Tower Bridge
Bill writes: After lunch yesterday we toured Tower Bridge, pretty much everyone's favorite bridge in London. Passing by Dead Man's Hole (where corpses from the Tower and surrounding areas were retrieved for storage below stairs), we went on into the bridge.
The bridge was built back in the 1880s, and is an amazing architectural achievement. Up until the 1970's it still used the original coal-fired engines to move each side of the 2,000 tons of roadway from horizontal to vertical in 60 seconds.
You can go to the top level of the bridge, the old pedestrian walkway, where one can get a nice view of the city. That's the HMS Belfast in the foreground and St. Paul's in the background on the right.
And you can see that the bridge is right next to the Tower.
A special exhibition on the Blitz was going on, and they had an "air-raid warden" talking about the problems of guarding the bridge during the German air raids. The main reason the bridge survived is that the Luftwaffe used it for a marker during the raids, as it was visible even during the blackouts. In turn, the wardens perched high on the bridge during the raids, and used wireless sets to inform the fire brigades where the fires from the bombs were located. What's astounding is the level of bombing that occured. Beginning on "Black Saturday," September 7 1940, 348 German bombers escorted by 617 fighters attacked London. It's hard to imagine, but according to the website I visited, this represented a 20-mile-wide swath of aircraft filling some 800 square miles of sky. At one point, the fires were so bright that people on Shaftesbury Avenue over 7 miles away could read their newspapers by the firelight on the docks. With barges of sugar and rum from dockside warehouses ablaze, even the Thames itself was on fire. And this was only the beginning, because the bombings continued for another 57 nights in a row. Absolutely astounding that anything survived. And yet, the bridge and St. Pauls did survive.
By contrast, by the time we left, it was dark, but the bridge was calm and lovely in the night.
The bridge was built back in the 1880s, and is an amazing architectural achievement. Up until the 1970's it still used the original coal-fired engines to move each side of the 2,000 tons of roadway from horizontal to vertical in 60 seconds.
You can go to the top level of the bridge, the old pedestrian walkway, where one can get a nice view of the city. That's the HMS Belfast in the foreground and St. Paul's in the background on the right.
And you can see that the bridge is right next to the Tower.
A special exhibition on the Blitz was going on, and they had an "air-raid warden" talking about the problems of guarding the bridge during the German air raids. The main reason the bridge survived is that the Luftwaffe used it for a marker during the raids, as it was visible even during the blackouts. In turn, the wardens perched high on the bridge during the raids, and used wireless sets to inform the fire brigades where the fires from the bombs were located. What's astounding is the level of bombing that occured. Beginning on "Black Saturday," September 7 1940, 348 German bombers escorted by 617 fighters attacked London. It's hard to imagine, but according to the website I visited, this represented a 20-mile-wide swath of aircraft filling some 800 square miles of sky. At one point, the fires were so bright that people on Shaftesbury Avenue over 7 miles away could read their newspapers by the firelight on the docks. With barges of sugar and rum from dockside warehouses ablaze, even the Thames itself was on fire. And this was only the beginning, because the bombings continued for another 57 nights in a row. Absolutely astounding that anything survived. And yet, the bridge and St. Pauls did survive.
By contrast, by the time we left, it was dark, but the bridge was calm and lovely in the night.
posted by Bill | 11:32 AM
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