Welcome to our London Bridge in the Sixteenth Century history section. You can skip to subsequent pages using the links below or simply continue reading to start at the beginning.
Towards the end of the sixteenth century London Bridge was completely covered with imposing buildings, and resembled a palatial street rather than a bridge.
The houses practically covered the whole of the bridge, and indeed in many cases projected to some distance over the pier heads. The carriage way of the bridge in those days had the appearance of a tunnel, an open thoroughfare, sometimes forty feet in width, running like an archway through the "ground" floor of the bridge houses.
One striking peculiarity of these houses was that unlike other ordinary buildings, each of their four sides was so to speak a "front" - the sides that fronted the river east and west were generally as lavishly decorated as those that looked to Southwark on the one side and the city on the other.