Connections

How wrong can you be?

I had watched a TV show hosted by Lady Lucinda Lambton, daughter of the major land owner of the area in which I grew up. She stated that the stone for the bridge was quarried in Penshaw next to the Monument and taken to London by barge.
However further research came up with the article below the picture.

This London Bridge was built out of granite which was quarried on Dartmoor. It was a structure of 5 arches, overall dimensions were 928 feet long and 49 feet wide.

When the new bridge was finished and opened by King William and Queen Adelaide in 1831, traffic switched to the huge new structure and the demolition commenced on the old bridge. John Rennie was then knighted for his work.

So Sir John Rennie's bridge lives on in Arizona.
I guess that there is a connection as both structures originally resided in the UK!

A guy by the name of McCulloch bought the bridge for about $2.5 million and reconstructed it in Lake Havasu.
More from the research article is below.

However, John Rennie's bridge was not to survive as long as Peter de Colechurch's and plans were afoot in the 1960's to replace the structure by a modern bridge. The old bridge had sunk twelve inches at the southern end even on completion and had continued to sink unevenly by an inch in every eight years thereafter and could no longer cope with the extent of modern traffic.

Over in Arizona, USA, Robert McCulloch learned that the British Government was putting the bridge up for sale. He put in the winning bid for $2,460,000 and plans were drawn up to move and rebuild the bridge in Lake Havasu City, Arizona.

Each piece was marked with four numbers. The first indicated which span, the second noted which row of stones, and the last two numbers indicated which position in that row. It was discovered, while dismantling the bridge, that there were code numbers on each stone when it was originally built: Rennie must have used the same system when the sections left the quarries.

The numbers are still discernable on the bridge structure. If you can't see them you will just have to take my word for it.

Just as a matter of historical interest, Lady Lucinda was left nothing by her father but her brother received more than twelve million pounds, about $20 million at todays exchange rate.
Go figure...

There will be more trivia about my trip soon.

There will be some cryptic information about where I will spend 4th of July, it may come as a surprise; but not to those of you who live in Surprise!

 

Below you will see my favorite pictures taken from London Bridge!