That second building on the right looks like another perfectly fine old looking building that somebody decided to strip to the bones and put a glass facade on. I HATE that trend. That's what was done to the old NY Times Building on Times Square in 1968. Horrible ugly creepy Allied Chemical building now. It holds the famous lit sign with the headline crawl that Times Sq is famous for, but is otherwise empty. Grrr.
Having looked at the second building, called the Crown Apartments, from closeup and at different angles, it looks like it's a newer building that replaced the 1927 one.
Tower Bridge Road, Queen Elizabeth Street looking South
And shot a little ways South of Tower Bridge Road/Tooley Street seen in the first clip is the Tower Bridge Road Market, circa 1931. There's some great shots of hats.
Interestingly the pub in the Victorian building on the corner of Tower Bridge Road and Tooley Street has only been there since 1998. In 1927 it was the Tower Bridge Hotel.
The building with the towers up ahead in both views is the former War Office Building, built in 1906, which served in both World Wars as the headquarters of the Imperial General Staff. The War Office Building sits on the site of Scotland Yard's first headquarters.
The column in the middle of the street (the centopath, I believe it's called), was erected in the 1910s/20s as a temporary memorial to the dead of WWI.
In the end, people liked it so much that they tore down the original (which was only made of wood and clad to look like stone), and built a permanent monument in its place.
The London Nobody Knows
This classic 1967 documentary James Mason takes you on a tour of the Old London that was still extant at the time, including the scene of one of the Jack the Ripper murders on Hanbury Street. Many of these locales shown in this film are now long gone.
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