London Bridge Experience

It still makes me angry just thinking about this so-called attraction. I visited back in 2011 so maybe, hopefully, much has changed with the passage of time. I would love to know if this is the case, it seems to have largely positive reviews on Trip Advisor. However, having had my fingers burnt, and wallet emptied the once, I am unwilling to go back for a second dose of this terrible farce! And judging by the fact I still see the same cheaply made-up faces in terrible costumes, on Tooley Street trying to drag unwitting tourists into this painful waste of time I doubt there has been much in the way of improvement.

Here is a slightly shortened version of the review (I did go on a bit, because of anger...) that I wrote for The London Bridge Experience on Trip Advisor in 2011;

Possibly the worst value for money attraction I have ever paid for; £22 each to experience this rubbish for less than an hour… I was really looking forward to this attraction after finding them online, and I was bitterly disappointed. Their website is just blatantly dishonest as to what you will experience. I will break down the online description from their official website; "You'll be taken on a journey through the history of this exciting area of London, from the Roman invasion, right up to the present day with the exciting development of the London Bridge Quarter and the Shard…" There was never a single mention of either Romans or the modern day developments. In fact there was next to no information told about anything, and the little which was given was rushed pseudo-history littered with bad jokes.

From entry you are greeted by one actor after another who are dressed in terribly cheap looking costumes and badly self-applied make up. They take you on a tour through awful sets littered with props that look like they have come straight from joke shops. Now, the sets themselves wouldn't be a problem, but I was expecting an interesting and informative commentary from the guides to take us on this journey into the past. Wrong! What we got was about half an hour of complete drivel. For the entire time the guides simply tried to get a cheap laugh with Mighty Boosh-style nonsense talk. I simply cannot comprehend how an attraction which describes itself as "a history lesson into the city's grimey and haunting past…" contains material such as aliens, a drunk chicken, a song about fruit soup, suggesting the bridge had been blown up with TNT, and other pointless ramblings! There was simply no historical information in the tour. I wanted it to end after about ten minutes when I was forced to get up and dance in front of our stony-silent and dumbstruck group, in a section which was meant to be an explanation of Viking London. I played along and I laughed at the bad jokes through sheer embarrassment all the while cringing inside. 

I wouldn't recommend this to anyone but especially not to foreign visitors; I could barely understand and English is my first language! The dialogue was complete nonsense jumping from one tangent to another, and mostly delivered in shouting and fake accents. There was a German couple in our group who clearly had no idea what was going on throughout the entire experience judging by their bewildered expressions and irritated whispers.

Now the Tombs part was actually not that bad, and was to its credit pretty scary in places. I was genuinely frightened at times, but it was however nothing like the videos posted on the website with less live actors and more cheap-looking animatronic zombies and skeletons. The fact you have to walk along in a line holding someone's shoulders limited the shocks, and parts of it were also health and safety hazards; I tripped up a lot of times on the badly levelled walkways. By about half way through I was starting to get a bit bored as all of the frights were all just more of the same...

I would have nothing to complain about if I had paid about £7 each for just the Tombs part, and it was advertised as a horror house. However I paid £22 per person and the London Bridge Experience was a cringe-inducing pointless waste of time shamelessly described as a "history lesson" on their website! I honestly think this attraction should be closed down and something more worthwhile set up in its place, it's such a great location and it's just an embarrassment it should be filled with this utter tripe!

If you have visited The London Bridge Experience more recently I would love to hear from you and see how your experience differed from mine. If you haven't visited then I would strongly advise you to keep it that way! With way better, and many free, attractions all across the city don't be conned into this nonsense waste of time.