Is London Bridge a practical result of post-war planning or a horrific urban eyesore? Your answer may reveal a lot about you, writes Lucy Kenningham

Consider London Bridge. No, not as a sunken-eyed commuter, but as a free-thinking flaneur. Or, if that’s too pretentious for you, take up the binoculars of a foreigner. Seen from a distance, with fresher eyes than the average sunken-eyed City insurance broker, a bridge can be an epic symbol of place.

Or, indeed, an epic letdown. In the case of this titular one, tourists who travel to see it can barely conceive that London Bridge is in fact their intended destination. Tripadvisor is littered with reviews of the place that read as warnings not to bother. “This is NOT the bridge that opens to let the big boats through!!!” reads one. If you Google image search London Bridge, you will duly be provided with dozens of angles of its drawbridge-flaunting neighbour, Tower Bridge, before you eventually get a picture of a mediaeval iteration of the actual bridge you searched for. You can see where the confusion comes from.

For it is the paradox of a bridge that for its users it is barely noticeable. For commuters, it is unnoticeable. Yet for tourists, it’s there and it’s hideous – in fact it’s a monstrosity. Or is it? What purpose do we want our bridges to achieve? How do our urban environments make us feel?

Sometimes it takes a foreigner to jolt you out of your insular mindset. Or a psycho-geography nerd, but there are fewer of them around. In my case, it was a level-headed Dane who surprised me with her vitriol about London........

© City A.M.