Westminster Bridge

Westminster Bridge is defined by its seven iron-ribbed arches painted a distinct, verdant green. This color was chosen to match the leather seats inside the House of Commons, which stands just to the west. While the current structure opened on May twenty-fourth, eighteen sixty-two, on Queen Victoria's forty-third birthday, it replaced an earlier stone bridge completed in seventeen fifty. That original crossing became so notorious for its public lottery funding and construction struggles that the novelist Henry Fielding famously dubbed it the Bridge of Fools.