"A delightful little book" says the Guardian, but I could not agree. Roberts offers potted histories of seventeen road and foot crossings of the Thames in central London, and while he's high on charm he's short on coherence.

He constantly hops from anecdote to anecdote, which is at times dizzying and certainly unsatisfying. Many of his facts are wrong or incomplete, and the book is unreferenced, rendering it largely useless to city or bridge historians. There are no pictures, which is absolutely criminal in any book about architecture, and he has little if any appreciation for the engineering which is fundamental to the construction of these landmarks.

I didn't completely dislike the book - there was plenty that was new to me, and much of it told entertainingly, but overall, it's rather lightweight. ( )