The great talkative peoples – such as the Greeks, or the French – according to that great talkative person, the Romanian philosopher EM Cioran, excel in the "technique of trifles". With his fourth book, Travis Elborough might be said to have perfected his already impressive trifling technique.
The Bus We Loved: London's Affair with the Routemaster (2005); The Long-player Goodbye: The Album from Vinyl to iPod and Back Again (2008); and Wish You Were Here: England on Sea (2010): the Elborough method is to salvage objects, places and ideas that have been overlooked or unconsidered, to layer them in a prose so tasty, so rich and so smooth that it resembles both custard and cream, and with a flick of his elegant wrist to serve them up before the public as the daintiest of dishes. In London Bridge in America he now adds nuts and cherries to this tipsy mix, by going fully transatlantic.
It tells three stories: that of the building of London Bridge in the 19th century; the story of its sale to a multimillionaire oil baron in the 1960s; and the long and complicated story of 20th-century British decline and American ascendancy. But there is much else here besides, including a nice debunking of the myth of Arthur Furguson, the infamous conman who seems not, in fact, to have existed at all, but who was long reputed to have sold Nelson's Column, Buckingham Palace and Trafalgar Square to gullible and greedy Americans. Furguson turns out to be an imaginary figure representing Old World/New World anxieties and antipathies. At no point, Elborough is at pains to point out, were the American buyers of good old dull, granite-arched London Bridge under the impression they had bought the much more impressive and iconic Tower Bridge: this is just a Furguson-style fantasy. A book about ambitions and desires, London Bridge in America is also a book about deceptions and fears. In Elborough's own words, it is a work "as serpentine as the Thames, with many loops and eddies and possibly some high and low tides".
He hits low tide no more than a couple of times – in the long diversion about Thomas Paine's bridge-building ambitions, for example, and in some of the more maddeningly meandering asides – but high tide comes in the extraordinary form of Robert P McCulloch, chainsaw entrepreneur and outboard-motor maker, who founded the city of Lake Havasu in the Arizonan desert in the early 1960s. McCulloch was the man who decided, along with his sidekick Corneilus Vanderbilt "Woody" Wood Jnr, theme park engineer and winner of the annual World's Championship Chili Cookoff, that his new city needed a big landmark to put it on the map. And City of London Corporation councillor and PR man Ivan "Frankie" Luckin persuaded them that the landmark they needed was London Bridge.
The story of the relationship between McCulloch, Woody and Luckin provides the human interest, but at the centre of the story stands the bridge itself. Officially opened on 1 August 1831, and replacing the famous 600-year-old medieval London Bridge, the structure bought by the Americans was "a noble classical granite bridge of five semi-elliptical arches, two of 130 feet, two of 140 feet and a central arch of 152 feet and six inches", dismantled stone by stone in 1968, and painstakingly reassembled and reopened in Lake Havasu in 1971. The opening ceremony was attended by London's lord mayor and a host of Arizonan VIPs, who feasted on lobster, hot Louisiana spiced Alaskan king crab, and Cornish pasties, and were royally entertained in the sweltering desert heat by a host of Pearly Kings and Queens, madrigal singers, and jugglers – all to the sounds of the recorded chimes of Big Ben.
The dimensions of the book are large and strange, but Elborough's style is what one might call cosy modern – vivid, chatty and amiable, unafflicted and unencumbered by vaguenesses or abstractions, aerated throughout by a kind of bemused good humour, and with charismatic flashes of metaphor and flights of fancy. Old London Bridge he describes as "like a dragon jealously guarding its lair, spiky backed with its houses, shops and severed heads on poles". Plans for the new London Bridge grew "mottled and brown to the colour of urn-stewed tea before anything further was done". 1960s commuters file out of London Bridge station, "any lingering tingle of Gibbs SR toothpaste completely obliterated by bacon, eggs and the third cigarette of the day". It is a style perfectly poised between the flourishes of fiction and simple matters of fact, a style neither above nor beneath itself, and which always takes the superficial seriously, and the serious as a potential form of entertainment.
On the evidence of London Bridge in America, it would probably be justifiable now to proclaim Elborough one of Britain's finest pop cultural historians – if being one of Britain's finest pop cultural historians didn't have about it all the ring of being the prize booby in a booby competition. He is, rather, simply a charming, wry literary companion, who wears his considerable learning as lightly as a second hand 1950s Italian silk suit bought from Covent Garden, and worn with Converse trainers, and eyewear by Oliver Peoples. Everybody's friend, let's call him the hipster Bill Bryson.
• Ian Sansom's Paper: An Elegy is published by Fourth Estate.
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