A few years ago, a section of the fencing around the Pont des Arts in Paris fell under the combined weight of the padlocks that couples attached to the bridge as a symbol of their love.

45 tons of these ‘lovelocks’ were removed and the sides of the bridge were covered with plexiglas panes, not the most romantic of materials indeed.

Sempé, ‘Le Pont des Arts’.

Mary Poppins, Bert and the children jump into a drawing and land in an animated world full of talking turtles and flying umbrellas. The special effects in this sequence were revolutionary at the time, and opened the door to the use of the green screen and modern CGI.

Walt Disney Pictures, 1964

‘Setu’ is the Sanskrit word for ‘Bridge’ and so the ‘Setu Bandha Sarvangasana’ is the ‘Bridge Pose’. It stretches all the organs and is also a representation of yoga itself, as a bridge between mind and body.

Army ants are blind and have minuscule brains, but are capable of incredible group coordination based on simple rules, for example to build elaborate ‘Ant Bridges’, that help them cross streams and climb vertical surfaces. Research on this type of coordination even inspires futuristic ideas about robot-building and smart materials that can ‘build themselves’.

Photograph by Ciju Cherian

Margaret Bourke-White was known for her sense of timing: she was the first foreign photojournalist to enter into Soviet Russia and interviewed the Mahatma Gandhi just hours before his assassination. In this image, taken during the India-Pakistan partition, she photographs refugees under the famous Howrah Bridge in Kolkata, Bengal.

Time Magazine, 1946

As a young woman, Georgia O’Keeffe told her classmates: “I am going to live a different life from the rest of you girls. I am going to give up everything for my art.” She painted this 'Brooklyn Bridge' just before leaving the city she had lived in for thirty years and settling in New Mexico.

1949, Brooklyn Museum

The Pamban bridge connects the very south of the Indian mainland to the fisherman island of Pamban on the Palk Strait, which runs 32 km long between India and Sri Lanka. Murupillai Navratnaswami was the first person to swim across the shark-infested strait in 1954, a feat that took him 26 hours and 50 minutes.

‘Landmark Bridges of India’ stamp series, Indian Post, 2007

This picture of the Bandra-Worli Sea Link reminds us that before new land was reclaimed from the sea, Mumbai was a city of islands.

Suketu Mehta writes: ‘A city like Bombay, like New York, that is a recent creation on the planet and does not have a substantial indigenous population, is full of restless people. Those who have come here have not been at ease somewhere else. And unlike others who may have been equally uncomfortable wherever they came from, these people got up and moved. As I have discovered, having once moved, it is difficult to stop moving.’

Fanil Rajgor, National Geographic

Céret is a village in southern France well-known for its cherry trees and for its 'Pont du Diable’, or ‘Devil’s Bridge’, a 14th century bridge over the Tech river. At the time of construction, it had the world’s largest bridge arc.

The legend goes that the devil himself helped in the construction of the bridge. His condition was that he would claim the soul of the first person to cross it. For a long time, the locals did not dare use the bridge, instead sending a cat across for the devil to claim its soul.

Vintage poster, France

The amazing Öresund bridge connects Sweden and Denmark across 10 km. After the first 8 km, the bridge becomes a tunnel that 'dives' 20 meters into the Baltic Sea and transports cars, trucks and even a railway line.

This clever design was built in place of a higher bridge, which would have let large boats pass the Öresund Strait, but would have perturbed traffic at nearby Copenhagen airport.

Photo: Nick D, Wikipedia Commons

This is the bridge over the Nive river at Arnéguy, a village in the French Pyrenées. It is an international bridge, marking the border between France and Spain. It has been used over the years by contrabandists, soldiers, and French resistants crossing into Spain during WW2.

There are around 70 of these international bridges around the world, including a number of 'Friendship Bridges' between neighbours like Bulgaria and Romania, China and North Korea, or Brazil and Paraguay.

Postcard, c. 1930

The bridges showed on the Euro notes are imaginary, but inspired on actual works of architecture around Europe. This one is said to be inspired by the Guadiana International Bridge between Spain and Portugal.

The European Central Bank reports there are still around 300 million 500 Euro bills in circulation today, three years after their printing stopped in 2019, due to widespread susciption that many of these notes were used in financial crime.

The 500 Euro Bank Note (2002-2019)