Tower Bridge: Tickets, Hours and Tips
Tower Bridge: Tickets, Hours and Tips
Everyone photographs Tower Bridge from the outside. Fewer people realise you can walk across it 42 metres above the Thames on a glass floor, then descend into the original Victorian engine rooms that used to lift the whole roadway for tall ships. The Tower Bridge Exhibition ticket runs about GBP 16.50 for adults and covers both, a genuinely different way to experience a landmark most visitors only ever see from a riverboat.
Tower Bridge at a glance
| Fact | Detail |
|---|---|
| Price | Around GBP 16.50 adult, concession and child rates lower, discounted 25 Jun-1 Sep 2026 |
| Hours | Daily, typically 9:30am-6pm, check the day’s last-entry time online |
| Time needed | 60-90 minutes for both towers, the glass walkways and the engine rooms |
| Booking lead | Book online for a modest discount and to skip the ticket-office queue |
| Getting there | Tower Hill station (Circle, District lines) or London Bridge, both a short walk |
Is the glass floor actually worth doing if you don’t love heights?
It’s less intense than it sounds. The two enclosed walkways sit 42 metres up and give a genuinely striking straight-down view of traffic and pedestrians below, but they’re fully enclosed, not open-air, so the wobble factor is more visual than physical. Anyone nervous about heights can still do the towers and skip lingering directly over the glass.
What’s actually in the engine rooms?
The original Victorian steam-powered machinery that raised the bascules until 1976, when hydraulics took over, preserved more or less as it last operated. It’s a quieter, less crowded stop than the glass floor above, and it’s the part of the ticket most first-time visitors don’t expect to find interesting, and then do anyway.
Book the Tower Bridge Exhibition online ahead of your visit, and confirm today’s prices and hours on the official entry page . Check the bridge’s own lifting schedule too if you want to time a visit around it raising for a tall ship, it still happens several hundred times a year. The bridge sits a five-minute walk from the Tower of London , which shares the riverbank and the same Tower Hill station, easily combined into one Thames-side morning.
Cross the bridge on foot first, free, then buy the Exhibition ticket if the view from inside hooked you. That way you’re not paying to find out whether the towers interest you before you’ve even seen the bridge itself.