The love lock tradition that's barely older than the iPhone

Here's the Hohenzollern Bridge detail that surprised me. All those thousands of padlocks clipped to the railings look like the sort of tradition that's been going on for generations. It isn't. The first one only appeared in late summer 2008, when a couple started the habit of engraving a padlock with their names, clipping it to the bridge, and throwing the key into the Rhine below.

It caught on remarkably fast. By 2011, there were already forty thousand locks on the bridge, and the number has grown enormously since. Engineers now keep a close eye on the accumulated weight of all that metal, well aware of what happened in Paris, where a similar tradition eventually caused a bridge railing to buckle under the strain. Cologne decided to let the locks stay rather than strip them off, so the collection just keeps quietly growing, one promise at a time.

I painted the bridge in watercolour and ink, that long iron span over the water. There's a poster with a letter home and a postcard if you'd like one.

Shop the poster here: Hohenzollern Bridge, Cologne · Travel Poster