One of my American cousins doesn’t remember the ‘Oranges and Lemons’ rhyme and game but she can remember ‘London Bridge is Falling Down’, the chant of a game like it. We played ‘London Bridge’ too.
The rhyme goes:
London Bridge is falling down,
Falling down, falling down.
London Bridge is falling down,
My fair lady.
Aside from the much-photographed late-Victorian Tower Bridge, the most famous structure to span the Thames is London Bridge, a kilometre upstream.

View of London Bridge by Claude de Jongh (c 1600 – 1663) painted about 1632 from the Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Fund
In fact there have been several London Bridges, the earliest built by the Romans.
In 1209 King Henry II, in part penance for the murder of Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury, commissioned a new stone bridge with a chapel at its centre dedicated to Becket as martyr. The Archbishop was a native of London.
This bridge had nineteen arches, as many as two hundred buildings – some of them seven storeys high – and a drawbridge to let ships through. Over the centuries fires destroyed some of the buildings and several arches collapsed.
In 1831 a new bridge of five arches was opened, designed by the Scottish civil engineer John Rennie. This was replaced in 1973. The 1831 bridge was not destroyed, however. It was sold in 1968 by the City of London for US$2,460,000 to a Missourian oil magnate named Robert P. McCulloch, who had it transported piece by piece to Arizona and re-erected. I remember hearing about this at the time. It seemed very strange.
I suspect the bridge of our children’s rhyme is the one built in 1209. It certainly had a rich history of collapses and repairs.

London Bridge is marked with an x. It is upstream of Tower Bridge.
My husband was in London when the bridge was sold in 1968. It was commonly believed the American had got his bridges mixed up and thought he was buying the Tower Bridge.
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It seems a clever move by the authorities to sell the old bridge to help pay for the new one. The Wikipedia article reports McCulloch wasn’t confused. Tower Bridge is certainly more spectacular though.
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Thanks for the memories of happy times – an old game/rhyme and recent meanderings along the banks of the Thames.
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Today’s London Bridge is not the most attractive one to span the Thames, that accolade probably goes to Tower Bridge, but is the most known one thanks to its chequered history.
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The London Bridge in Lake Havasu City, AZ is their claim to fame. We winter near there and visitors always want to see the bridge. About 8 years ago groups from all over the area started a fund raiser And set a world record by having the most people line dancing on the London Bridge. They do it every year since then.
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