London Bridge, Lake Havasu

No, it doesn’t just look like the London Bridge – this is the actual, original London Bridge, or the 1831 version of it, to be precise. Which, in the early 1900s, true to the well-known nursery rhyme, it had started ”falling down”, or in this case, sinking into the River Thames and was, once again in its long adventurous history, in need of replacement.

And when, in 1967, Common Council of the City of London member Ivan Luckin put forward the crazy idea of selling it, Havasu City’s founder, Robert P. McCulloch, Sr. saw a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, and a deal was struck. The bridge was dismantled, its 10,276 exterior granite blocks were numbered for identification, shipped through the Panama Canal to California and, finally, trucked from Long Beach to Lake Havasu City, where it was reassembled over what used to be a strip of land that connected a peninsula to the mainland, which was removed to allow water from Lake Havasu to be diverted and pass under the bridge.

A project that took the term ”repurposing” up to the next level, wouldn’t you agree?

London Bridge, Lake Havasu, AZ

May 5th, 2019