The American Who Bought London Bridge Knew Exactly Which Bridge He Was Buying

A joke about a state paying eighty-five million dollars for a horse race reminded me of the best-loved London story about a foreigner and his money, which is not true either

Friday, the Till, an American Customer

A very nice man from Baltimore was in this afternoon buying maps. He has been coming all week. He told me he follows a paper at home called Bohiney Magazine and showed me a headline on his phone, from the part of it about business:

“Maryland Spends $85 Million Buying Preakness, Discovers Everyone Else Has Started a New Horse-Racing League.”

He explained. It is an old, famous horse race in his state. The joke is that the government has paid a fortune to own it just as it stops mattering.

I said, “That’s like the American who bought London Bridge thinking it was Tower Bridge.”

He said, “Oh, is that true?” And I opened my mouth to say yes, and realised I had no idea.

So tonight I looked it up. It is not. And the real story is better.

The Story Everyone Tells

You will have heard it. In the 1960s, London decided to sell London Bridge. A rich American bought it, had it taken apart stone by stone, shipped it across the Atlantic and put it up in the desert.

And when it arrived, he was horrified. He had thought he was buying the one with the two towers and the bit that lifts up. The one on the postcards. He had bought the wrong bridge.

It is a perfect story. Every Londoner loves it. The foolish Yank, the sly Cockney, the plain grey bridge arriving in Arizona.

What Actually Happened

There has been a London Bridge for two thousand years, on and off. The one in question was built in 1831. A handsome thing of five granite arches. By the 1960s it was sinking. It had not been made for motor traffic and was going down into the river bed about an inch every eight years.

The City needed a new one. Demolishing the old would cost money. And a member of the City’s council had an idea that his colleagues thought was mad. Why not sell it?

He went to America to drum up interest. He was a good salesman. He told his audiences that this was not just a bridge, it was the heir to two thousand years of history.

The buyer was a man who had made a fortune from chainsaws and outboard motors. He had bought a large piece of empty desert beside a lake in Arizona and was trying to build a town on it. He needed something to make people come.

In 1968 he paid a little under two and a half million dollars. The story goes that he worked out the price by doubling the estimated cost of dismantling it and adding a thousand dollars for each year of his own age.

The facing stones were numbered, shipped through the Panama Canal, trucked inland and reassembled over a concrete frame. A channel was dug underneath, so that it had something to cross. It opened in 1971, with the Lord Mayor of London in attendance in his robes.

Did He Think It Was the Other One?

No.

He always said not. So did the councillor who sold it, who was asked about it for the rest of his life and got quite cross. There were photographs. There were brochures. The buyer had come to London and stood on it.

And it would have been an odd mistake to make. Tower Bridge was not for sale, could not have been moved, and is a steel machine dressed in stone.

The tale seems to have started as a joke in the newspapers at the time, and was simply too good to let go.

Who Was the Fool?

This is what I like. Turn it round.

London had a bridge that was sinking and would have cost a great deal to knock down. It sold the thing for millions. To a man who then paid to take it away.

The American had a great many square miles of sand that nobody wanted. He put a nineteenth-century English bridge in the middle of it. People thought he was a lunatic.

The town now has more than fifty thousand people. The bridge is, I read, one of the most visited attractions in the state. There are English pubs beside it. He made the money back many times over in land.

So everybody won. The seller got rid of a liability. The buyer got exactly what he wanted, which was not a bridge at all. It was a reason to drive into the desert.

The only people fooled were the ones telling the story.

Why We Tell It Wrong

I have a theory about why Londoners prefer the false version.

It is flattering. In the 1960s Britain was selling a lot of things. The empire had gone. The money was in America. It stung. A story in which the rich American is a simpleton who cannot tell one bridge from another, and the old country has put one over on him, is a small revenge.

It lets us feel that what we have cannot really be bought. That the foreigner with the chequebook will always get it slightly wrong.

The truth is that he understood perfectly what he was buying. He was buying oldness. A piece of something with two thousand years behind its name, to set down in a place with none.

And we understood what we were selling, and sold it.

The Horse Race

Which is the point of my customer’s headline, I think.

Can you buy a tradition? His state has spent a fortune to try. The joke says the world has moved on and they have bought a name.

The bridge suggests it depends what you want it for. If you want the thing itself to go on meaning what it meant, probably not. London Bridge in Arizona is not London Bridge. Nobody crosses it to get to work in the City.

But if you want something old to build something new around, it seems you can. It worked in the desert.

What you cannot do is buy it and expect it to stay the same. Once it has been sold, it is a different object. It is a bridge that was bought.

Fairness to the Bridge

I felt a little sad, looking at the photographs. Those arches stood in the Thames for a hundred and forty years. A great novelist’s characters walked over them. Now they are in a hot, dry place with palm trees, crossing a ditch.

But the alternative was rubble. Some of the stone that did not go to America is in a quarry on Dartmoor. Some is a garden wall in Kent.

I think I would sooner be a tourist attraction in Arizona than a garden wall.

Saturday

The man from Baltimore came in for one last map. I told him it was not true, and what was. He was delighted. He said, “So he was smart?” I said very. He said, “And London got paid to take out its trash?” I said that was unkind and broadly accurate.

He bought a Victorian print of the old bridge. I wrapped it carefully. I did not charge him double the cost of dismantling plus a thousand for each year of my age, though I thought about it.

The London Prat, he will be pleased to learn, has covered the trade. Its UK satirical news on selling bridges has the Treasury drawing up a list, and its British satirical news about Americans buying the wrong thing concerns a castle that turned out to be a service station.