A defining feature of London and one of the world’s most recognisable landmarks, Tower Bridge is both an engineering masterpiece and a heritage icon. The attraction can welcome over 100,000 visitors through its doors in a month, while some 40,000 people cross it every day by car, bike, bus or on foot. Countless more gather on the banks of the Thames to admire it from afar.
Our website reimagines how audiences engage with Tower Bridge, blending immersive storytelling with a commitment to web content accessibility, inviting a new generation of visitors to explore this iconic attraction.
Project Highlights
- +80% reduction in CO₂e (carbon dioxide equivalent emissions) - setting a new benchmark in digital sustainability
- Huge increase in accessible content
- Interactive map highlighting the visitor experience
- Ventrata ticketing integration
Did you know?
Tower Bridge is run by City Bridge Foundation, a 900-year-old charity that looks after five of London's bridges. By visiting Tower Bridge, visitors help to support City Bridge Foundation’s work maintaining Tower, London, Blackfriars, Southwark and Millennium bridges as well as investing into London charities.
Promoting ticketed visits inside Tower Bridge
Tower Bridge is recognised across the globe as an icon of the London skyline, but research showed that many visitors are unaware you can explore inside.
To attract more visitors the website needed to:
- Deliver an accessible, intuitive ticket-buying journey
- Clearly promote Tower Bridge’s tours and experiences
- Engage a global audience through compelling, easy-to-understand storytelling
To raise awareness we introduced an interactive map, presented front-and-centre on the homepage. The map builds anticipation, visually guiding users through the experience and its major touchstones, revealing what they can expect inside this historic landmark.
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Guiding users through the experience and its major touchstones, the "Explore inside" section promotes in-person visits and builds anticipation.
Our “Explore Inside” page expands on this journey, highlighting the full tour experience, offering accessible insights, and driving ticket sales. These pages present essential information and key facts, immersing the user in the Tower’s historic story through the virtual tour.
These efforts result in visitors gaining a far stronger grasp of the full experience before they arrive, reducing uncertainty, boosting engagement with the tour content and helping drive more confident, informed ticket purchases.
Revealing the rich history of Tower Bridge to a wider audience
Tower Bridge is awash with gripping historical stories, yet, in the original site these were fragmented and hard to find.
Our redevelopment weaved storytelling throughout to make the most of the bridge’s rich history and inspire visitors to explore it for themselves.
Historical narratives are brought to the surface through clear, intuitive navigation, while a ‘jump-to’ feature allows users to move freely through the narrative, exploring at their own pace.
A focus on accessible content
To ensure these engaging stories can be enjoyed by everyone, we created WCAG AA-compliant, plain-text alternatives and pictorial descriptions for key historical items — from handwritten letters and old comic books to Victorian receipts and 1950s newspaper clippings — making their content accessible both to visitors and to search engines.
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Three examples of historic documents made newly accessible with plain-text alternatives and image descriptions: a comic book from the 50's depicting the night a London bus jumped from one side of the bridge to the other; the letter of employment for the first woman to work on the bridge; and a handwritten receipt from 1889
Communicating vital and timely information to Londoners
Any registered vessel with a mast or superstructure of 30 feet or more can request that Tower Bridge be opened to grant access to the Pool of London, and this happens around 800 times each year. City Bridge Foundation is legally required to publish the bridge lift schedule, making clear, timely communication essential.
We enhanced the clarity and accessibility of the bridge-lift schedule, and the booking process itself. The old, hard-to-scan table has been replaced with an accessible schedule featuring jump-to-date and find-a-vessel functions. We now also publish images of the vessels that are due to pass through the bascules.
The new ‘Request a Bridge Lift’ page make it easier than ever for vessel operators to understand the process and submit a bridge lift request.
For the bridge lift team, we also updated internal workflows by creating a comprehensive vessel database, speeding up approvals and mitigating duplication and potential errors.
Late-notice alert system
Tower Bridge is a vital competent of London's busy transport infrastructure, and is subject to closure at late notice. Across the site, a custom alert widget allows staff to publish late-notice changes across the whole website in seconds, ensuring timely communication of vital information whenever it is needed.
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Publishing the bridge lift schedule is a legal requirement — we went further to improve the user experience of browsing and requesting bridge lifts.
Environmental responsibility and digital emissions
City Bridge Foundation takes its environmental responsibility seriously, with a clear mandate in the brief to reduce the website's impact on the planet.
Through this redevelopment of the Tower Bridge website, we set a new benchmark for digital sustainability against the most popular London visitor attractions, reducing the site’s CO₂e (Carbon Dioxide equivalent) by more than 80% and saving over two tons of CO₂e annually.
Read our insight article, Tower Bridge website: a new benchmark in sustainability, to discover more.
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