Tower Bridge Glass Walkway: Victorian Hydraulic Marvel

Why is it significant?

Walk onto the wide timber pedestrian path of Tower Bridge and look up at the majestic steel lattice suspension chains and Cornish granite towers.

Key Facts

Open the walk

Walk onto the wide timber pedestrian path of Tower Bridge and look up at the majestic steel lattice suspension chains and Cornish granite towers. Opened in June eighteen ninety-four by the Prince of Wales, this bridge is an engineering triumph: when tall sailing ships approach, its two giant bascules, each weighing over one thousand tons, can pivot open to an angle of eighty-six degrees in just sixty seconds!

Look up forty-two meters above your head at the high-level walkways connecting the towers: today, they feature glass-floored observation decks where visitors look straight down between their shoes at red London double-decker buses crossing below.

In December nineteen fifty-two, number seventy-eight bus driver Albert Gunter was driving his bus across the bridge when the gates suddenly failed to close and the bascules began rising before his eyes! Rather than brake and plummet backward, Gunter stomped on the accelerator, leaped the growing three-foot gap in mid-air, and slammed down safely on the other side, earning a ten-pound bonus for saving his twenty passengers.

Stroll across the river to the southern bank as we follow the Queen's Walk toward the warship HMS Belfast.