Thanks to its location at a strategic bend in the river, the views of London (Westminster, the South Bank and London Eye to the west, the City of London and Canary Wharf to the east) from the bridge are widely held to be the finest from any spot at ground level.

The name of the bridge is in memory of the Anglo-Dutch and Prussian victory at the Battle of Waterloo in 1815.

The first bridge on the site was designed in 1809-10 by John Rennie for the Strand Bridge Company and opened in 1817 as a toll bridge. The granite bridge had nine arches, each of 120 feet span, separated by double Grecian-Doric stone columns and was 2,456 feet long, including approaches. Before its opening it was known as 'Strand Bridge'. During the 1840s the bridge gained a reputation as a popular place for suicide attempts. Paintings of the bridge were created by the French Impressionist Claude Monet and the English Romantic, John Constable. The bridge was nationalised in 1878 and given to the Metropolitan Board of Works, who removed the toll from it.

From 1884, serious problems were found in Rennie's bridge piers, after scour from the increased river flow after Old London Bridge was demolished damaged their foundations. By the 1920s the problems had increased, with settlement at pier five necessitating closure of the whole bridge while some heavy superstructure was removed and temporary reinforcements put in place.

London County Council decided to demolish the bridge and replace it with a new structure designed by Sir Giles Gilbert Scott. The engineers were Ernest Buckton and John Cueral of Rendel Palmer & Tritton. However Scott, by his own admission, was no engineer and his design, with reinforced concrete beams under the footways, leaving the road to be supported by transverse slabs, was difficult to implement. The pairs of spans on each side of the river were supported by beams continuous over their piers, and these were cantilevered out at their ends to support the centre span and the short approach slabs at the banks. The beams were shaped to look as much like arches as...beams can.

They are clad in Portland stone from the South West of England; the stone cleans itself whenever it rains. To guard against the possibility of further subsidence from scour, each pier was given a number of jacks which can be used to level the structure.

The new crossing was partially opened on Tuesday 11 March 1942 and completed in 1945. The new bridge was the only Thames bridge to have been damaged by German bombers during World War II.