Tower Bridge
— the bridge that still opens for tall ships.
Not only on a wall.
“A Victorian river crossing in the east of central London, where two stone towers carry steel walkways forty-two metres above the Thames. The bascules still lift for tall vessels around eight hundred times a year, often after dusk when the river runs quiet and the south bank lights come on one window at a time.
Tower Bridge, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Tower Bridge crosses the Thames just downstream of the Tower of London, linking the boroughs of Tower Hamlets and Southwark. Designed by city architect Horace Jones with engineer John Wolfe Barry and opened on 30 June 1894, it is a combined bascule and suspension bridge, 244 metres long, with two bascule leaves of around 1,100 tonnes each. The high-level walkways sit 42 metres above the river. It remains a working road crossing operated by the City of London Corporation.
The Victorian engineers wrapped a steel skeleton in Cornish granite and Portland stone so that the new bridge would sit beside the medieval Tower of London without quarrelling with it. Horace Jones died in 1887, two years after construction began, and George D. Stevenson took the Gothic cladding through to completion. The towers read older than they actually are. Look at them long enough from the river path and the bridge stops feeling Victorian and starts to feel like something the Thames always had.
The Tower Bridge Exhibition runs daily, with entry to the high-level walkways and the original Victorian steam engine rooms inside the south abutment. The glass floor in the upper walkway sits forty-two metres above the Thames and looks straight down onto traffic and water. The bascules still lift around eight hundred times a year for tall river traffic. The schedule is published a few days ahead on the bridge's official site, so a lift is something a visitor can plan to see rather than wait for.