The batty American who bought London Bridge



LONDON BRIDGE IN AMERICA BY TRAVIS ELBOROUGH (Jonathan Cape £14.99)













Never underestimate the power of nursery rhymes. I’m sure I’m not the only person who thinks, whenever they cross a certain bridge over the Thames: ‘London Bridge is falling down, falling down, falling down, London Bridge is falling down, my fair lady.’

Not that any London Bridge has ever fallen down, of course. People have been walking across one London Bridge or another for nearly 900 years, and an extraordinarily high proportion of them have reached the other side.

Nursery rhymes can warn us of non-existent threats; they can also act as an unlikely form of public relations. In the mid-Sixties it became clear that the current London Bridge was no longer fit for purpose. While not falling down, it was ‘inadequate to meet existing traffic needs’, according to the Corporation of London.

Travis Elborough puts it rather more elegantly: ‘Barely altered since it was widened to 65 ft in 1902, London Bridge was an Edwardian gent valiantly trying to cope with the mores of the 1960s. In essence it was a pontine version of BBC TV’s cryogenically preserved adventurer of the era, Adam Adamant.’

Cryogenically preserved: Gerald Harper as Adam Adamant

So the decision was taken to demolish it and build a new bridge - something groovy and modern involving iron and concrete. On this structure, a typical Sixties’ excrescence, we shall waste no more time or ink. What happened to the previous bridge is the subject of this splendidly entertaining book.

Back then, old buildings were being knocked down willy-nilly. The remains of the Euston Arch were dumped in the River Lea, and London Bridge might have gone the same way were it not for the far-sighted intervention of former journalist and PR man Ivan Luckin, who was serving on the body responsible for all the city’s bridges. ‘Why not sell the bridge to some Americans?’ he asked.

Fellow committee members scoffed. ‘Why not sell the bridge to some Americans?’ said Luckin again and again, until people started to think that it might be a good idea.

Such sales had not been unknown. William Randolph Hearst, the whimsical newspaper magnate who inspired Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane, had developed a habit of buying up old European buildings and having them shipped over to his vast estate, where they lay in piles waiting to be reassembled because he had some new interest and had forgotten all about them. (His palace had 165 rooms: he called it ‘my little hideaway’.)

Luckin thought he could find someone like Hearst to take the bridge for a small consideration - maybe a million or so. The timing was perfect: London was fashionable. ‘England swings like a pendulum do, bobbies on bicycles two by two,’ sang Roger Miller, who had probably never been east of Delaware.

Elborough explains: ‘Luckin’s real brainwave was to argue that they could and should market this particular bridge as the embodiment of London’s 2,000-year history.’

Never mind that it had only been there since 1831. ‘This was not any old lump of 19th-century granite hindering drivers of Ford Consuls from reaching their destinations - it was a lump of 19th-century granite that could trace its roots right back to the Roman conquest.’

Whimsical: William Ransolph Hearst and his 165-room 'little hideaway'







And so a sub-committee was set up, brochures were printed and Luckin took his salesman’s patter on the road.

The man he found was Robert P. McCulloch, an industrialist and entrepreneur who was building a city from scratch next to Lake Havasu in Arizona. The lake had been formed by the damming of the Colorado River, but the water at one end was in danger of going stagnant, so he needed to redirect it and turn the peninsula there into an island. And to get over to the island, he would need a bridge. Why not London Bridge? What better way of putting the new city on the map?

Travis Elborough tells this glorious story with warmth and humour and a great wide-open spirit. McCulloch paid $2,460,000 for about 30,000 tons of bridge, shipped it all over and had it rebuilt on dry land: much easier and cheaper than building it over water, as you can imagine. Only once it had been erected were the sands dug up to allow the water to pass under it.

Finally, in October 1971, the bridge was ready, and what a party they had. ‘On the roadway of the bridge stood a vast configuration of red and white striped canvas awnings, rigged up by a specialist team from Los Angeles.’ The main tent for the gala dinner was 40 ft high and weighed nearly 20 tons. Its walls were bedecked with pendants, battle standards, coats of arms and shields, and its entrance lined with suits of armour.

As it was: London Bridge in the 1920's

‘The overwhelming impression created was that Richard the Lionheart might possibly be returning from the Crusades.’

But had they bought the right bridge? Legend has it that McCulloch thought he was getting Tower Bridge, but according to Elborough, legend doesn’t know what it’s talking about. When McCulloch came to the UK to sign on the dotted line, he was photographed on London Bridge with Tower Bridge in the background. He was no fool. Indeed, he comes over as rather an admirable character: bold, adventurous and a bit batty.

So was it worth it? At the end of this delightful book, Elborough goes to have a look for himself. London Bridge, he says, seems ‘curiously right’ where it is.