Description
The Old Westminster Bridge of 1750 designed by Swiss engineer Charles Labelye, was originally funded by a lottery. Or at least, it was supposed to be. Although the funder originally hoped to raise £100,000, in the end the lottery only generated £40,000. This debacle led novelist Henry Fielding to call Westminster the ‘Bridge of Fools’, a reference to the gamblers who sunk money into the state lottery but also to the government at the time who had to put up the rest of the funding.
https://illuminatedriver.london/bridges/westminster-bridge
