In 1833 a ferry service across the Swan River was established at the Narrows, at the foot of Mt. Eliza, near the site of Perth's Narrows Bridge. The first bridge across the River was not built until 1843, however it was not at the Narrows, rather at Heirrison Island. The Narrows Bridge was built as part of the Kwinana Freeway, Perth's first freeway road system, the first section of which was opened in 1959.

In March 1952 BP Australia (then the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company) had reached an agreement with the WA State Government to build a 40 million pound oil refinery at Kwinana. The Government agreed to provide agreed to provide infrastructure including electricity, water, roads, railways, a safe channel to the sea and a thousand state houses at Kwinana - within three years. In October 1952 BHP agreed to construct a steel rolling mill near the refinery and thus the Kwinana industrial strip was born.
In response to the development that was about to take place to the south of Perth, the WA Government commissioned British-born town planner and architect Gordon Stephenson to produce a development plan for the metropolitan area of Perth and Fremantle. The resulting 1955 Plan was co-authored with Alistair Hepburn and is commonly known as the Stephenson-Hepburn Report. It included an atlas of maps which laid down a broad pattern of future land uses including highways and open space, and catered for significant additional population growth. One of the highways mooted was a fast road link between Perth and the new town of Kwinana which became the Kwinana Freeway. The freeway would enter the city via a bridge across The Narrows.
The construction of the first section of the Freeway, linking Perth city to the Canning Bridge at Applecross, was commenced in 1957 and completed two years later. The second section, extending the freeway to Canning Vale, was completed between the years 1978 and 1982. The final section, linking Kwinana and the Rockingham, was completed in 2003, 50 years after plans to build it had first been approved. The freeway incorporates two major bridges - the Narrows Bridge over the Swan River at South Perth, and the Mount Henry Bridge over the Canning River.

Opened in 1959 with the first stage of the Kwinana Freeway, The Narrows Bridge was a single five-span concrete structure designed by G Maunsell & partners and built by Christiani & Nielsen and J O Clough & son. It was the first bridge in Australia to use segmental construction and a lighter web construction using pre-stressing cables. The unusually soft soil conditions at the site forced the use of 160 "Gambia piles" for the bridge's foundations, named after the country in which they were first used. The 79 cm diameter piles have steel shells and conical noses. The hollow piles were driven by a drop hammer falling within them, then when they had sufficient resistance to driving, they were filled with reinforced concrete.
At the time of its construction, the 97.5 metre central span was the largest precast prestressed concrete bridge span in the world. The new bridge had a traffic capacity of 6,000 cars per hour in each direction, over a total of six traffic lanes. The bridge was entered on the state's heritage register in January 1999, and was named a national engineering landmark by the Institution of Engineers, Australia, in November 1999.
By the 1990s, the bridge had become the city's worst traffic bottleneck, despite the addition of an extra traffic lane, bringing the total number of lanes to seven. This led to an identical (in looks) duplicate bridge being erected alongside the original; it was opened in February 2001. Two dedicated bus lanes were included at that time; these lanes have since been converted for use by a double track train service that links Perth and Mandurah. The southbound line is carried on a narrow southbound railway bridge built in the 6-metre gap between the existing road bridges.

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