Old London Bridge Had 138 Houses and Its Own Rapids

For more than 500 years, the main road into London crossed a bridge lined with houses, and under their floors the river fell like a waterfall. We rebuild Old London Bridge in 3D from its own records to find out how you keep a town standing on top of a waterfall. 3D reconstruction by Stone & Source. Narration: synthetic voice (Kokoro text-to-speech). Chapters: 00:00 A town over a waterfall 0:32 The usual guess 1:15 The priest who built it 2:32 The street on the bridge 4:08 The waterfall underneath 5:51 Waterwheels, Nonsuch House and the ice 7:43 Who paid for the bridge How to read the reconstruction: solid means the records describe it; lighter (blue) means we inferred it; pale (wireframe) means nobody knows. Almost no period picture shows the street itself, so our street-level shots are inferred. How the piers were built in 1176-1209 is unknown, so that sequence is drawn pale. Key numbers: begun 1176, opened 1209; about 280 m long, 19 arches and a drawbridge; 124 houses in the 1358 survey and 138 at the peak around 1400; a roadway about 4.5 m wide; houses up to about 10 m deep and 4-5 storeys; 551 people in 1695; a drop of about 1.5 m at low tide (up to about 1.8 m in winter); houses removed 1757-61; replaced 1831. Myths we checked: not 200 houses or seven storeys; Nonsuch House was built in the Bridge House yard, not prefabricated in Holland; the Viking story behind the nursery rhyme comes from Samuel Laing's 1844 translation; the bridge in Arizona is the 1831 bridge, not this one. Sources: Dorian Gerhold, London Bridge and its Houses c.1209-1761 (London Topographical Society, 2019), as summarised by the author in Country Life (13 Oct 2019) and by C. Catling, Current Archaeology 391 (2022) V. Harding and L. Wright (eds), London Bridge: Selected Accounts and Rentals, 1381-1538 (London Record Society 31, 1995) John Stow, A Survey of London (1603) Richard Thomson, Chronicles of London Bridge (1827): King John's letter of 1201, Hawksmoor 1736, the 1746 Dance and Sparruck report, the Annals of Waverley Louis Simond, Journal of a Tour and Residence in Great Britain (1815), vol. 1, pp. 262-63 The Diary of Samuel Pepys (1660-62) John Ray, A Collection of English Proverbs (1670) M. Lockwood et al., Frost fairs, sunspots and the Little Ice Age, Astronomy & Geophysics (2017) London Metropolitan Archives catalogue: London Bridge Waterworks Company City Bridge Foundation (formerly Bridge House Estates) We are not historians. Where scholars disagree, we say so. Spotted a mistake? Comment with a source and we will pin the correction. Music: "Teller of the Tales" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/b... "Sovereign" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/b... "Suonatore di Liuto" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/b... "Lord of the Land" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/b... "Folk Round" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/b... "Eastminster" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/b... Stone & Source: the past, rebuilt from the sources. A sister channel of Orbit & Abyss.