Until 1763 Old London Bridge boasted a famous parade of timber shops and houses on either side of a narrow street. Most of these had survived the Great Fire of London in 1666, but the nineteen piers built to bear the clusters of buildings above restricted the flow of the Thames to such an extent that the water roared through the arches as the tide turned, creating a dangerous weir for the many boats that plied the river.

Two hundred years ago entire communities were supported on such habitable bridges throughout Europe. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries they were demolished in favour of purely vehicular bridges.

Living Bridges, the first book ever to be published on the subject, examines the contributions that inhabited bridges have made to city life from the Middle Ages to the present day, and explores the role they could play in the future. The history and construction of major inhabited bridges across Europe and North America are discussed in detail.

In Europe these include Old London Bridge, the Ponte Vecchio in Florence, the Ponte di Rialto, Venice, and the Pont de Notre-Dame in Paris, as well as contemporary projects by Richard Rogers, Alsop and Stormer, SITE, Morphosis, Mario Bellini, Bernard Tschumi and other leading architects.

The book is copiously illustrated and contains photographs of some of the specially commissioned large-scale models of twenty of the most notable "living bridges" in history, together with numerous reproductions of period drawings and paintings, as well as photographs of extant bridges.