I’ve never regretted taking a guided tour. There’s so much more that we can learn through human interaction than just reading on our own. Per my usual planning self, despite not being able to score very rare ticket to the Ceremony of the Keys at the Tower of London, I felt very proud that I had scored tickets for a guided tour of Tower Bridge.
Hilariously, we showed up and caused great confusion because there was no tour to match the ticket. I give the staff great credit for finding someone to give a tour, which turned out to be a rather formally constructed affair.
I walked away from this artifact of human effort astonished and impressed. In this day and age of automation and intelligence, I think we forget the power of the simplicity that we can find harnessing the basic forces around us. To be able to distill down a concept and execute it to almost no fault and knowing the longevity of that puts my own existence, and any possible accomplishment I could claim, into stark perspective.
That being said, there was quite a bit of technology, based on that era, that was involved in the creation of this bridge- for example, the suit the men wore to stay underwater to manually lay down the infrastructure. But the essence of the mechanics of the bridge- driven by hydraulics- is that which you can see and touch and feel. When humanity moved to a smaller more efficient and powerful scale of technology, I think we lost the ability to relate to it in human terms. We had to become like machines to understand the machines.
Symmetrical and non electronic. In the current age, we don’t see much of that anymore. As much as I was bewitched by London Bridge, almost saying that it was my favorite building of this trip- I think White Cube, as a complete departure from London Bridge architecturally but also achieves its own quality of distillation, makes for good competition.
Address: London EC4R 9HA, United Kingdom
Website: Tower Bridge History
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