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The museums, the machines and the men and women who worked it out: laboratories kept as they were, beam engines under steam, the tunnel, the barrier, the roofs, and the plaques on the houses where the ideas came.
Foster, Arup and Anthony Caro's blade of light across the Thames, and the sway on the opening weekend that shut it for twenty months.
Engineering landmarksFree
Also in Harry Potter.
A 1996 competition run by Southwark council and RIBA was won by the engineers Arup, the architects Foster + Partners and the sculptor Anthony Caro, with a suspension bridge whose cables are slung below the deck instead of above it, so nothing stands between the walker and St Paul's. Ninety thousand people crossed on 10 June 2000, up to two thousand of them at once, and the deck began to swing sideways. A small sway makes people adjust their footing, the adjustment pushes in time with the sway, and the movement grows: the engineers called it synchronous lateral excitation, and it was not in the design codes of the day. The bridge shut two days later and reopened in February 2002 with eighty-nine dampers fitted under and around the deck - braces that resist sideways movement, and weights tuned to swing against it - for five million pounds on top of the £18.2 million the bridge had cost to build. Look down as you cross: several hundred of Ben Wilson's miniature paintings, made on flattened chewing gum, run the length of the deck.
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Data is compiled from public sources including OpenStreetMap, under the ODbL. Hours change often, so check before making a journey.