Tower Bridge

Tower Bridge, London, bridge on the River Thames near the Tower of London, one of the city's principal landmarks. It was built between 1886 and 1894 at a cost of over £1 million. It has two Gothic towers and a central drawbridge; this design was governed both by the navigational requirements of ships and barge trains that passed below and by the Gothic style that Parliament demanded on account of its proximity to the Tower of London. The engineer was Sir John Wolfe Barry and the architect Sir Horace Jones, who described the bridge's exuberant towers as “steel skeletons clothed with stone”. The towers contain both the passenger lifts to the upper pedestrian footway and the hydraulic mechanisms for lifting the bascules of the bridge. These two bascules can swing open for ships to pass in 1y minutes. The pedestrian footway, closed in 1909 because of suicides, is now open to the public, together with other parts of the bridge, on a museum basis.