In 1841, the American daredevil Samuel Gilbert Scott was killed while performing an act in which he hung by a rope from a scaffold on the bridge.

Michael Faraday tried in 1832 to measure the potential difference[7] between each side of the bridge caused by the ebbing salt water flowing through the Earth's magnetic field[8] using magnetohydrodynamics.

By the 1920s the problems had increased, and settlement at pier five necessitated the closure of the whole bridge while some heavy superstructure was removed and temporary reinforcements were put in place.

[9] In 1925, a temporary steel framework was built on top of the existing bridge and then placed next to it for the use of southbound vehicles (the postcard image shows this, and the settlement especially to the left of the fifth pier).

[10] In the 1930s, London County Council decided to demolish the bridge and replace it with a new structure designed by Sir Giles Gilbert Scott.

Scott, by his own admission, was no engineer, and his design, with reinforced concrete beams (illustrated) under the footways, leaving the road to be supported by transverse slabs, was difficult to implement.

At the outbreak of war, despite an immediate order being issued by the Ministry of Transport, that the bridge construction was of national importance, the supply of male labour to execute the heavy works became acute.

Stones from the bridge were also used to build a monument in Wellington, New Zealand, to Paddy the Wanderer, a dog that roamed the wharves from 1928 to 1939 and was befriended by seamen, watersiders, Harbour Board workers and taxi drivers.

[citation needed] Several stone balusters from the demolished bridge were sent in the late 1930s by the author Dornford Yates to be used in his French home 'Cockade', but the Fall of France in 1940 interrupted this project.

The north end of the bridge passes above the Victoria Embankment where the road joins the Strand and Aldwych alongside Somerset House.