David McFetrich - An Encyclopaedia of British Bridges

Abingdon Bridge

deck; but to me was a world of noise, complexity, and heavy plant operating in a seemingly random, unconnected and dysfunctional way. I still drive over that bridge fifty years later: and I now see it for what it is, a small cog in our national infrastructure system. But the joy of bridges and their construction stays with me.

Many years later, I have worked on bridges across the world: from has been calculated to deal with the myriad of challenges the structure will face throughout its working life.

David McFetrich has created a wonderful encyclopaedia. This is not just a list of bridges in this country: it is a social history of a nation continually growing in industrial power and might, of engineers and architects striving to create beauty and purpose out of functionality, and of the real heroes of the tale, the bridges that underpin our very existence.

Everyone has a favourite and I was asked would I pick one? The choice is almost limitless. For scale one could look at the Forth Crossing in Edinburgh or the Medway city, and is an icon about everything that engineering can bring our country.

and underbridges. Many of these are dull, insignificant or copies of standard designs used elsewhere, but there are still many bridges that are interesting in terms of their design, construction or location, or their connections with people or events of history, or simply for their heritage value.

Some of these bridges were described in the general books about British bridges that have been previously published. Unsurprisingly, however, there were many gaps. None of these earlier books, for example, described a single timber , those romantic delights of the North American countryside where youngsters took advantage of the gloom to steal their first kisses. A few such British bridges are recorded in these pages. In addition, this book also includes examples of the many exciting new bridges that have been built since those earlier surveys were published.

The purpose of this book is to give some outline facts about as many interesting bridges and types of bridges as reasonably possible. I have also included a handful of seaside piers (effectively one-ended bridges), the structure of which is often similar to that of bridges. In to keep the length of the book manageable, the entries on individual structures are therefore only short summaries, mostly of information taken from published sources. More information is usually available in these publications. For example, the Civil Engineering Heritage series of books gives additional technical details, Edwin Jervoise generally quotes the sources of historical information about the ancient bridges, de Mar provides many crisp architectural judgements, Wright has some matchless photographs and Wood often has interesting anecdotes about particular bridges. These, and the other writers to whom I refer, together provide a far wider perspective and greater expertise than I could ever encompass on my own. References to these publications are given at the end of each entry, with full details in the bibliography, so that the reader will know where to go to find out more. The sources have mostly been used many times, so the reference details are in abbreviated form, thus AB for Jervoises The Ancient Bridges of England and Wales series. A complete list of these abbreviations is given just before the beginning of the main entries. Where a source has information about a single bridge only, the reference gives the surname of the author (or first author), or short title if anonymous. Since I have made no judgements of my own about the value of the information given in these listed sources, there are occasions when they have no more than a few words about a bridge I have included.

About half the individual entries are accompanied by illustrations; any more would have made the book impractically long and expensive. Most of these are photographs (mainly colour) taken in the last few years, but I have also thought it interesting to include a few recent bridge paintings and drawings, as well as some older black and white photographs from early in the twentieth century and prints from the nineteenth century.