like a wall. Night falls on a field of corpses and the river Medway
is choked with bodies. Day two is much worse. Romans drive in bridgeheads, which are temporary
footholds forced across the river bank to secure position on the far side. Think of those
tanks that pull up to the water and then the thing unloads. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's those
things are. It's this. Those things are not powered by a tank. They're using elephants now
and cavalry to terrify the tribesmen. And can you imagine? Can you imagine? You've never even
seen an elephant before. You've never seen or even heard. What is this thing? You can't read.
You've never seen an elephant. There's not picture books. You can't go to a zoo. No.
To them it must have been a monster out of myth.
Taller than their huts, bellowing, armored, unstoppable. The river runs red. Men drowning
under the weight of their own armor. The clash is relentless. The screams rising in the morning
mist. Thousands die before the Brighton's finally break. When it's done, the Legion stand
bloodied but unbroken. Claudius' path to London is clear. After Medway, the Thames is next.
And here's the problem. The Thames is not a lazy brook. It's wide, brown, and tidal.
20 feet up and 20 feet down twice a day. Try to picture that. A river that breathes in and
out like a set of lungs, swelling, draining, ripping boats from their moorings. You can't
ferry an empire across that. This is a very stupid question because you know,
and everyone listening should know by now, just how gifted I am when it comes to geography.
How far inland is London? It's like, well, by foot. What are we talking about?
Are we talking about AI? I'm just curious, how is this river tidal? Clearly, it's from
the sea or the ocean. So how far in is this tide affected? London's not that far. If you
look at it, it's like the southeastern side of the United Kingdom. If you look at it now, it's like
the southeastern, like kind of, you know, they could bomb it from, you know, France would fly
planes over there and they drop bombs. Right. I'm just curious how far inland a river carries
a tide more than anything else. Oh, pretty far. I didn't think that was a thing.
Yeah, definitely. There it is. Okay. So what do the Romans do, Jake?
They build boats. That's what they do. That's what they do. The Romans build.
They build roads. They build bridges. You know, some of the, some aqueducts, they build all kinds
of stuff. Oh, yeah. Imagine this. You're a Roman engineer standing on the bank behind you,
40,000 soldiers, carts, oxen and siege engines in front of you, a swirling tidal mess. No cranes,
no concrete mixers, no rebar, just sharpened oak logs, pilings, hammered into the riverbed
with brute force, drop hammers slamming, massive weights hauled up by teams of laborers,
often slaves captured in conquest, then let loose to smash piles into the mud, no steam engines,
no hydraulics, just muscle, sweat and punishment. Is this the first London Bridge?
This is the first London Bridge. That's right. That first London Bridge is the reason London
exists. Without it, the camp is just another outpost. With it, you've got a crossing. A crossing
makes a hub, and a hub makes a port, and a port makes a city. London is born because of that bridge.
Without Rome forcing that crossing, there is no London, no city and no port. The bridge wasn't
just a structure, it was the hinge that made London possible. But nothing Rome built here
was safe. Shortly after in 6080, Boudicca, queen of the Asenai, rises in revolt.
She was a tall, flame-haired woman described by Roman writers as fierce and commanding.
She had been publicly humiliated and beaten by Roman officials after her husband's death.
Her daughters were assaulted. Her tribe's lands were seized. The Romans did not kill her.
They thought breaking her spirit was enough. Make an example out of her. This was a mistake
that would haunt them. That fury turned into fire. She rallied neighboring tribes in March with
the force. Some say numbered in the tens of thousands with some estimates saying
nearly 100,000, which at the time would have been nearly half the entire population
of the Roman-Britain area. Governor Satonius, the Roman governor of Britain at the time,
is badly outnumbered. He looks at the tiny Roman garrison in London and makes a brutal call,
abandon it, save the province and sacrifice the town. Back in Rome, people were horrified
that London had been left to burn. Wait, is this the same dude that was trying to make
a name for himself? No, this is a appointed senator. Yeah, he's like the governor.
Claudius is way back in Rome. They are not happy with him. By the way, they are not happy with him.
Not happy. The rebels torched the settlement and flames sweep through what little stood.
Archaeologists to this day still dig through the thick red layer of ash left behind.
Thousands are slaughtered or burned alive and whatever crude bridge stood there,
certainly went with it. That is the rhythm that defines London Bridge for centuries. Build, burn,
rebuild. Eventually, of course, Rome comes back. Rebuilding the settlement and the bridge
after Boudicca's revolt, the legions reestablish order, construct sturdier defenses, and pour
resources back in stronger and bigger. London grows by the second century. It's the capital
of Roman Britain, government buildings, walls, money flowing, all of it balanced on a bridge.
But empire's rot. And by the fifth century, the legions march out and the Roman emperor,
Roman dynasty, not dynasty, what do you call the Roman what? Empire, empire, the Roman empire
falls. Rome itself is collapsing under waves of invasions, economic strain and political chaos.
The city of Rome is even sacked in 41080 with the entire empire pulling its soldiers home.
London is left exposed with no one to make this the Ottomans. Is that is that what came after
Roman Ottoman Empire? That would be that's like the Middle East, right? That's like the
Middle East came over like Turkey, you know, because like Germany is there's a lot of
Ottoman. I don't know anything about that war. Yeah, I'm not like my my war knowledge kind of
like before the Revolutionary War kind of like starts to go. I should educate myself on that
stuff more. I was really interested in learning about this stuff. Isn't a joke like when you
when you hit 45 like you either just become a Roman enthusiast or a World War Two enthusiast?
Oh, I love World War Two. You pick, yeah, either pick like you're into World War Two
or you're into Rome. Well, that was a meme for a while. Both are interesting discussions about,
you know, I was looking at this stuff and the parallels that kind of get drawn between
just the stupid things men do to each other. It's terrible. So the bridge collapses and once
again the thriving town shrinks to a shadow itself. Local tribal leaders and later Saxons
govern the ruins. And while London all but disappears for a time, the site never truly dies.
It waits in the ashes to resurge centuries later. Okay, we're gonna fast forward a little bit.
So like it just there was no bridge for hundreds of years. Just there was there was a bridge,
but it was just like not it not without the Romans there and all the economics of
the Romans coming there. It was really kind of and remember they didn't really have government.
Right. So for till like 1100s, things didn't really start to take off. Just plans by the
1100s and the 1200s. London is bursting. While London strains that it seems the wider world is
just as alive. In China, the Song Dynasty is inventing gunpowder. In the Middle East,
Islamic scholars are preserving and expanding classical knowledge in great cities from
Damascus to Baghdad. Meanwhile, in the Americas, which are unfound at the time,
Mayan cities are fading and new cultures are rising. Britain is just one stage in a global drama
of invention, war and upheaval. The Crusades, Jake, are waging. This is the age of chainmail
and jousts. The pitcher bull writes chainmail like you write a letter and that person has
to write five letters and, you know, that chainmail. No, no, that's actually that reference
doesn't even exist anymore. Chainmail. No, it really doesn't. No one would know what
chainmail is now. No, it's just chainmail. No, it's just forwarding something on
Instagram is the new chain. Right. But I remember getting like a chainmail. Yeah.
Letters. Yes. Reply all. You have to send this to five of your friends. Otherwise,
you don't know what I think was. Yeah. Anyways, okay. Legends like King Arthur
in the Sword and the Stone helped place this timeframe. It is the world of castles, crusaders,
romance overlapping with the very real construction of another London bridge.
The mood. Sorry, again, questions. And it's just giving you an excuse to cough. There you go.
Yeah, thank you. When were the when were the so-called you're supposed dark ages?
1300s, I think. That's like you're thinking like black, like, you know,
yeah, but also like medieval medieval times. Yes. The times, the medieval times,
like when you're talking about the 11 and 1200s was actually kind of like a, you know,
a Renaissance time, right? There was a lot of things that were happening.
But the dark ages were like the monarch plague and war and famine and everything.
Well, that and like they say society like, you know, collapse or contracted. Right.
Yeah, like art and design and invention, like nothing happened for three years.
Everybody's too worried about not dying.
There is a conspiracy theory that has a lot of weight in it that those 300 years never existed.
Oh, dark ages is fifth to the 10th century. That was earlier.
So that was like, so this is, this is a, this is post-dark ages, 1100s.
Have you heard this theory though? That that does the dark ages didn't actually even exist.
Like, so literally we, what is it? It's the, it's the 21st century.
It was created by the church, this 300 year span.
So in theory, we actually are living in the 1800s, would it be right now?
Like by the actual timeline.
So they just manipulated the calendar somehow.
Yes, yes, exactly. And so when they look back at records, they're like,
part of it. And the whole reason they like think or know there were dark ages is like,
well, there was hardly any records from these 300 years.
Like clearly society collapsed and like nothing happened.
And it's like, no, actually the thing was something about the church and the pope at the time
wanted to line up the thousand year or the point of like a thousand years since Christ,
like the turn of the millennia since Christ with his own reign.
And basically said, and there were some other political reasons, they're like, well, let's just
go around and burn all the books and burn all the calendars.
I guess nobody can read.
Well, think about it at the time.
Yeah. No one can read. No one knows what year it is.
Anyways, it doesn't matter.
So they just go in all records now.
They don't even know how old they are.
Right.
It's your, it's your.
I'm going to die in the next two years.
It's your 900, not actually year.
What would that be?
Yeah, like 600.
So there's a theory that like 300 years actually didn't exist.
So the dark ages were actually only like 10 years or something.
Right. Yeah.
Anyways, interesting.
Fascinating if you look at it.
But centuries earlier, neither here nor there.
Rome had pushed into Britain and folded it into an empire.
Now, in the 11 and 1200s, English lords joined a pan European march
outward against Muslim powers in the east.
Wars fought over faith, power, and identity.
Yes.
London is packed, filthy, alive with trade.
Centuries of wars, Viking raids, and a Norman conquest
have hardened Britain into a place used to rebuilding after violence.
Its economy clawed its way back through wool exports,
bustling markets along the London bridge over the River Thames,
and the constant flow of merchants from Europe.
Still, timber bridges have burned and collapsed again and again.
The city wants permanence.
Yeah, let's build a stone.
Yes.
So they commissioned Peter of Coal Church,
a priest with an engineer's brain,
to build something nobody had ever attempted in England,
a stone bridge across a tidal river.
In those days, most educated men were clergy
because monasteries and churches where we're learning
and record living kept, worked, lived,
were capped.
Yeah.
Right.
I'm trying so hard.
You guys, I'm, I'm a little ill.
I'm trying not to cough.
Chris is under the weather.
Usually I read all these ahead of time.
I write them and then I'll read them out loud to Jesse
and go through and make corrections on things that are hard.
Yeah, we didn't have that.
I'm trying to save my voice.
This is director's cut.
Straight to director's cut.
Okay.
Peter wasn't just praying over souls.
He was trained in practical knowledge, geometry,
and the kind of organizational skill it took to
marshal a workforce for a project just like this.
How do you even do it?
Right.
Today you would drop steel sheet piles,
pump it dry and pour in reinforced concrete.
Easy.
Exactly.
Yes.
In the 1170s, you had oak, rubble, and willpower,
and a brute labor of hundreds of workers,
most of them peasants, craftsmen, or guild laborers.
Some were coerced or constricted in service.
They weren't exactly slaves in the Roman sense.
Okay.
They drove oak piles.
Deaders, probably.
Deaders.
Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
Absolutely.
Man, sorry, you didn't pay your garbage, Bill.
You're going to have to go like wander around in this tidal muck.
So what they did is they would drive oak piles into the mud
and oval nearly 20 to 30 feet across.
They would lash them together
and then fill it with rubble
until it rose like a man-made island.
Imagine a giant wooden basket shoved into the riverbed
and stuffed with stone until it became a solid ground
where none existed.
Around that, they build another cage bigger
and stuffed it full of more rubble.
That was called a Starling.
And then you remove the center rubble?
No, you do not.
No, that was armor against tides, ice, boats, driftwood.
It was basically a crash barrier protecting the bridge.
Got it.
Inside that wooden and rubble island,
masons laid stone until it rose above the waterline.
This became the pier, the massive stone base
that would carry the weight of the arches above.
Think of each pier as a solid block
like a squat tower sunk into the river,
the thing that everything else rests on.
Building one could take months, even a year,
with hundreds of laborers moving thousands of tons of stone
by hand and cart and cutting down entire groves of oak
to feed the piles and scaffolding.
Yeah, think of the forest that they had to just disappear.
They had gone.
19 of these were built, each one in fortress,
rising out of the water like stone towers planted in the current.
On top of these piers, they raised arches,
picture a wooden skeleton built as a mold.
Stone blocks are laid one by one along the curve,
each wedge locking tighter until the keystone is dropped in
and the whole thing holds under its own weight.
These were not cemented like modern bridges.
They were masonry arches.
Cut and carved stone fitted so precisely
that gravity and geometry alone kept them standing.
As long as your piling doesn't like sink.
As long as your piling doesn't sink.
Picture the mason network hauling blocks of kentish ragstone,
which is basically limestone limestone.
Yeah, okay.
They're chiseling them with iron tools and wooden mallets,
each edge shaped by hand.
He's standing in ankle deep mud, sweat on his face
and dust in his lungs to measure.
Blimey.
Blimey.
That ain't a lot.
He's a priest.
He's probably he's probably he's nice guy.
Good Lord.
Maybe.
Yeah.
He's standing in that mud measuring with something called crude,
a crude divider, which is kind of like a compass.
It has two iron legs joined at the top
and they would scratch the arcs into wood or wax.
That's how he copied the curves
and transfer the measurements from board to stone.
For alignment, he drops plumb blobs on strings
and uses straight rods as sight lines.
Straight rods.
So picture this.
How do you find a straight rod?
I don't know.
I actually looked for like pictures of like straight rods.
I don't know.
Is it just a stick?
It's just a tree that's like this one's really straight.
Picture this.
Men crouch in the mud laying long poles end to end
peering along them with one eye closed
to check if the line stayed true.
It's primitive, almost laughably simple
compared to lasers and levels today, but it worked.
Those rods and strings kept geometry true
in the middle of chaos.
The stones are dragged in by ox cart
or floated down the river on barges.
Each block a small mountain moved by rope
and again, sheer will.
These masons were not anonymous laborers.
They were skilled craftsmen's trains through guilds,
which I was like, what's it feels like?
Well, obviously the free masons, Chris.
I was wondering if it was like, is it like the union?
But it sounds like it's a mix
between college and labor union.
Training craftsmen through apprenticeship
and also protecting their trade
and years of apprenticeship.
Passing knowledge from father to son,
very often father to son.
That's why your name would be like Carl's son
because you want to be the son of Carl
and you're the blacksmith or whatever.
It would be Mason, Mason, Masonson.
Masonson. No, well, you'd be Charles Mason.
That, you know.
Oh, yeah, right. Yeah, clearly.
The names were very simple back then.
Yes.
So no cement binds their work,
only the geometry of the arch.
Their world was noise, dusk and risk.
Some spans were 15 feet, some 30,
depending on where the piles would bite.
Symmetrical, asymmetrical from day one.
A row of uneven stone ribs stretching
across the river Thames.
So, so they, assumedly,
when they started to put these pilings,
they're like, all right, by design,
we're going to make them, you know,
we're going to go 30 feet or whatever it is.
Didn't work because there's like,
when I talk about the piling sinking
or settling that obviously happened.
And so they're like, well, I can't do it there.
So we're going to go another 10, 15 feet.
Tip that one over.
Wow.
That's why it took forever.
It took 30 years to build this bridge.
Yeah.
And when it opened in 1209,
there was fanfare, bells ringing,
processions across its length.
King John took credit,
though the true genius was Peter of Coal Church
and the Masons who carved it from stone.
Medieval chroniclers wrote of its marvel
and later artists sketched and painted its arches,
capturing the pride of a city
that had never seen anything like it.
Yeah.
And then London went insane.
What?
They didn't just cross the bridge.
They colonized it.
Imagine looking up as you stepped onto the span,
houses looming above you, timber stacked,
three, four, even six stories high,
tilting toward the river like they might topple in a storm.
Cross buildings overhead made stretches of the bridge
into shadowed tunnels,
sunlight broken into shards.
There were about 140 to 150 properties crammed
onto that stone spine.
It was five to 800 people live there.
An entire real estate.
That hard to find.
Like why are you trying to capture the commerce
as it comes into London, Jake?
So literally you're just making your shop over the bridge.
And as a shopkeeper,
you need to live above your shop.
Exactly.
Yes, exactly.
Who mandated like were you selling,
was the city selling plots along the bridge?
Or did some guy just come in and he's like,
his cart that he brought onto the bridge one day,
the wheel broke and it stopped working.
And then he's like, well,
I'm just going to camp out next to my cart
that I can't get off the bridge.
And then he starts just building up
his cart into a shop and someone else goes,
I'm going to do that.
I think that's probably what it was.
You know, you have highwaymen, right?
You know what a highwayman is.
You know, they just wander the highway
and maybe they decided,
hey, I'm going to sell some of this shit
at the entrance of the bridge.
Like you said, they set up a tent
and then someone else set up a tent
and I'm sure it spiraled out of control,
you know, over the course of years.
Yeah.
Shops at street level sold everything
from gloves and knives to books.
While families cooked, fought and slept above them,
you could hear the hammering of a cutler
next to the chanting of a chapel choir.
Later came the non-such house.
I'm sorry.
Yes, it's the non-such house.
A timber palace with ridiculous onion domes
shipped piece by piece from Holland
and assembled like a Lego set
balanced over the river.
It was the largest prefabricated building
of its time, carried across the channel,
plank by plank, every joint numbered
and rebuilt without a single nail.
Only wooden pegs held it together.
Imagine standing on this bridge,
looking up at this cartoonish palace
perched above shops and hobbles,
like a fairy tale dropped into a slum.
It made no sense.
And that is the point.
A ridiculous flex that somehow balanced
on the same arches already sagging
under the weight of a small town.
So it wasn't just a crossing.
It was a neighborhood, a fortress,
a market and a fire trap.
All of it suspended over 19 uneven arches
fighting the tides.
Yeah.
Think about the load.
Stone arches below a road barely wide
enough for two wagons.
Yeah.
Isn't that ridiculous?
That's a painting from period.
Yeah.
There's just a bunch of paintings.
There's obviously no photos or anything
like that because, you know,
right, right, if you didn't exist.
Just wild like what?
I didn't know any of this.
You know, I just started started digging.
I vaguely like it sounds familiar.
Like, yeah, there was a weird like.
Yeah.
Just it's so.
Think about the load Jake,
140 houses, 150 houses and buildings,
kitchens with open flames,
chimneys coughing smoke into the fog,
families packed overhead and livestock,
carts, priests, beggars,
butchers with bleeding carcasses hung
from hooks, taverns sloshing ale,
blacksmiths hammering iron,
even a public latrine
dripping straight into the river.
Yeah, probably not a road.
Dogs are snapping at heels and pigs
are rooting in the garbage.
Feral children are darting through
horses eventually children.
Carriages thundered through the chaos.
It was less a bridge than a circus
stacked on stone.
Could you even get through?
No, and we're going to get there.
OK, I was like, at what point
did they start charging?
Yeah, very.
It's a very interesting discovery.
Well, 100%.
Yeah, yeah.
John Stowe in his survey of London
didn't just mention the bridge in passing.
He marveled at how it was
replenished on both sides with large
fair and beautiful houses,
describing it as though it were another
great street of the city
suspended above the Thames.
To him, the bridge wasn't just a crossing,
but its own district packed with
noise and color.
Centuries later, Bruce Watson
pushed the point further, calling it,
a chaotic blend of commerce,
housing and traffic,
equal parts market fortress and madhouse.
Unlike anything else in medieval Europe,
by any sane measure,
it should have collapsed.
The road was absurd.
Some estimates suggest thousands
of tons of stone,
plus the weight of 140 houses,
hundreds of animals and carts and people
packed shoulder to shoulder.
It's like parking a small town,
maybe 20 or 30 fully loaded 747 jets
on top of a row of stone arches.
The design was constantly patched
and no modern inspector would have
signed off on it,
but somehow it worked.
Overbuilt piers, redundant arches,
and sheer stubborn medieval engineering.
And maybe the secret was
that there was no OSHA,
no building codes,
and no safety limit.
Yeah, no one cared.
They piled it high and trusted stone
and a lot of Catholic faith
for it to hold.
On foot in the 1300s,
it wasn't just the shops and animals anymore,
it was claustrophobia.
Okay, hold on.
There exists a scale model
of what this looked like at the peak.
There it is.
It looks rad.
It does look very cool.
Hold on, where is it again?
Like this is obviously
in some old cathedral or something,
but that is like a long,
like you don't,
this is a good shot
because you can see just how damn long
the thing is.
Yeah.
Yeah, it's 150 houses,
plus buildings.
Did you get to the point
where there's a drawbridge
because I'm looking
and there's a drawbridge?
I did not see the drawbridge.
That's great.
Like at some,
at some point someone
just removed this
and they're like, what?
Yeah, we need a drawbridge here.
Sorry, John.
We got to pull down your house.
Yeah.
Okay.
Well, bizarre.
Wow.
In the 1300s,
a crush of bodies
pressed in from all sides,
shoulders jammed,
breath hot on your neck,
hawkers shouting in your ear,
beggars tugging at your sleeve
and dogs at your legs,
buckets of sewage
dumped from windows
splashing into the river,
the stink of fish,
guts and coal smoke
so thick it coats your tongue.
It was a sensory overload,
a tunnel of noise
and a smell and humanity
jammed into stone.
By carriage in the 1600s,
way worse.
The roadway was maybe 15 feet
wide hemmed by stone and timber.
Two wagons could scrape past
if both drivers had the guts
and a little luck
and they were in the right spot.
Gridlock was constant.
Tempers always boiled.
Wheels grinded on cobbles.
It got so bad that in 1722,
the city had to issue an ordinance
forcing drivers to keep left.
That simple order is why Britain
still drives on the left today.
Born out of frustration
on the London Bridge.
The idea came from the city
authorities in 1722
desperate to untangle the chaos.
Drivers were instructed
to keep to the left as they crossed,
a rule enforced by wardens
posted on each end.
And it worked.
The gridlock eased,
crashes lessened
and soon the habit spread
beyond the bridge.
Over time it became law
and then tradition
woven so deeply in British life
that three centuries later
the entire country
still follows a traffic rule
born on that cramped medieval span.
Do you know why you stay
to the left, Chris?
Tell me.
It's because,
let me think of this now,
it's something about
how you're right-handed
and you're driving a team of horses.
You're using that hand to use your,
it's a whip.
I'm sure there's an actual name for it
because it's not just a whip.
It's like to stick the rope on the end.
It's a crop.
Yes.
Sure.
Thank you.
The crop.
And so if that's,
or maybe it's that's in your left hand
because you're right-handed
and you need this for something else
and so you're on that side
and you want to be able to see,
it's just like how you drive,
you know, on the right here
because you're closer to the left side.
It had to do with where the position
of the driver was on the cart.
Where they sat on the horse.
Yeah, where they sat on the cart.
Yeah.
Hold on a second.
Yep, you're good.
I can buy you a model
of the old London Bridge
that you can build in all your spare time.
It's a board game.
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All of that bustle and weight shake
is coming at a cost
because a bridge stuffed
with horses and houses
and people and wagons was
nothing but a tinder box.
Oh, right.
Yeah, that too.
To go up in flames.
Crowds were packed tight
and shimmies puffed smoke.
It was a set up for disaster.
It was dangerous from the start.
The most infamous fire was in 1212
when flames broke out
on both ends of the bridge at once.
What?
That seems very,
yeah, it seems like someone
was doing arson there.
I believe so.
So it's called doing arson,
not committing arson.
Like you do arson.
That is something to do.
That is quite odd.
Why do you do it?
I don't know, Jesse's always in.
Are you going to do an arson?
Do an arson.
You're going to do arson anyway.
That's how you do it.
You're going to do an arson.
Yeah, they trapped hundreds
of people in the middle.
Imagine that terror.
Yeah, you can't go either way.
Heat pushing people back
from either side.
The only excuse.
I mean the good news,
the good news is you're on a bridge.
You can jump off.
Many leapt into the River Thames,
their wool and linen clothing
catching fire before they even
hit the current.
Contemporary swimming.
Contemporary chronicles.
Prevalent.
Yeah, no, probably not
a lot of swimming.
Contemporary chroniclers
like Matthew Parris
claimed thousands perished that day,
though the real number
may have been in the hundreds.
Still, it was one of the
deadliest urban fires
of the Middle Ages
etched into their memory,
proof that London Bridge
was still a death trap
as much as it was a lifeline.
In 1633,
fire got to the northern houses
again,
torching whole rolls
of timber shops.
And yet,
in an ironic twist,
that devastation
created a firebreak
that would later save the day
when the great fire
of 1666 roared through London,
consuming more than 13,000 houses,
90 churches.
The gap left by the 1633 blaze
stopped the flames
from sweeping across
the entire bridge.
I suppose.
Yeah, that's good.
Samuel Pepis, the diarist,
wrote of standing on the river
and watching,
quote,
the poor pigeons I perceive
were lost to leave their houses,
but hovered above the windows
and balconies
till they burned
and their wings fell down.
Without that accidental firebreak.
Is he talking about pigeons
or is he talking about people?
I'm not sure.
He's a he's a diarist,
not a poet.
Right. So, you know.
Without that accidental
firebreak,
the destruction would have been
total and complete.
The river itself posed
its own cruelty.
The starlings,
if you remember those
massive stone casings
around each pier,
strangled the flow
so badly
that the water level
above the ridge
stood up to six feet
higher than below.
Basically a dam.
OK.
At ebb tide,
it blasted through the narrow
arches
like a dam
releasing floodwater.
Boatmen called it
shooting the bridge.
And it was notorious.
Skilled water.
This sounds fun.
Skilled watermen would charge
extra to take passengers through
steering hard against the torrent,
praying they didn't smash
against the stone.
Newspapers of the 1700s
carried regular notices
of drownings.
Whole fairies upended.
Barges splintered.
It was said more Londoners
died trying to shoot the bridge
than from the Highwaymen
murdering and robbing them
on the roads.
In winter,
the current slowed above the bridge
and the.
And in the winter,
the slowed current above the bridge
allowed the Thames to freeze solid.
Out of this hazard came spectacle.
Frost fairs.
Imagine rows of tents and stalls
set up on the ice.
Hawkers selling gingerbread
and roasted meat.
I see where this is going, Chris.
No, no, we're OK.
Yeah, no, that's OK.
Yeah, totally, totally fine.
We're fine.
We're not going through the ice.
We're not going through the ice.
Coaches rattle across frozen water.
Children skated with bones
tied to their shoes.
And Londoners drank gin
by bonfires lit on a river.
Turn the glass ice.
The last great frost fair was in 1814.
When an elephant was marched
across the oh, no, here we go.
But in medieval centuries,
it was a recurring carnival
born from a river
throttled by the bridge.
Sadly, no, take that.
The elephant still didn't go through.
Everything's not a tragedy, dude.
Come on, elephant.
Totally went through the ice.
And then, of course, as with anything,
there are politics involved.
The bridge wasn't just commerce and cast.
It was a stage for power.
The Southwark gate became a grotesque gallery.
It spikes crowned with severed heads,
tarred and blackened for all to see.
William Wallace.
Yeah, William Wallace.
Braveheart.
Yeah, I know the name.
OK, well, you brought it up earlier.
Yes, OK, thank you.
I didn't put it together.
Yes, thank you.
That's William Wallace had his head,
you know, stuck there in 1305.
He was a trader to hum some hero to others
who stuck there as a warning.
The severed heads were literally
scalded in boiling pitch or brine
to preserve them.
The skin turned black and leathery.
The features twisted into grotesque masks.
Did they do that before rafter killing them?
Well, they cut their head off
and then stick it in the boiling pitch.
So probably not alive anymore.
Yeah, it's called parboiling.
That's what it's called.
That's a good ish.
After the peasants revolt in 1381,
Watt Tyler's followers ended the same way.
In 1535, it was Thomas Moore,
once Lord Chancellor.
His head set beside common criminals.
Moore was not just a politician.
He was a Renaissance humanist,
lawyer and writer.
His most famous work, Utopia.
Any socialist should read Utopia.
Described in imaginary island society
organized around shared property,
strict rules and communal living.
At the time, it was satire and social commentary.
But centuries later, people would seize on it
as a precursor to criticizing socialists
and communist thought.
Moore refused to bend to Henry VIII's split
with the Catholic Church.
Henry VIII, a thiam.
Choosing scaffold over compromise.
That stubbornness made him a martyr to some
and a villain to others.
And finally, just another head
on a pike above London Bridge.
It probably didn't smell good either, Chris.
I don't know.
Maybe they're cooked.
The tar sealed it in.
Yeah.
Well, tar, the brine, you know.
Let's be honest.
That was not the worst smelling thing
on London Bridge.
No, I'm sure it was not.
This is not a...
I don't think people showered or bathed much more than...
Yeah, I don't think people had a sense of smell.
No.
It's all in what you get used to.
Ford Visors, like the German traveler Paul Hinsner
in the late 1500s, wrote with horror
about crossing under the grizzly displays,
noting the rows and rows of heads, quote,
parboiled and set upon poles
on the most conspicuous part of the bridge.
From the road, you could see hollow eye sockets,
lips shrunk back from teeth,
crows pulling at their hair.
It was a theater of decay deliberately made
to last longer.
A message rotting in slow motion above the Thames.
Others described the stench that drifted down the roadway,
the sight of crows pecking at faces.
To them, it was both terrifying and unforgettable,
proof that London ruled by fear as much as law.
It told every traveler exactly who ruled London
and what defiance would cost them.
Eventually, by the 1700s, the bridge was exhausted.
The weight of centuries had caught up with it.
Once teeming with houses, the once teeming houses
were finally torn down by 1761.
Whole families and shops evicted in the name of safety.
The roadway was widened to cope with the crush
of carts and carriages, but the old medieval peers
still strangled the Thames, turning the river
into a bottleneck that backed up sewage and trade alike.
Traffic was changing.
Coaches were larger, wagons were heavier,
and soon the first rumble of industry
was echoing in the city.
The bridge that once embodied London now felt
like a choke chain around its throat.
Parliament debated it for years before finally ordering
a new bridge, admitting that the medieval marble
had become a liability, a relic from another age.
John Rennie designed a granite five-arch bridge,
which opened in 1831.
The medieval bridge stood after six centuries,
finally came down stone by stone.
Six hundred years, Jake, that other bridge stood.
Six hundred years.
A testament.
By the 1960s.
Wait, so why is London Bridge falling down?
It's clearly not.
By the 1960s, Rennie's proud granite bridge,
barely 130 years old, was sinking under the pounding
of Rennie's buses and cars that had never been
designed to carry.
The Thames clay beneath its piers gave way,
the whole span dropping an inch every eight years.
For a structure meant to last centuries,
it felt almost pathetic.
A reminder that Victorian engineering,
for all its triumphs, was not invincible.
Londoners grumbled at the bottlenecks.
Parliament studied reports of subsidence,
and eventually the city conceded it needed
yet another replacement bridge.
Rennie's bridge, once a marvel of the 1830s,
was written off as obsolete within almost a single human lifetime.
Strangely, Robert McCullough, an American oil man and developer
who had literally founded Lake Havasu City
out of an empty desert in the 1960s,
bought the bridge in 1968 for under two and a half million dollars
as a way to draw people to its brand new creation.
Each of Rennie's granite blocks was carefully numbered, dismantled,
and shipped across the Atlantic through the Panama Canal
and hauled by truck into the Arizona desert.
Under the blazing sun, workers reassembled it
over a man-made canal that McCullough had cut through the sand,
but with a twist, the old stones were now just a skin
wrapped around a reinforced concrete core.
What had once held back the Thames now stood over an artificial
waterway built as much for marketing as for function.
It opened in 1971 with marching bands,
parades, and a carnival atmosphere.
The stunt worked.
Thousands of curious visitors came to see the bridge from London,
reborn the desert, and property sales at McCullough's new city boomed.
The rumor has always lingered that McCullough
thought he was buying Tower Bridge,
probably not true.
The man knew that headlines would cause confusion and generate buzz.
The gamble paid off, and he turned an obsolete Victorian crossing
into a marketing coup, and in the process made London Bridge
more famous in Arizona than it had ever been in London.
So today, London Bridge stands in the desert, palm trees,
fake tutor pubs, a street in the sky reborn as a marketing stunt.
And I'm still mad at you and Jeff, because I wanted to go,
I wanted to see it, and you guys abandoned me that morning.
You guys left, I was in the Shirako, and I was with Jesse,
and you guys left us.
You guys left us, and I couldn't catch you.
100%, the Shirako was too slow, I think.
And you guys were like, see you later, and you were gone.
I don't even know if Jeff even went with me.
I think it was just chasing me that went over on the car.
I actually don't say anything about it.
No, I know.
But I feel like that was just kind of like-
What did you see?
Tell me about what you saw there.
Tell me, explain this thing in London Bridge.
I literally was on the highway and saw a road that said
London Bridge, Arrow, and I was like, what?
And so I turned, knowing nothing about it at all.
Really?
And as I'm going, I'm telling Chase in the passenger seat,
I was like, can you Google, is this,
did they move the London Bridge or something?
And sure enough, that was the assumption,
and sure enough they did.
Would it look obvious that it wasn't like-
No, I didn't know it's only like a facade, but like-
Yeah.
It was not that remarkable.
It seemed like just a bridge in any other, like-
Would it have been more remarkable in 1968, do you think?
Do you think you're spoiled?
Yeah, maybe.
I don't think it was really that impressive.
It did look like it had the most English-seeming thing
about the whole thing was the old-timey gas lanterns.
Yeah.
They were probably LED at this point,
but like they had those along there,
and so it looked very like, huh.
And I was kind of surprised, like, I can drive on this, huh?
Like, this is just a road.
It's this ancient-ass bridge, yeah.
So, yeah, it was not that special.
Back in London, the current London Bridge is a plain,
but sturdy concrete and steel span open in 1973.
Sad, lame.
No palaces, no circus of chaos,
just six lanes of traffic and footpaths carrying thousands
across the Thames every day.
The modern London Bridge is functional.
Boring, but it does its job.
A reminder that after 2,000 years of collapse
and reinvention, the city still cannot live
without a bridge in this spot.
Yeah, it is interesting.
They kept, like, they kept putting it in the same spot.
Yep.
Well, it's probably the shortest,
shortest distance across the water.
I suppose.
The song maybe echoes a Viking saga.
Maybe it's about the endless repairs.
Maybe it's just gallows humor from people who knew
the bridge was always half broken.
But who is the fair lady?
Nobody knows for sure.
Some say it was Eleonora Province,
Queen Consort to Henry III,
who once held rights to tolls on the bridge.
Others argue it was the Virgin Mary,
the church's dedication on the bridge itself.
Still, others think it was just a stand-in,
a rhyme's placeholder,
like saying, dear lady or fine lady with no name at all.
The mystery is why part of that song stuck.
It lets every generation imagine their own figure
watching the bridge crumble.
But the truth is simple,
London Bridge really was always almost falling down
and people kept singing about it.
Yeah, interesting.
It was basically making fun of the whole situation.
Yes.
What makes it worth remembering, though,
isn't that it was always failing,
is that it did hold for those 600 years.
600 years, yeah, right.
That's the London Bridge I think about
when I read all this and stuff.
I'm not thinking about the Romans.
I didn't know there was, yeah, like a half way,
like a, I don't know,
the what, 70-year bridge, 80-year bridge?
Six centuries of insane loads
with a whole town perched above a tidal river
carried by uneven arches on rubble-filled cages,
fires, floods, ice, executions.
Wild.
And none of it came down.
It wasn't elegant. It wasn't neat.
It was messy, crooked, patched, overcrowded.
That's probably why it worked.
Like an old race car held together
with duct tape and stubbornness.
It flexed instead of snapping.
It wasn't just a crossing.
It was London itself.
Yep, I like it.
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All right.
Do you have a favorite bridge?
Chris, hold on, hold on.
That original road was cobblestone, right?
And I imagine the second, was it?
Yeah, the one I went over, I think,
was cobblestone as well.
Yeah, it was a cobblestone.
Yeah, I imagine.
Pouring concrete in 1880.
Yeah.
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Do you have a favorite bridge, Jake?
Let me ask you this, actually.
Have you been in New York City?
No, no.
So you have not seen the Brooklyn Bridge?
I have not seen Brooklyn or any of the boroughs.
They're so cool, man, these stone bridges
and some of this stuff is, it's absolutely beautiful.
And I know that we've moved on.
Things used, I think things had,
used to have to be bigger back in the day.
Like they just had to have more to them
because we didn't have the engineering to just,
we had to rely more on brute strength
than finesse when it came to engineering.
Sure.
So you have all these big monolithic things
and now things have gotten so
efficiency based, right?
It's from like an economic and material standpoint
when you talk about how things need to be built.
That has a charm of its own.
No, it doesn't.
Look at old trellis train bridges.
Don't you think those are cool in a way?
Because they are so minimalistic.
No, because they're all the same.
They don't stand out.
It's all the same design over and over again.
I mean, I will look at it.
Are you talking like the underside trellis bridge,
like the arches that go underneath the rail?
That's a sub structure or a superstructure either way.
I'm going to tell you about my favorite bridges.
Okay, go ahead.
Which are train bridges.
I'm listening.
Because you asked.
Okay.
So they're all three are on the St. Croix River.
So the Arcola High Bridge.
Have you ever heard of or seen or...
Is that the one that looks like Mickey Mouse ears?
No, no.
The one in Prescott there?
No, no.
That's a different one.
Yeah, that is a Mickey Mouse one because it has...
That one raises...
Ooh, that's the fourth bridge I like.
Okay.
No, if you Google Arcola High Bridge,
it is a massive span, extremely high up,
because there's bluffs and they're like,
well, we got to get a train track across back in like...
I think it was built in the late 1800s, actually.
I should look this up if you're not...
I got you.
I got you.
Okay.
And what's cool about it is back in...
When we were in high school, you can drive right up to the edge of it,
up at the top, and you could...
There was nothing stopping you from walking all the way out.
And there's no railings.
There's no actually like floor or like support.
It's literally just railroad ties on top of the beams.
Just nothing underneath.
There's nothing, nothing there.
So do you like this bridge because of your nostalgia
of doing that as a kid?
A little bit, but I also like that it's so unsafe
and it's still there.
And it's just like...
That photo didn't do it justice.
How high up in the air you are and how far it spans.
So that's cool.
That...
And I think that is very charming in its own way.
Like that is a very cool bridge object.
I would say for me, it kind of comes from nostalgia too.
I really do like the...
This is such a boring choice.
What is your favorite bridge?
I do like...
I really do like the Golden Gate Bridge.
Okay.
Driving across it is really, really special.
It's very cool.
It is enormous.
Yeah.
And it's one of those things that if they were to build
that bridge again, it would not look like that.
No, you're right.
It would be much simpler.
Even if you look at the New Stillwater Bridge,
it's really just boring.
It is.
I remember...
And that's even a suspension bridge, technically.
It is, technically.
Let's see if that...
Yeah, here I've got a picture of this thing too.
I remember taking my boat up there
when they were building this bridge.
And they were flying in some of the sections.
Because everything's just built in sections now.
They don't really build it on site.
Yeah.
But this is...
It's kind of boring.
The coolest thing about this bridge
is underneath you can see the two roadways.
Think of it as basically two separate channels.
And they're big sections.
They're big hollow U-shaped underneath sections
that are, as you said, lifted into place and put there.
But that means inside, there's basically
two giant tunnels underneath the roadway.
And that's where all of your utility conduit
and everything goes through.
But there is access to go through there.
And I would love to see photos of what that looks like.
Maybe we can sneak in there.
Maybe we can ask permission.
That would be better.
You're getting really good at permitting
when we were out in California.
Unfortunately, yeah.
So you want me to get a permit to get into the bridge.
I like that.
Okay, I like that plan.
All right, I'm running out of voice.
So I'm going to let you go.
I'll leave you and everyone else with a little bit of a sorry.
Take care, everybody.
We will see you all next week.
Take care.
Oh my god.
That's so creepy.
Why is it so...
About this episode
Exploring the history of the London Bridge reveals a tale of resilience and chaos. From its origins as a Roman engineering marvel to a bustling medieval neighborhood, the bridge has endured fires, floods, and even executions. The episode dives into the bridge's evolution, detailing the construction techniques used, the vibrant life it supported, and the eventual need for modern replacements. With humor and insight, the hosts discuss how the bridge became a symbol of London itself, reflecting the city's tumultuous history and the enduring spirit of its people.
Original notes
Everyone knows the nursery rhyme. But the real London Bridge wasn’t just “falling down”. It burned, froze, collapsed, drowned people, and carried a whole neighborhood on its back for nearly 600 years. From Roman legions and Boudica’s revolt to medieval masons, firestorms, frost fairs, severed heads on spikes, and finally a trip across the ocean to Arizona, this is the definitive story of London Bridge.
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