This is something of a departure for me. Let me know what you think of it.

London Bridge they call me. There are other bridges of course, some more distinctive (like Tower Bridge) but I am by a long way the oldest crossing point.

The waters below me hide the remains of the bridge built by the Romans, who built Londinium. Their ghosts are everywhere, in the stones and in the ground.

The Saxons also built a bridge, but they were a bunch of savages so it fell down.

The Normans were more thorough and built a bridge that lasted longer, but then they decided to rebuild in stone and added houses and shops to it. The ghosts of the dead walk the air over me.

I stand almost in the shadow of the Monument, the large column that shows where the Great Fire of London started in 1666.

The Victorians built my predecessor, but they didn’t get their sums right when they tried to widen it for more traffic in 1902 and one side started to sink slowly. I replaced it in 1973 when it went for a permanent holiday in Lake Havasu in Arizona.

Every day thousands of people walk over me without thinking about what I represent. If you look downstream you can see the Tower of London, with Traitor’s Gate marked on the river bank, with HMS Belfast opposite. If you look upstream you can see Parliament and the London Eye. But there’s this man who works nearby and who keeps staring into the water beneath me at low tide and muttering about the Romans…