Does a real photo show the moment in 1952 that a double-decker bus jumped the widening gap of the Tower Bridge drawbridge sections as it was opened to let river traffic through? No, that's not true: While a quick-thinking driver of the London number 78 line was truly celebrated for hitting the gas and jumping the gap, the viral photo is fake. There is no such photo and the fake photo greatly exaggerates the size of the size of the gap Albert Gunter jumped on December 30, 1952.
The fake photo appeared in a November 10, 2025 Facebook post (archived here) where it was published on the facebook.com/engineeringexploration page under the title "In 1952, A London Bus Driver Jumped Tower Bridge With 20 Passengers On Board. It opened:
On December 30, 1952, a London double-decker bus--Route No. 78--was crossing Tower Bridge when the roadway began to rise unexpectedly. The driver, Albert Gunter, realized that if he stopped, the bus would plunge into the Thames. Instead, he made a split-second decision: he accelerated.
This is what the post looked like on Facebook at the time of writing:
(Image source: Lead Stories screenshot of post at facebook.com/engineeringexploration.)
Here's an embedded link to the post:
Lead Stories reviewed The Tower Bridge Foundation's webpages about the incident, finding only photos of the driver, but no picture of the incident:
(Image source: Lead Stories screenshot of photo found at https://www.towerbridge.org.uk/discover/history/bus-jump.)
A BBC article, (archived here) published in 2024, included no photo of the event and said nothing of any photo or film of the jump.
Lead Stories searched Google News' index of thousands of news sites, finding no such photo.
Although Lead Stories was unable to find a document establishing the gap had widened to six feet when Gunter's bus took flight, no coverage of the incident would support the all-four-tires airborne photo, in which the bus is higher over the bridge decks than the height of such a bus, approximately 15 feet (archived here). In the fake photo, the gap between the moving parts of the bridge is clearly greater than the six feet described in reporting on the incident, as the buses were 26 feet long.
