London Bridge is falling down, goes the nursery rhyme, and it's not wrong.
The current bridge, opened by the Queen in 1973, is actually the latest in a series of bridges that have connected the City to Southwark for nearly 2,000 years. The Romans built the first one around AD 50, and since then, the crossing has been wooden, stone, and now concrete, each version meeting its end through fire, decay, or simple obsolescence.
The medieval London Bridge was remarkable: a stone thoroughfare lined with houses and shops, its 19 arches so narrow that navigating the rapids beneath them was called "shooting the bridge," and watermen regularly drowned attempting it. That bridge stood for six hundred years until the Victorians, finding it hopelessly congested, replaced it with a more sensible granite crossing in 1831.
VoiceMap's self-guided audio tours trace the bridge's evolution from a Roman crossing to a modern commuter route, revealing how each incarnation shaped the city around it and why the 1831 bridge now stands, improbably, in the Arizona desert.