Original subtitles

I don't know.

in an almost infinite array of shapes and colours.

So, the light's going to come over. I'm going to be over there.

You're going to swing it to me, I'm going to pass it up to Harry. OK?

Listen - You have to understand that Charlie is here.

So what I need you to do is keep it away from above his head.

OK?

We've got a famous man here.

LAUGHTER

A good-looking famous man.

All right, we need to keep it...

This is his business, all right?

LAUGHTER

To what extent Lee is really concerned about my welfare,

each contains 36 individually programmable nodes, casting light

Right. Nice and easy, please.

But at £1,200 a pop, he's probably more worried about his lights.

Charlie, tell me when you got hands on.

Lovely, and swing it to me.

Fantastic. OK. All right.

It's coming over to you, Harry. Give me some slack!

After one hour, the first light is finally in place.

He's doing well.

I'll tell you what - he's better than you.

LAUGHTER

Do you want a job, Charlie?

So that is just fitting one light.

But today is an important part in the meticulous planning process.

the arch is closed to river traffic,

and a safety boat is standing by.

What I need you to do is, as we descend,

nice and easy, keep a nice tension on the rope,

little pieces at a time.

I keep that nice and slow, nice and easy. Perfect.

Today is something of a dry run.

The team are only installing a fraction of the lights

that will eventually be fixed to the bridge.

It's a chance to test their theories on how and where to attach

the lights.

It'll be at least another year until the full installation

on Lambeth Bridge.

All those people, all those ropes, all those bits and gizmo and kit,

Now you can see the beam that we're attaching. OK? Yeah.

Let me just come under there, please, Charlie.

Right. Get your foot up against that beam, Harry,

and push it out to me a little bit.

That'll do there. That's perfect.

So what I'm realising is that this project involves a lot of hanging

around, a lot working in a not the most comfortable situation.

I have to say, I take my hat off to these boys because they're going to

be down here for months getting this right.

James, is that right?

These lights are seriously top end.

Totally weatherproof,

Seals are certainly coming this far up the river,

I think it will bring a huge amount to London.

I think it will bring a huge amount of benefits for those that operate

passenger boat services in particular.

We should be inviting people out onto our boats more,

people should be coming out on the boats more, because, remember,

as you can see now, a bridge looks completely different

when you're going underneath it.

Not many people see the underside of that bridge.

Seal, look. Seal. Seal, where?

Just there. Oh, my God!

That's just testimony to how clean the river is today.

He's gone down to feed some more, I guess. That was incredible.

Yeah, it's not an uncommon sight these days.

of the Illuminated River project?

up as far as Teddington.

This is right up to Tower Bridge. Yeah.

Imagine walking over Tower Bridge,

looking down and seeing one of those. Seeing a seal! Exactly.

Spotting a seal today is even more amazing when you consider

that just 50 years ago the river was declared biologically dead.

When I first came afloat you could smell your way up the river.

You could smell the Tate & Lyle sugar refinery.

You could smell the power stations.

You could smell the rubbish.

So, it's transformed amazingly.

One good example, if you look at that boat just going past us

Chris Livett makes his living on the Thames with a fleet of boats

just to get one light down and into place.

And this project needs thousands of lights fitted on 15 bridges.

It really is quite some undertaking.

And tiring.

The River Thames is about to undergo a transformation

unlike anything seen before.

A £45 million privately funded project

that will light 15 of its bridges,

changing London forever.

Go straight through here

onto the little boat.

Lovely, thank you very much. Welcome aboard.

Pedestrian access is restricted,

providing everything from dinner cruises to tug boat hire.

Go straight to the front, that's it.

I'm interested to know how this massive project is viewed

by a man who knows this legendary waterway better than anyone.

So your family's had a long relationship with the river?

Yeah, we've been afloat now since 1710-ish.

Whoa! So, I'm the seventh generation of Livett.

I've now got an eighth generation - my son is in the business.

Chris's forebears were known as watermen.

Basically, the river-bound black cab drivers of the day, responsible

for transporting passengers up, down and across the Thames.

So what does a man with such a long connection to the Thames think

I'd heard that, but I didn't realise it was like a proper

It was the bridge that made London and what we now know

as London Bridge.

It may be long gone, but in this church next to the river,

it's still possible to see the first London Bridge.

Albeit in miniature form.

Completed in 1209,

what made London Bridge so special

is that it was almost a town in its own right, with 140 timber

houses, shops and churches, all perched precariously on top.

This is the most incredible artefact.

I mean, I had no idea that it had a sort of castle thing

in the middle of it.

I sort of knew that there was a drawbridge.

there's been one on this site since Roman times.

fairy tale drawbridge.

Right up until the mid-18th century, this was the only bridge

over the Thames.

And such was the demand to use it,

that it's said at the height of the medieval rush hour,

it could take over an hour to cross.

Actually, the traffic was so bad, that they introduced a rule

that you should travel on the left.

So the fact that we drive on the side that we do is thanks

to London Bridge.

I mean, it's a model, but it's so evocative.

You can always sort of smell it.

which is a bit of advice I actually, sadly, didn't take.

Tell us every time you have a doubt, every time you believe there's

something that needs to be changed, and we will adapt as fast as we can.

I'm also available myself if at any time you have any doubts

of any sort. You can contact me...

...as you wish. That's great.

We need it. We need that level of support because this is such

a unique project for us all.

Thank you for your time.

Thanks a lot. Thank you.

We are a supplier, but we are more than that.

Now this project become ours.

We are part of a team that has a mission.

My mum always told me to beware charming men,

You can smell the life, animals, people.

Yep. But then, he did say concrete things about, "I will help.

"Here's my number."

I can't see how we could have got better commitment out of him.

At the end of the meeting, he'd got it.

He got what we're trying to do.

I think because of that,

he will follow up.

While the Illuminated River team deal with the ins and outs of Dutch

electrical giants, I'm taking this opportunity to learn

more about London's first bridge.

Although the bridge that stands

here now dates from the 1970s,

Stand forward, pull down.

so the thoroughfare down the middle was not much wider

than this, about four metres.

So you would have had thousands of sheep and people crossing

backwards and forwards every day.

I mean, absolute mayhem.

It's 8am on a wet December morning, and it's good news.

Philips have delivered the lights as promised.

Which is fortunate, as today is the day they will be attached

to Lambeth Bridge for the first time.

Grab those two rings.

And they've got a new team member.

That should be sitting right above your hips there, Charlie.

Me.

Well, it was quite a wide structure, it had houses on both sides,

Is that nice and tight around your waist? Yep.

The lights need to be fixed under the arches, so the only way

to get there is by rope.

So, Charlie, foot on,

climb over, and the same foot fold... There we go.

Step down to the ledge for me, hold on to the top ledge for me.

That's it. You can sit down onto that white ledge.

Perfect. No, use your feet.

That's it. OK.

We're walking down the wall.

You've been doing this all your life, eh?

With bridge work, nothing is simple.

a year in the aid of charity.

I'd give almost anything to be able to travel back and just walk

across this bridge once.

Well as luck would have it, there's a scene playing out

on the new London Bridge today that is as close as I'm ever

going to get to time travel.

Can we have the crook up? Sorry?

The crook up a bit.

Today's event gives people who have been awarded the

Freedom of the City of London

a chance to exercise an ancient right -

to drive sheep over the bridge.

It's a recreation of a once common journey that now happens just once

and look at the wash that it's generating... Yeah.

So, we've got our Alan Titchmarsh,

national treasure, and the Lord Mayor of London

in an enormous hat. And some sheep.

It's quite a strange event. Very English.

So sheep, moor - make sense.

Shape, London Bridge - slightly surreal. Absolutely.

It's a bizarre experience. Isn't it?

Sun shining on the Shard,

and driving sheep across London Bridge.

Today's event celebrates a time when sheep were the stock and trade

of London, and a main route to the lucrative markets

was over the congested London Bridge.

Leo can control how they look from his laptop.

is about to write his own chapter in the history of London Bridge.

Last night, we had this...

...what looked like a very large bucket going out across the bridge.

Artist Leo Villareal's team has spent the last two weeks fixing

test lights to four of the bridges in the scheme.

All his ideas so far have been tested on computer-rendered models.

Now, for the first time, he is testing them on the actual bridges.

This is the first test as part of a long series.

So you actually get to...

Oh, my God! Look, it's started! All right, OK. We get to reveal the architecture.

Here on London Bridge, the existing lights have been turned

off and replaced with 20 metres of Leo's bespoke LEDs.

Connected by Wi- Fi,

Back in London and now in the 21st century, another American

I guess those are these little pixels here. Yes.

So it's very important to see the actual lights on the actual

bridge with our own eyes because we're making major decisions.

And the more information we have, the better decisions

we can make.

In the photos, it looked like it was much more like a hot band

and then like a dark area.

The test today will have huge implications

on how the project moves forward.

There's plenty that needs to be ironed out.

How many lights will they need?

Exactly how to attach them, where to direct them, the brightness,

And to see Havasu grow from literally nothing

It was really exciting to see all this stuff. The stones coming

was a big news thing, you know, and you could smell it.

You could smell London.

You could smell the Thames, and when the bridge came

here it was black.

And as you can see, the sun has bleached it out.

Not bothered by the minor detail that there was no river

for his newly-acquired bridge to span,

McCulloch had his engineers build it on dry land.

Once complete, a channel was dug underneath for water from the nearby

lake to flow through.

The bridge was like a huge shot of adrenaline.

You know, it was hope, it was ambition.

the colour, the hue?

to what it is today is cool. It's just cool.

I mean, how many people can say that we've got the London Bridge

in my backyard?

So I love it.

It's funny because I came here, half expecting to be underwhelmed.

You know, it's such a strange idea, bringing London Bridge

and sticking it in the middle of a desert.

But it's been anything but that. It's far exceeded my expectations,

partly because the bridge itself is absolutely beautiful and partly

because of the way it's being taken to the very heart of this community,

being the spark for a new community.

Despite all the odds, it really works.

Next time, work finally starts, and the pressure

a) to see so many of the people working on the project

in one place together, seeing the start of it all,

really, the start of something physical happening, but also to kind

of understand the scale of it, because it's one thing to see

those amazing computer graphics and renderings of the river of light

through the middle of London.

It's quite another to stand here and see a bit of light

on this bridge here, on London Bridge,

but then to imagine it on Cannon Street and to imagine

it on Southwark and to imagine it on the Millennium, to imagine it on Tower Bridge.

Suddenly, you understand the scope and ambition that this project has.

So, from this tiny acorn of a light installation, a mighty oak

should and will grow.

It's been really intriguing tonight,

is on from the get-go.

I have to keep sort of saying, are we on track? Are we on track?

Ancl they keep saying to me, well, we are until we find any other problems.

But there is an issue with an unlikely squatter at Cannon Street.

It's the law. We can't physically move her, and she's got every right to be here.

The city planners come to pass judgment on work so far.

It feels worse than exam day.

I haven't felt this nervous, certainly professionally,

for a very, very long time. And the countdown to the big day begins.

11 weeks, 12 weeks.

It's in 12 weeks' time.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media

It seems a lot of people have got an interest in how these bridges

If they make the wrong call today, the cost could be huge.

You know, it's a lot of responsibility.

You know, this is a lot of money, a lot of effort is going into it.

And we have to get it right.

It's a birthing process, and it's a little... You definitely feel

vulnerable in that.

But this isn't a birth that can happen behind closed doors.

Looking on are a whole raft of representatives, from the bridge

owners to the city planners, the light manufacturers

to the financial backers.

Are they at full right now?

Full? No, no, they're not at full. Kind of like under scrutiny here.

I was 16 when the bridge came.

are going to look.

You turn this on, you hadn't seen this, and there's

all these people here!

No pressure! I've got my fan club behind me!

And you've also got to do the kind of mental leap now

of, if you like, this is one pixel of the giant screen

that you're going to be creating down the river, all of these bridges.

What happens with this bridge and then, you know,

Cannon Street and on and on and on?

Cos here we can see four bridges.

So there's a lot to do. The light test on London Bridge this evening

represents less than 5% of the planned total.

There's a really intense winter in 1813, 1814,

They could walk down the stairs,

walk onto the ice and walk over to the other side of the river.

The watermen were becoming destitute.

To combat that the watermen would break the ice around the stairs.

Put one of their skiffs on there,

you'd have to step on my skiff to step onto the ice

and, "Thank you very much, that's a shilling, Sir."

CHARLIE LAUGHS

But what happened to that wonderful old 19 pier bridge

that so spectacularly dammed up the River Thames?

Well, it turns out that it was the ice that it was in part

responsible for that was ultimately the end of it.

Historian Travis Elborough continues the story.

people could then walk across.

where the Thames freezes over,

and the frost really does the stonework in.

Ultimately, they, in 1821, decide they're going to have to build

a new bridge.

And after a monumental seven year build, the new bridge,

designed by John Rennie,

was opened in a grand ceremony by King William IV.

But it would only last a fraction of the time of its predecessor.

Unfortunately, it is almost immediately out of date,

almost the moment it opens.

When Rennie finishes his original design for the bridge in 1821,

there isn't even horse buses,

The first London Bridge, with its 19 tightly spaced piers,

See the colour of it, how white it is. Yeah.

That's an indication of how clean the water is.

When I first came afloat that would have been grey and toxic.

This is the new London Bridge. Yep.

The old 22 arch bridge was slightly further down river here.

What, here? Yeah, just here,

just by St Magnus the Martyr, the church.

When the bridge was here the river was a different place.

This is the Pool of London and it was a pool of water.

It was a lot more sedate. We didn't have the speed...

They didn't have the speed of tide that we have today.

At London Bridge, actually, there's a dam,

so it would slow the water down.

there aren't horse drawn omnibuses on the streets of London.

had such a profound effect on the flow of the Thames

that in the coldest winters the river froze over.

For Londoners it meant party time,

turning this newly formed public space

into a frosty fairground.

A spectacle full of hastily constructed shops,

pubs and theatres.

Thousands of people turned up every day and there was said to be every

possible form of entertainment

including on one occasion a parading elephant,

but for the waterborne taxi drivers a frozen Thames was a problem.

The thick ice, thick pack ice,

But when McCulloch brought his bridge here,

the more photogenic Tower Bridge, McCulloch knew exactly which bridge

he was getting.

And it's hardly surprising to learn he'd done his research,

considering the eventual price tag was $2.5 million.

It is genuinely quite surreal to be here.

It's the high 20s, I am in,

basically, the Arizona desert,

and that is old London Bridge that spanned the Thames in London

for 130 years.

And yet here it is in all its pomp and beauty.

It's quite hard to get your head around.

Havasu, with its population of some 50,000, is now a bustling

tourist resort, favoured by college kids and retirees alike.

Despite persistent rumours that he thought he was buying

it was a very different place altogether.

We moved here in February of 1965.

Rick Kingsbury was one of the town's first residents.

There were around 600 people and around 20 homes.

We lived in a 30-by-eight-foot trailer, and it was three months

before we had running water, and it was five months

before we had electricity. For the life of me, I couldn't figure

out what I had done to make my parents so mad that they would

bring me here!

But the great speculator, Robert McCulloch, had grand plans

for Lake Havasu, and he hoped that London Bridge would put the town

firmly on the map.

far from it, because London had decided to sell its famous bridge.

By the time it opens in 1831 there are horse buses,

there are railway stations bringing people into London

and it's struggling to cope

with a much more motorised and traffic-ridden London.

So, in the mid 1960s there's another plan to create

a new bridge for London.

ARCHIVE NEWS VOICEOVER: After almost 140 years of this sort of pounding,

the nursery rhyme's famous link between two banks of the Thames

isn't falling down - it's carefully being taken to pieces.

In 1968 work started on dismantling London Bridge.

London's outgrown the 53 feet wide span.

But that didn't mean the life of the 1831 John Rennie bridge was over,

Put us completely in the team -

45 enquiries have reached the City of London from would be buyers.

Closing date for tenders is March 29th.

Anybody want to buy a bridge cheap?

It's around half a million including storage, shipping and delivery.

But the really interesting part of the story isn't just where it was

delivered but why.

It's quite hard to get your head around!

After deciding the 19th-century London Bridge was too small to cope

with 20th-century traffic,

London Bridge was put up for sale.

The proud new owner was to be this man, Robert P McCulloch,

and he rebuilt London Bridge here, in Lake Havasu City, Arizona.

No. No...

And from what I understand all the lighting is faulty,

and has never been fixed.

So, you can see here, there's sort of bits and pieces - some purple,

some a sort of weird green, some white,

and a whole side just not working at all.

The Illuminated River Project promises that the Millennium Bridge

will at last become the blade of light

the architects always imagined.

Instead of the anonymous silhouette that spans the river today.

And it's not just the Millennium Bridge.

Next on the list for our band of surveyors - Southwark Bridge.

"The lighting is good."

Hm...

And it wasn't meant in an ironic sense, it was genuinely called that.

It's proving an interesting exercise in reassessing the familiar.

You start to notice completely different things, like,

is it well-lit? Things that you don't really think

about you're just going about your daily business.

It is quite amazing when you put that lens on - you go,

"Right, I'm really thinking about the lighting and the experience that I have ♪

Some of it's lovely, some of it's awful - some of it is just not lit!

What do you make of Cannon Street?

It's just a dark void.

Walking along here this evening, you suddenly realise

that the bridges are not at...

Not at their best in any way!

Well, tonight, the team behind the scheme are attempting to prove

But, now, it will slowly pulsate to match the tide on the banks below.

Each bridge will be an individual artwork,

but also synchronised with its neighbour.

So, when viewed together,

the 15 bridges become one giant ribbon of light.

But, not surprisingly, all of this doesn't come cheap.

The budget for the 15 bridges is around £45 million.

Nearly all of that is going to be met by private donations.

But the question remains.

Do the London Bridges really need all of this new, expensive lighting?

Surely, they're lit already.

The aim of this event is to help create a baseline

for how local people feel about the bridges. There's a sheet...

And while some of the bridges have been illuminated in the past,

that the bridges need lights.

...you should all have a clipboard, and a questionnaire.

\ Let's go. I

They've invited a cross-section of people who live and work

near the river for a bit of a night-time recce,

and I'm tagging along.

First stop, Norman Foster's iconic Millennium Bridge.

The question here is, "The lighting is good and I can see well."

No!

No, no...

The amazing thing is that this bfidge

when it opened was called "The Blade of Light".

There are three panels and each of them have eight million

created in the Nevada desert.

For one week every August, 70,000 like-minded souls

get to live out their wildest dreams

in a frenzy of self-expression, and artistic freedom.

My first experience there was getting profoundly lost.

And, so I decided to create this beacon using strobe lights

and a microcontroller and started programming it.

I didn't think of it as an artwork - I thought of it as a way to get home at night.

But I brought it back to New York and put it on the wall of my studio

and put an acrylic cover over it and realised I was onto something.

Leo is now one of the world's foremost light sculptors,

and his installations regularly sell for six-figure sums.

This is what I've been making in the last year-and-a-half.

The Burning Man festival is a yearly event which sees a temporary town

individually addressable pixels.

So, there's 24 million pixels in the entire thing.

So, it's a huge step up from 16 strobe lights.

That's quite a big step up! Yeah!

Leo describes his work as digital campfires, and I can see why.

There is something primal about them, inviting the viewer

to congregate around and get lost within.

This is not a loop.

All these layers are all independent and being dynamically recombined.

So, you never see the exact same layering twice.

So, if this ran for the next 1,000 years, you would never get exactly

the same sort of moment or sequence on the screens?

Hey, how you doing? Very nice to meet you.

they've all been lit as individual entities without any thought

for the river as a whole. Coupled with the fact

that much of the previous lighting has now failed,

the overall picture is, well, unsatisfactory to say the least.

And when you see the lack of care that's being given to these bridges,

you understand the potential for this project.

So, who exactly has been given the job

of transforming London's bridges?

Well, he's based here in New York.

I've come to the Brooklyn studio of Leo Villareal

to have a look at his blueprints for the River Thames.

Hello, Leo.

And Albert Bridge will keep its famous monochrome glow.

Nice to meet you. What an incredible space.

Yeah. This is all your work?

It is. Wonderful!

Leo is an artist with a 20-year career specialising in light.

He uses intricately-arranged LED lights and computer coding

to create these complex, pulsating light installations.

So, this is one of the early pieces?

Yeah, this is a piece called Strobe Matrix that I made in 1997.

This was my first light sculpture even

It's 16 strobe lights.

Is that it - only 16? Only 16. So, 16 pixels effectively? Yes.

This was created out at Burning Man.

of structural engineering with real creativity and flair.

Fish don't like light.

Right, so this is really not good.

In the build up to the big switch-on...

You turn this on, you haven't seen this, and there's all these people here...

BOTH LAUGHING

No pressure! ..can the artist behind the project...

I'm under scrutiny here.

...pull off the feat of turning the Thames into a river of light?

My name's Charlie Luxton.

I design buildings, I run an architecture practice,

and I like bridges.

A lot.

Why? Well, at their heart, they are a pure expression

...protecting the fragile ecosystem will be paramount.

They have a huge historic and symbolic importance.

They connect communities.

They transform cities.

But let's face it - these lofty thoughts probably don't cross the minds

of the millions of people who use them every day.

It's fair to say that we take our bridges for granted.

But there's a plan on the horizon that's going to transform the way

we view these bridges and the river that flows beneath them.

To find out more I'm taking a trip down the river

with the two people leading this unique project.

No-one has ever done anything like this before and there's

a very good reason - it's really difficult.

of this extraordinary project.

For 2,000 years, it has been the lifeblood of London,

nurturing the city that has grown along its banks.

And today it is still very much a working river with tens of millions

of journeys over, and along it, every year.

But it's about to undergo a change like never before.

There is a plan for an audacious engineering project the likes

of which this city has never seen which promises

to transform London's skyline for good.

The plan?

To light the River Thames.

15 iconic bridges with a combined span of two-and-a-half miles

spread over five miles of river.

In this series, I will follow the ins and outs

It seems simple but it's really difficult.

Charlie, tell me when you got hands on. And see exactly what it takes

to get something this ambitious off the ground.

This has to work.

If you were to close the bridge, £2 million for 20 minutes.

What?! £2 million for 20 minutes.

A project on this scale will be pitted with challenges.

From public scepticism...

...to unforeseen delays.

I don't care if somebody else's project in another part of the world has to wait a bit.

How will they prioritise us?

And with the Thames home to an array of endangered species...

Seal - look there. Oh, my God!

Which will celebrate the beauty of the Thames,

Seriously, you know, like, you have the dream where you're walking down

the street in your pyjamas or whatever? I have this...

Honest to God, I have this recurring dream.

Nothing happens and all these eyes turn and look at me.

So, that's... So given how complex it is,

is it going to happen?

Oh, my gosh yes.

I mean...

I'm glad you answered! We're ready to go on site, pretty much. You're ready to go? Yeah!

We just need to tick a few more boxes and then we're ready to go.

The scheme, known as the Illuminated River Project,

promises for the first time to light all of Central London's bridges

in a cohesive way.

That's my recurring...

and its historic relationship with London.

These computer-generated models give us a glimpse of how the Thames

of the future will look.

Waterloo will be lit with colours echoing the palette

of Claude Monet's classic paintings of the bridge.

Some will be lit to reflect the location.

So, Lambeth will be the same red as the seats

of the nearby House of Lords.

Westminster Bridge green to reflect the seats in the House of Commons.

Others will be lit to reflect their use, like London Bridge

and Cannon Street Bridge, mimicking the movement of the cars,

pedestrians, and trains that use them.

Ancl wherever the lights go, to install them, we can't access the deck of the bridge.

I can wake up on one side of the bed and think, "All it is

"is sticking lights on a bridge."

But, actually, it's far more complex than that.

The plan is that in eight months' time, the project will go live.

The job ahead is fixing an incredible 69,000 lights

to the bridges.

The worst place to put light is over a working river

because you need an apt sailor with an electrical engineering degree.

You have to close off arches because the river is a busy place.

Case in point - Cannon Street Bridge, built in 1866.

It carries 60,000 commuters in and out of London every day.

This is a rail bridge.

Never the exact same combination.

It's going to cost £2 million, I think, a day

if you were to close the bridge... No, every 20 minutes.

£2 million for 20 minutes. What?! £2 million for 20 minutes. Yeah.

If you were to close the bridge.

To, you know, close the station.

So, we're not going to do that!

THEY LAUGH

What keeps you up at night, Chris?

The... HE CHUCKLES

Switching on the lights,

and nothing happens when the button's pressed.

That's my recurring... CHARLIE AND SARAH LAUGH

and interesting projects that I've ever done.

Hannah Rothschild is a project trustee.

The Thames, after all, is the heart that runs through the city,

connecting north, south, east, west.

So if you're doing the bridges, you've got to do more than one.

You've got to actually, I think, put light back into the heart

of the river.

Hannah's family charity has a long history of funding grand projects -

from museums and art collections to social housing and hospitals.

I came up with the idea and then I was lucky enough

to be part of a family that has the wherewithal

to catalyse projects like this.

That's one aspect of it.

But, I mean, this has been one of the most challenging

of billionaire banking fame.

Of the total £45 million budget, nine million will be spent

on around 300,000 LEDs

that will all need to be fixed to the bridges.

Today, project director Sarah Gaventa and lead architect

Chris Waite are in the Netherlands for a meeting at the headquarters

of their supplier, Philips.

Sarah's already placed the first part of the order.

But recent news has raised concerns.

Philips has told us that there is a worldwide shortage of luminaires

coming up, so they're really worried about not having enough lamps.

If the lamps don't arrive on time, there isn't a project, basically.

The plan is for the main work to start on the bridges

And the only people interrupting him now are curious passers by.

can happen at spontaneous capacity.

Unfortunately, the authorities haven't always seen

eye to eye with Ben.

He estimates that over the years, he's been approached by the police

over 400 times.

Despite being arrested,

Ben's refused to give up.

And now on the whole, they let him get on with it.

I just want to say it looks amazing.

It's a beautiful day, today.

And what do you do on a work clay?

I have lots of overalls and I have an umbrella.

\ Oh, I see. I

in less than three months.

It always makes me smile when I walk across here because a lot of people

don't know, because I saw him doing this. Yes.

So I tell everybody to look down... And smile. Look down and smile.

Thank you very much.

Surely, that is the true purpose of public art.

The chewing gum man's pictures make people happy.

They get people talking to each other and make

the place, well, better.

Simple, really.

It's also a bonus that his art costs next to nothing to create.

Which is very much not the case for the Illuminated River.

The project is being backed by the Rothschild Foundation

This is just two of 12 books that basically illustrate the design

Sarah has prepared a short presentation to remind everyone

of the huge scale of the project.

OK. Everybody all right?

So it is from Tower Bridge to Albert Bridge.

So, it's 15 bridges in central London.

That's really nice.

And I think the thing that I think is quite amazing about this project

is just how many people will see it, a year.

I mean, it's about 200 million people.

So, the potential is absolutely huge.

And to reinforce the enormity of the scheme, Chris has brought some

of the plans he and his team have spent the last two years

working on.

Well, that's fantastic.

at the end of the technical design stage.

I think one could suggest that,

OK, it's about the artwork,

it's about the artist's vision.

From a physical standpoint,

it's really all about your component, your products,

your luminaires and having them perform in the right way

for the artwork.

This is going to be a world-class piece of art

we're installing and, together, we have to get this right.

There is absolutely no way that we don't deliver.

This has to work.

I brought you a little gift - some biscuits.

Without lights, that won't happen.

I don't care if somebody else's project in another part of the world

has to wait a bit, you know?

How will they prioritise us?

I want them to feel that they should prioritise us.

I share all your concerns.

These guys have to believe in this project like we do.

Otherwise, we've got we've got no chance of making it a success.

They've secured a meeting with Eric Rondolat,

CEO of Philips' Specialist Lighting Division.

Hi, Eric. How are you doing?

Good. Thank you.

So by painting on the gum, it's finding a place where art

From London.

It's even got a bridge on the cover.

\ Fa ntastic. I

I don't think we're lighting that one.

You are. This one? Yes.

That's the Tower Bridge?

Yes. We're lighting the Tower Bridge that's the good news.

Yeah, well, obviously we've got a lot of news for you, then.

It seems the London project is not as firmly on the senior management's

radar as hoped.

I thought the Tower Bridge wasn't in the project at the beginning.

Was it? Yes, it always was.

Look inside the little clouds, they're...

But this time, it's bigger.

Much bigger.

I really like this one - they're kind of the clouds,

sort of drifting along over 1.8 miles of light surface.

Leo's lights were only meant to be on the bridge for two years.

But the locals liked them so much, they campaigned to keep them.

And they're now a permanent fixture.

I think what's a clever about is it's so organic.

The way the lights are programmed together,

they really are as a surface rather than a kind of a Christmas tree

of lights if you know what I mean. So, you get these incredible forms

and they become almost three dimensional because of the...

Oh, look, and now they're sparkling.

and let your imagination run wild.

...sparkling.

You could just dismiss this as being some lights on a bridge,

but you'd have to be a pretty hard-hearted soul.

Because this art project that the Bay likes is one

of those wonderful bits of alchemy where the outcome of the project

is so much bigger than the sum of its parts.

And I, for one, am enormously excited to see

what this approach can bring to 15 bridges in London.

The River Thames is about to undergo a transformation

unlike anything seen before.

Changing London forever.

Incorporating 15 bridges from Albert all the way down to Tower Bridge,

and have a look at a bridge that Leo has already worked his magic on.

I'm treating each individual pixel as its own unit.

I mean, you talk about them as though they're sort of alive.

I mean, is that how you view them on one level?

They are, they're very...

They have personality.

And they're mysterious as well.

And I like preserving that sense of mystery.

I have to say, seeing Leo's work in this sort of gallery,

being on this zero-gravity bench and just sort of losing myself

in the art is wonderful - it's intoxicating.

Well, now, I'm fascinated to see how these wonderful ideas translate

onto a city-scale piece of work.

And to do that, I need to head west to San Francisco,

the Illuminated Rivers Project is big - very big.

Not this one!

This one.

This is the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge, known as the Bay Bridge.

It was built in 1936 and when it was finished, it was the longest bridge

in the world - the biggest single span.

But only six months later, the Golden Gate Bridge was built.

And this one sort of fell into the shadow of its bigger sister.

But in 2013,

there was a reason to fall in love with the old bridge all over again,

after Leo bedecked it with 17,000 of his pulsating LEDs.

And it's truly mesmerising.

Just like the work I saw in his studio you can stare,

humanising an anonymous urban environment.

Yeah. Chewing gum marks.

So, I'm taking something which is thrown away,

which is a discarded chewing gum, and hopefully making

it into something beautiful.

How many pictures have you done on this bridge?

A good...

More than 600, I'd say. I've lost track.

More than 600? Yeah.

But they're all very different, the pictures are all very different

because people come up to me and they ask for dedications.

Each of Ben's pictures tells a story as recounted by a passer by.

It could be a first kiss or a "get well" message.

The pictures are small signs of personal connection,

So you're the man responsible for these little lovely creations.

It's me as an artist kind of doing work from my heart,

with a lot of public heart.

The idea's imposed on the environment rather than the ideas

evolving out of the environment.

You know, I care about people and I care about our environment.

And Ben has found a loophole, which to his mind means

he can't be accused of damaging this London landmark.

This space is not under the jurisdiction of local

or national government. Which space?

The gum that I'm painting on.

Cos if you painted on the bridge, that would be graffiti.

That would be, technically, criminal damage.

Just ask the ancient Egyptians.

On five miles of the River Thames, stretching from Battersea in the

West to Bermondsey in the east,

passing Westminster,

the London Eye,

St Paul's and the Shard.

Once complete, it will be the longest public art commission

in the world.

But what exactly is meant by "public art"?

Well, it comes in all shapes and sizes, but generally you'll

find it in outside spaces.

It's free to view and accessible to all.

Of course, public art is as old as the hills.

The River Thames is one of the world's great waterways.

It can be short-lived.

Or built to stand the test of time.

It can be outrageous,

comical or poignant,

but it doesn't have to be large.

London's Millennium Bridge has become one man's canvas

for his take on public art, and it's on a microscale.

Ben? Hi. Hello.

How are you? Yeah, yeah good.

I'm Charlie. How's it going?

All right. How are you?

Yeah, yeah, good. Work in progress.