Boris Johnson - The Spirit of London

In its time the Bridge I use every day has sustained churches, houses, Elizabethan palaces, a mall of about two hundred shops and businesses as well as the spiked and blackened heads of enemies of the state.

The previous dilapidated version was sold in 1967 – in one of the most magnificent examples of London’s protean talent for export – to an American entrepreneur called Robert P McCulloch. He paid $2.46 million for the structure, and everyone laughed behind their hands because they assumed that poor Mr McCulloch had confused London Bridge with the more picturesque Tower Bridge; and yet the Missouri chainsaw tycoon was not as foolish as he seemed.

The bridge has been re-assembled stone by stone in Lake Havasu, Arizona, where it is the second most visited tourist attraction after the Grand Canyon; and the fascination is deserved, I would say, given the utter indispensability of London Bridge in the creation of London.

It was the bridge which created the port; it was the toll booth on the north side that necessitated the guards, and the guards that necessitated the first housing. It was the Romans, in about 43 AD or soon thereafter, who built the first pontoon bridge.

It was a bunch of pushy Italian immigrants who founded London, and seventeen years later the boneheaded ancient Britons responded to this gift of civilisation by burning London to the ground, destroying the bridge, and massacring everyone they could find.

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