• Email Us: [email protected]
  • Contact Us: +1 718 874 1545
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Medical Market Report

  • Home
  • All Reports
  • About Us
  • Contact Us

Why Are There So Many Padlocks Attached To Bridges?

July 23, 2024 by Deborah Bloomfield

Ever been crossing a bridge and found yourself faced with hundreds – or even hundreds of thousands – of padlocks? The cultural phenomenon can be seen across the globe, and has even caught on to the point of becoming dangerous in some places, so what’s the deal with all these pointless padlocks?

Love Lock Bridge

Love locks are padlocks attached to a bridge, often with the initials of a romantic couple etched or painted onto their surface. Once locked, the key is tossed into the water below. It’s widely interpreted as being symbolic of the couple’s commitment to each other, in permanently affixing themselves in the form of a padlock to a bridge of their choosing.

It’s not entirely clear when love locks began, but one of the earliest reports comes from Vrnjačka Banja, Serbia, where the love locks on Most Ljubavi (“Bridge of Love”) are said to date back to World War One. The practice is thought to have then picked up momentum in the 2000s when it became popular in Italy, spurred on by a romantic novel from Federico Moccia in which somebody sticks a padlock on the Ponte Milvio bridge in Rome.

Love locks then spread across the globe and have been the subject of several scientific papers. An unsurprising fact, perhaps, given they’re a rare modern-day opportunity to discover how customs can disseminate across the globe despite nobody being told to do it.

Most Ljubavi

Most Ljubavi “Bridge of Love” in Serbia, a love lock bridge believed to be one of the oldest on Earth.

The science of love locks

The love lock was the central focus of a 2017 paper that sought to tackle the age-old issue of being an archaeologist: all your ritual subjects are too dead to ask why they did what they did. Study author Ceri Houlbrook of the University of Hertfordshire’s School Of Humanities was uniquely placed to study Manchester’s Oxford Road Bridge in the UK, which she describes in the paper as “barely recognizable as a bridge”. It was here that Houlbrook first noticed and photographed seven padlocks on February 12, 2014.

Less than a week later, another was added. Then another arrived within a month, but by the end of May, there were a total of 15, demonstrating the lock locks’ “magnetic-like effect” in which deposits attract more deposits. The study continued for three years, in which time 409 love locks on Manchester’s “barely recognizable as a bridge” Oxford Bridge.

Advertisement

Then came the task of trying to interpret the why during the love lock bridge’s formation.

Love locks on the fence at Lonsdale Quay, North Vancouver, BC Canada

A love lock bridge at Lonsdale Quay in Vancouver, Canada.

“Most often the practitioners had deposited love-locks with their partners as statements of romantic commitment, often while on holiday (the deposit becomes an inverted souvenir) or while attending special events, such as shows at the nearby Palace Theatre,” explained Houlbrook.

“These interviews revealed that deposition was occasionally timed to coincide with an anniversary, engagement, or birthday. However, other motivations were made apparent in these interviews; for example, one elderly couple in Bakewell attached their love-lock to a bridge to celebrate a recent lottery win.”

As for what all this can teach us about archaeology, the study of a little bridge in Manchester tells us what can be learned when we look at ritual deposits as an ongoing practice rather than the finished article, observed retrospectively from a distance of several millennia in the future.

Advertisement

“Archaeologists may take from this the lesson that accumulations should not be studied at one static point in time, and this will prompt us to question assumptions about the place, people, pace, and purpose of historic and prehistoric accumulations,” concluded Houlbrook. “And yet three years and 409 lovelocks later, the author still believes this custom has more to teach us.”

love locks being removed from a bridge in prague

Local authorities are rarely so charmed by love locks, as demonstrated by this person removing love locks from Charles Bridge in Prague.

The dangers of love locks

It’s a romantic practice, but one that isn’t necessarily permanent. A woman reportedly traveled 9,580 kilometers (5,953 miles) from Los Angeles, United States, to Seoul in South Korea to remove a love lock with bolt cutters after said love was lost.

Costly plane fares aside, love locks have also been deemed a threat to public safety in some spaces as the sheer number of locks rendered the fences unstable. This has seen lock locks be removed by councils from Paris to Melbourne.  

So, while it could be argued that there are greener, cheaper, and safer rituals for professing your love, there’s undeniably a lot of academic intrigue surrounding this quirky contemporary depositional practice.

Advertisement

All “explainer” articles are confirmed by fact checkers to be correct at time of publishing. Text, images, and links may be edited, removed, or added to at a later date to keep information current.  

Deborah Bloomfield
Deborah Bloomfield

Related posts:

  1. Canada’s Conservatives pledge big spending, deficit reduction in election platform
  2. Evolito’s electric motors look set to take off in aerospace where YASA left off in automotive
  3. TWIS: Newly Discovered CRISPR-Like Systems May Be Used To Edit Human Genomes, Reconstructed Face Of 50,000-Year-Old Ancient Ancestor, And Much More This Week
  4. Can Peacocks Fly?

Source Link: Why Are There So Many Padlocks Attached To Bridges?

Filed Under: News

Primary Sidebar

  • Why Do Some Toilets Have Two Flush Buttons?
  • 130-Year-Old Butter Additive Discovered In Danish Basement Contains Bacteria From The 1890s
  • Prehistoric Humans Made Necklaces From Marine Mollusk Fossils 20,000 Years Ago
  • Zond 5: In 1968 Two Soviet Steppe Tortoises Beat Humans To Orbiting Around The Moon
  • Why Cats Adapted This Defense Mechanism From Snakes
  • Mother Orca Seen Carrying Dead Calf Once Again On Washington Coast
  • A Busy Spider Season Is Brewing: Why This Fall Could See A Boom Of Arachnid Activity
  • What Alternatives Are There To The Big Bang Model?
  • Magnetic Flip Seen Around First Photographed Black Hole Pushes “Models To The Limit”
  • Something Out Of Nothing: New Approach Mimics Matter Creation Using Superfluid Helium
  • Surströmming: Why Sweden’s Stinky Fermented Fish Smells So Bad (But People Still Eat It)
  • First-Ever Recording Of Black Hole Recoil Captured During Merger – And You Can Listen To It
  • The Moon Is Moving Away From Earth At A Rate Of About 3.8 Centimeters Per Year. Will It Ever Drift Apart?
  • As Solar Storm Hits Earth NASA Finds “The Sun Is Slowly Waking Up”
  • Plate Tectonics And CO2 On Planets Suggest Alien Civilizations “Are Probably Pretty Rare”
  • How To Watch The “Awkward” Partial Solar Eclipse This Weekend
  • World’s Oldest Pots: 20,000-Year-Old Vessels May Have Been Used For Cooking Clams Or Brewing Beer
  • “The Body Is Slowly And Continuously Heated”: 14,000-Year-Old Smoked Mummies Are World’s Oldest
  • Pizza Slices, Polaroid Pictures, And Over 300 Hats: What’s Left Behind In Yellowstone’s Hydrothermal Areas?
  • The Mathematical Paradox That Lets You Create Something From Nothing
  • Business
  • Health
  • News
  • Science
  • Technology
  • +1 718 874 1545
  • +91 78878 22626
  • [email protected]
Office Address
Prudour Pvt. Ltd. 420 Lexington Avenue Suite 300 New York City, NY 10170.

Powered by Prudour Network

Copyrights © 2025 · Medical Market Report. All Rights Reserved.

Go to mobile version