A midcentury tycoon bought 10,276 tons of granite and shipped it west—what?

The Sale That Saved a Monument

In April 1968, the City of London auctioned a 140-year-old bridge that was slowly sinking into the Thames under the weight of modern traffic. London Bridge, completed in 1831 by engineer John Rennie, had been designed for horse-drawn carts, not double-decker buses and delivery lorries. By the 1960s, it was subsiding an inch every eight years, and the city faced either expensive reinforcement or demolition.

Robert McCulloch, founder of McCulloch Chainsaws and developer of Lake Havasu City, Arizona, placed the winning bid: $2,460,000. The sale made international headlines — not just because a 130-foot-wide granite bridge was changing continents, but because McCulloch planned to reconstruct it stone by stone in a desert town of 2,000 people that had no natural river. The City of London was delighted to offload the problem; McCulloch was buying the world's most improbable tourist attraction. The contract was signed on April 18, 1968, and demolition crews began numbering each of the bridge's 10,246 exterior granite blocks for shipment across the Atlantic.

Disassembly, Shipment, and Desert Resurrection

Dismantling London Bridge took two years. British laborers marked every block with four-digit codes, photographed each section, and crated the stones for a 10,000-mile journey by sea to California, then overland by truck to Arizona. The granite facing stones weighed up to three tons each; the internal brickwork, which provided the bridge's structural strength in London, was left behind because Arizona's reconstruction would use a modern steel-reinforced concrete frame.

The stones arrived in Long Beach in 1968 and were trucked in 200-ton shipments to Lake Havasu City, where McCulloch's engineers had already begun pouring a concrete core. The reassembly, overseen by Sundt Construction, followed the original blueprints exactly — masons fitted each numbered block back into its precise 1831 position, preserving even the tool marks and Victorian-era graffiti. By 1971, the bridge stood complete, spanning a mile-long channel that McCulloch's crews dredged through the desert peninsula to create an artificial island. The Channel, as locals call it, was filled with water diverted from Lake Havasu, and London Bridge finally had a river again — man-made, but real.

The Legend That Refuses to Die

Almost immediately, a rumor took hold: McCulloch had confused London Bridge with Tower Bridge, the far more photogenic Victorian Gothic drawbridge a half-mile downstream, and realized his mistake only when the crates arrived in Arizona. Newspaper columnists loved the story — the bumbling American tycoon hoodwinked by wily British auctioneers. But McCulloch's purchase records, interviews, and company correspondence all confirm he knew exactly what he was buying.

His bid specified "London Bridge (Rennie, 1831)" and included technical surveys of the structure's granite composition and load-bearing capacity. Ivan Luckin, McCulloch's British representative who negotiated the sale, repeatedly denied the mix-up in interviews before his death in 1985. McCulloch himself addressed the rumor in a 1977 interview with the Arizona Republic, stating he'd visited London twice before bidding and walked across the bridge both times. The confusion myth persists partly because Tower Bridge dominates London postcards, making Rennie's simpler design forgettable by comparison.

A Desert Landmark's Lasting Impact

The bridge's dedication on October 10, 1971, drew 50,000 visitors and featured the Lord Mayor of London in full ceremonial regalia. McCulloch's gamble paid off spectacularly: Lake Havasu City's population exploded from 2,000 residents in 1968 to over 15,000 by 1980, fueled almost entirely by bridge tourism. Today, the city has 57,000 residents, and London Bridge remains Arizona's second-most-visited tourist attraction after the Grand Canyon, drawing three million annual visitors.

The bridge spans 930 feet across Bridgewater Channel, connecting the mainland to a 1,200-acre island dotted with hotels, restaurants, and the Lake Havasu Museum of History, which houses original construction photographs and purchase documents. In London, a modernist replacement bridge designed by architect Lord Holford opened in 1973 on the original site, engineered to support projected traffic through 2050. McCulloch died in 1977, four years before Lake Havasu City incorporated as an official municipality. The original Rennie bridge cost £2.5 million to build in 1831; accounting for inflation and shipping, McCulloch spent the equivalent of nearly $20 million in today's currency to relocate a piece of Victorian London to the Mojave Desert — and transform both monuments in the process.