Tower Bridge Gunter made a split-second decision to accelerate, clearing a gap to drop onto the north bascule, which had not yet started to rise. There were no serious injuries. Gunter was given £10 (equivalent to £ in ) by the City Corporation to honour his act of bravery. The Hawker Hunter Tower Bridge incident occurred on 5 April 1968 when a Royal Air Force Hawker Hunter FGA.9 jet fighter from No. 1 Squadron, flown by Flt Lt Alan Pollock, flew through Tower Bridge. Unimpressed that senior staff were not going to celebrate the RAF's 50th birthday with a fly-past, Pollock decided
Tower Bridge in the early 20th century were critical of its aesthetics. "It represents the vice of tawdriness and pretentiousness, and of falsification of the actual facts of the structure", wrote Henry Heathcote Statham, while Frank Brangwyn stated that "A more absurd structure than the Tower Bridge was never thrown across a strategic river". Benjamin Crisler, the "New York Times" film critic, wrote in 1938: "Three unique and valuable institutions the British have that we in America have not: Magna Carta, the Tower Bridge and Alfred Hitchcock." Architectural historian Dan Cruickshank selected Tower Bridge as one of his four choices for the