When you vacation to Lake Havasu you must visit the famous London Bridge. It is he first bridge across the Thames was built by the invading Romans in the middle of the 1st century. After the Romans left Britain, a new timber replacement was built, and it was the first official post-Roman London Bridge. This was destroyed in 1014 by the Norwegian King Olaf to hold off Danish forces which had conquered the walled City of London, inspiring the famous nursery rhyme London Bridge Is Falling Down.
Several bridges had been built on that site in the centuries since, and in 1831 another London Bridge was opened, and temporarily named New London Bridge. The ship which would later carry Charles Darwin to the Galapagos, the HMS Beagle, was the first to pass under it. In 1968, the bridge needed to be replaced thus was sold to Robert P. McCulloch of McCulloch Oil for $2.5 million. It is a popular but baseless urban legend that McCulloch believed he was instead purchasing the more palatial Tower Bridge.
London Bridge Video, Lake Havasu, Arizona
Three years and another $7 million later, the bridge was disassembled and many of the stones used for cladding a steel structure over a man-made canal in Lake Havasu. The opening ceremony in 1971 drew over 50,000 visitors. Some of the statistics of this gargantuan moving effort are quite striking. The granite bridge weighed 22 million pounds, and was dismantled into 10,276 stones, each marked to facilitate reinstallation. The majority of the stone never left England and was deposited in a quarry in Devon, later to be sold in an online auction.
The Lake Havasu London Bridge is today the backdrop for a Tudor styled Olde English Village complete with authentic shops and restaurants. Visitors can even tune into KBBC radio, which identifies itself as "BBC Radio." Arizona's London Bridge has now become the state's second-biggest tourist attraction second only to the Grand Canyon.
