Travis Elborough on London Bridge in America: The Tall Story of a Transatlantic Crossing

I sat down for a chat with the lovely Travis Elborough, author of London Bridge in America: The Tall Story of a Transatlantic Crossing, to talk about one the most bizarre chapters in Anglo-American history: the upheaval and subsequent plonking of London Bridge in the Arizonan desert.

The London Bridges of old were famous for involuntarily falling down, but in 1968 the one built in 1831 - a far sturdier structure than its predecessors - was voluntarily dismantled, brick by brick, and transported to the Arizonan desert, where it was rebuilt for the benefit of holidaying Americans.

Shard: View from the top

At 309m it's the tallest building in Europe (by tallest in Europe I mean western Europe, and by tallest I mean second-tallest after the 324m Eiffel Tower; though that's not technically a building because it's a structure, right? But if we were to include creations like Gustave Eiffel's, the Shard, which opened to the public last Friday, is only the 10th-tallest construction in the UK, let alone the continent - a full 55 metres shorter than that most celebrated of north-west landmarks, the Skelton Mast in Cumbria), and last night I decided to take the two kaleidoscopic lifts up to the Shard's Level 68. Despite the many and varied fingerprints, Brylcreem streaks and camera flashes, I managed to take the following slightly-too-grainy images thanks to a whopping great ISO setting. If you don't know what that means, move along; you're not wanted here.