Bridges

By Richard Hayman

From the monumental splendour of Tower Bridge and the august span at Westminster to the engineering masterpieces at Ironbridge and the Forth, bridges comprise some of the most recognisable landmarks in Britain. Whether the smallest arch or the largest overpass, each has a rich architectural, economic, social and sometimes even religious history. This beautifully illustrated introduction by Richard Hayman explains how piety built and maintained bridges in the Middle Ages; how economic forces inspired a new generation of road bridges in the eighteenth century, such as the Menai Bridge in North Wales, and how technological prowess gave us soaring Victorian railway viaducts and the concrete road bridges of the twentieth century.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
• Release date: Feb 20, 2020
• ISBN: 9781784423889

Richard Hayman

Richard Hayman is an archaeologist and architectural historian who writes on the history of the British landscape. His other books include Riddles in Stone: Myths, Archaeology and the Ancient Britons.

Book preview

CONTENTS

ACROSS THE WATER

MEDIEVAL BRIDGES

ROAD BRIDGES

AQUEDUCTS AND RAILWAY BRIDGES

STEEL AND CONCRETE

FURTHER READING

PLACES TO VISIT

ACROSS THE WATER

THE IDEA OF building a bridge across the mouth of the River Severn had existed on numerous drawing boards for over a century before its final realisation in 1966. The official opening of the Severn Bridge in September of that year was a very important occasion. The BBC broadcast two hours of live coverage and to mark the event it commissioned a suite of orchestral pieces, entitled Severn Bridge Variations, from six leading English and Welsh composers, including Michael Tippett and Malcolm Arnold. By the time the bridge was opened for traffic there was already a queue, which only lengthened in the coming days. Three days after its opening there were 8- and 5-mile tailbacks on the Welsh and English sides. Mostly they were not commuters but sightseers.

The Severn Bridge opened in 1966, an embodiment of the white heat of technology that characterised the Sixties, and is viewed here from the public platform created for travellers to stop and admire it.

John Rennie’s London Bridge was opened in 1831 by William IV and Queen Adelaide, an event that included a procession of royal and city barges, watched by thousands of onlookers.

The Severn Bridge is Britain’s finest twentieth-century bridge, a world-class piece of engineering that, briefly, put British technology on top of the world. Its technical credentials may not be obvious to the untrained eye (and will be explained later), but even to casual observers the Severn Bridge was a magnificent spectacle, a mile-long ribbon of steel across the mouth of Britain’s biggest river. Unashamedly modern in design, the Severn Bridge was forward looking but it was also the end of an era. There was a heyday of bridge building in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries when official openings were cause for public celebration. The Severn Bridge was the last time that the opening of a bridge was a source of such local and national pride, and at the same time is a strong reminder of how important bridges have been in British culture.

Like many notable bridges, the Severn Bridge combined technical achievement with a pleasing design, enabled economic development and was the latest incarnation of an ancient river crossing. It expressed the aspirations of the age that built it, like all great bridges do, and is a perfect example of why bridges are worthy of our attention. More generally, it is bridges that have determined the geography of our towns and cities and of important roads, because they negotiate the principal natural barriers in the landscape. And bridges were among the first public building projects, while their maintenance was one of the earliest responsibilities of local government.

Bridges prove their strategic value in times of warfare. The Battle of Stirling Bridge in 1297, where the Scots routed the English, is perhaps the most famous example in Britain.

In Britain there are bridges from the medieval period to the twenty-first century, but a bridge is always a provisional structure. Rivers are destructive forces of nature and bridges have needed to be repaired and eventually replaced – several generations of London Bridge demonstrate that the history of a river crossing is usually much older than the bridge that now spans it.

Thomas Telford and William Jessop designed Pontcysyllte Aqueduct, the crowning engineering achievement of the canal age and now a World Heritage Site.

In the medieval period bridge building was an act of charity, which was the bedrock of Christian morality, and provided funds for the building, repair and maintenance of bridges. In the eighteenth and continuing into the nineteenth century, bridge building became a symbol of progress and technical virtuosity, an heroic age of civil engineering. Three of the most notable bridges from this period – the Iron Bridge (Shropshire) over the Severn, Pontcysyllte Aqueduct over the Dee (Wrexham) and the Forth Bridge – are now World Heritage Sites. Bridge builders were the great men of their age. Of the two most illustrious, Brunel has a university named after him, while Telford has lent his name to a town.

Media City Footbridge at Salford Quays, Manchester, is one of several place-making bridges to have been part of post-industrial re-development in Britain’s cities.

Since the twentieth century bridges have been consciously designed as place-making structures that have helped to define local distinctiveness in post-industrial cities like Manchester and Glasgow. But bridges have always defined places. In Britain, Newcastle-upon-Tyne is the city of bridges par excellence. London too is a city of bridges, but they also provide focal points in many other towns and villages across the country, like Marlow (Buckinghamshire) or Henley-on-Thames (Oxfordshire), while there are British-designed bridges that have become iconic structures in international cities like Sydney and Budapest. In rural Britain, all kinds of bridges have become place-makers, from the estuarine bridges across the Humber and Severn to the simplest of clapper bridges on Dartmoor. Even in the remotest of settings a bridge never looks out of place, and nothing graces a river quite like a bridge.