"Bridging the Tees", by Chris Davies

Chris Davies very kindly supplied me with a copy of his book Bridging the Tees (self-published, 2023, 128pp). If you want a copy you will have to go direct to the source: he sells it on eBay for £20 + postage (softcover) or £30 + postage (hardcover) - just search for the title. Alternatively, you can email teesbridges@btinternet.com for details of how to buy it.

The author's aim was to create a book that describes and depicts the roughly fifty bridges that span the River Tees in Northern England. Unusually, the photographs are all taken by drone, giving a different (and very helpful) perspective compared to what many other books offer.

I like this kind of book - a catalogue of the bridges of a single place. I've previously featured examples like Bridging the Tweed, Thames Bridges and Danube-bridges. It's a nice little genre all of its own. It should appeal both to pontists and to those with an interest in the local area and its history.

Davies's book opens with a useful discussion of the River Tees itself, both as a waterway and as a historic border (between the county of Durham and the North Riding of Yorkshire). Several pages discuss the history of bridge (and turnpike) building and maintenance, an important part of understanding how the Tees bridges each came to be, and under what conditions they remain.

The heart of the book lists the bridges from Tees Head to Teesmouth. Each is given the same space: two pages, one page of text facing one page with a photograph of the bridge.

The text gives the salient facts about each bridge, so far as they are known, and something of their history and context. The author has plainly done his research, and it's all clearly written and informative. The river is home to several important historic structures, such as Wynch Bridge, Barnard Castle Bridge, Whorlton Suspension Bridge, Newport Bridge and the Tees Transporter Bridge. Important bridges that no longer exist are mentioned in passing, such as the Stockton and Darlington Railway suspension bridge which proved to be unsafe as soon as it was built. Of the modern bridges, the Infinity Bridge is of particular interest.

Many of the bridges were new to me, including quite a few that seem worth a visit. The author notes that the book was never intended to be an academically comprehensive reference work, but there's little doubt it is the definitive word on its topic. I enjoyed it.

"Thames Bridges" by David C. Ramzan

I do love a bridge book which takes a specific river as its focus, and Thames Bridges (Amberley Books, 96pp, 2022) is a nice addition to this genre.

As far as the Thames goes, it's a pretty crowded field already, with Crossing London's River (1972), Thames Bridges (1973), Thames Crossings: Bridges, Tunnels and Ferries (1981), Cross River Traffic (2005), Thames Bridges: Then and Now (2006), Thames Bridges: from Dartford to the Source (2007), London's Bridges: Crossing the Royal River (2009), Bridges: XXXIV Crossings of the Thames (2011), Crossing the River (2015), All the Thames Bridges from Source to Dartford (2019), Bridges over the River Thames: From the source to the Sea (2020) .... you get the idea! For collectors of bridge books, is there any need for another one about the bridges of the Thames?

Thames Bridges covers the entirety of the river from its source in Gloucestershire to its estuary, passing under over 200 bridges along the way. The book is extensively illustrated, with photographs on almost every page. For some of the minor bridges, the photograph sufficiently illustrates what they are, and their context. The images are a mixture of old and new, and I especially liked the inclusion of the older photographs - so much of the narrative relates to the history of the land, the river, and its crossings, that these help bring that tale to life.

Outside the heart of London, this is the river of Clark's Marlow Suspension Bridge, Brunel's Maidenhead Railway Bridge, the old and new bridges at Runnymede (Lutyens and Arup), Hampton Court Bridge, and of course the mighty Queen Elizabeth II Bridge. It is undeniably an important river, spanned by many undeniably important bridges.

Thames Bridges rarely wastes too many words on any span, and this is definitely not a book that can be considered an in-depth gazetteer. However, it's concisely written, with enough on each structure to grasp key facts, understand their significance, and relate them to the wider history of the area. There is plenty of history, and the book touches on Mesolithic settlements, Roman construction, as well as more modern attempts to reshape the landscape.

I particularly enjoyed the book's sense of pace, which remains unhurried throughout. I think it is best read in order, starting with relatively humble spans and a river that is little more than a stream, and seeing the images of bridges growing very slowly steadily in scale, with tales of increasingly impressive engineering achievement as the book draws you steadily downstream.

For those with a general interest in the Thames, and its history, I can certainly recommend Thames Bridges. It is an accessible, well-written survey. I think that those with greater knowledge of the Thames and its bridges should also enjoy it: it left me with a little bit of a desire to hunt out some maps of the Thames path, as this book would make an excellent companion to a river tour!

Postscript

For some other examples of books in the bridges-by-river genre, here are some that I have reviewed previously:

• Bridging the Tweed (2020)
• Danube-bridges (2018)
• Bridges of Dublin (2017)
• Bridges of Paris (2017)
• The Glow of Paris (2017)
• River Axe Crossings: from Mouth to Source (2012)

"An Encyclopaedia of World Bridges" by David McFetrich

This new book is the follow-up to the author's previous Encyclopaedia of British Bridges, which I reviewed in 2019 (and its predecessor, back in 2010).

It lists and briefly describes over 1200 bridges in over 170 different countries, and there truly is nothing else quite like it.

An Encyclopaedia of World Bridges (Pen and Sword Books, 352pp, 2022 - also available in ePub and Kindle format) starts with an introduction and useful glossary of terms, and finishes with 90 pages of Appendices (of which, more later). However the core of the book is an A-Z of bridges around the world: well-known, not-so-well-known, significant, and curious.

It's smaller in size, and shorter than its predecessor (British Bridges had 444 pages covering over 1600 bridges) but it's still a mammoth undertaking. I've pictured it as part of its family for scale.

The entry for each bridge has a paragraph giving key details, and every page in the main section is illustrated with colour photos, although less than half of the structures have an accompanying image. There is sufficient information in almost every case to answer key questions, and the internet will beckon if an entry particularly piques anyone's curiosity.

Nitpicking Pontists can go through the book looking for surprising omissions (and there are plenty - I will leave this as an exercise for readers to address through this blog's comments function, if they wish!) However, I found I discovered far more that was unknown to me than I felt was missing. There are bridges of every conceivable age, shape and size. The sheer variety gives the lie to the traditional idea that there are really only four types of bridge (beam, arch, suspension, and stayed), with plenty of bridges that defy these simple categorisations.

The Appendices include helpful indexes of bridges by country and according to key participants in construction, obstacle spanned etc. There is an excellent bibliography with over 325 entries (although sadly for true enthusiasts, the sources of information for each bridge are not linked to the bibiliography, as was the case in the British Bridges volume).

The most interesting Appendix offers no less than 76 lists of bridges by various categories, some obvious, some much less so. Here you will find lists of Inhabited Bridges, Highest Bridges, Monorail Bridges, Chain Suspension Bridges etc. But also the less obvious Copy Bridges, Bridges Stranded by Changes in the Course of Rivers, Natural Fibre Bridges, Pilgrim Routes over Bridges and many more. I found this a particularly intriguing section of the book, giving the reader a number of ways to engage with the topic other than simply flipping through from A to Z.

I can heartily recommend the book to anyone with an interest in the history or architecture of bridges. For the world tourist, it could easily have been titled 1001 Bridges to See Before You Die (and a few more), in the vein of the popular bucket-list books aimed at people who lack the time or opportunity to travel.

I must confess I have not actually read every page yet: but it will be sitting on my desk for the foreseeable future, a book to dip into repeatedly.

"Link it! Masterpieces of Bridge Design" by Chris van Uffelen

There ought to be a name for this sort of coffee-table architecture book, churned out seemingly by the dozen every month, heavy on the photos, light on text, and filled with an uncritical gosh-gee-whizz approach to its subject. Publishers like Braun have a formula that works, whether the book is about bungalows, home conversions, factory design, corporate gardens, cinema architecture, bamboo architecture, apartment buildings, or, eventually bridges. And all those examples are just a small part of the output from one author, Chris van Uffelen.

Something similar can be found on architectural websites like Dezeen, Archboom, Architizer and Designboom: an ever-growing torrent of archi-gloss, much of it unedited from designer's self-promotional submissions. And make no mistake: it is responsible for a genuine and substantial dumbing down of how "design fans" perceive the built environment, such that even the worst examples of toxic architectural bloat are slurped down like nectar by an audience increasingly addicted to the hyperreal and incapable of rational analysis.

None of which is to say that I find nothing of value in "Link it! Masterpieces of Bridge Design" (Braun Publishing, 2014, 208pp).

This is essentially a sequel to van Uffelen's "Masterpieces: Bridge Architecture + Design" (2009), which I reviewed when it came out. I say "van Uffelen" as if he wrote these books, but they are actually put together by "Editorial Office van Uffelen", who provide publishers with the complete ready-made coffee-table service, even if much of that is simply emailing suitable architects and asking them to submit their marketing material. A disclaimer at the end of the book makes clear that if anything is incorrect, it's the fault of the design firms, not editors or publisher.

So: there's almost nothing in the book that you can't find freely on the internet, and essentially you're paying to fund the marketing efforts of the designers who participate in the publication. And yet ... there are plenty of structures and projects in this book that I was unaware of and intrigued to discover.

"Link It!" includes a smattering of generally remarkable bridges that should be well-known to dedicated pontists: Dublin's Samuel Beckett Bridge; the Millau Viaduct; the Hovenring; the Passerelle Simone-de-Beauvoir; Calgary's Peace Bridge; Jerusalem's Bridge of Strings; etc. I am sure these will be interesting and attractive examples of bridge design for the non-specialist (who are obviously the book's core audience).

Beyond that, there are bridges in China, Austria, Germany, Canada, the Netherlands, Belgium, Denmark, Indonesia which are interesting, in some cases attractive, and often have features that a designer could take inspiration from, or in others spot details to avoid. The quality of the designs is, inevitably, uneven, and each bridge has minimal explanation and certainly nothing in the way of criticism. There are, thankfully, only a handful of complete stinkers amongst those that have actually been built.

I mention that because the book also features a number of unbuilt bridges, generally with little or no detail on when they may be built, or whether they will happen at all. Some clearly won't, like the daft "Bouncing Bridge" proposed in Paris, the deliberately conceptual "Hydraspan" proposed for San Francisco, or the notorious Kazimierz Ludwinow Pedestrian Bridge, in Krakow, Poland.

There are a few designs which I would hope even the more cynical pontist would find appealing. Examples include the Wupperbrucke in Leverkusen, Germany; the timber truss Enniger Bridge in Switzerland; the Phyllis J. Tilley Memorial Footbridge in Texas; and the Green School Millennium Bridge, in Bali. Sadly, it's not hard to think of plenty of other fine bridges that didn't make the cut.

The photographs throughout the book are generally of an excellent quality that show off the subject matter to its best, although they are often the "day-before-opening" images beloved of the architectural press, showing the bridges pristine and generally unsullied even by people or traffic.

In summary, it's best to see this sort of book as a glossy brochure, assembled without any expert curation; but which can still provide some pleasant browsing if not taken too seriously.

"The Architecture of British Bridges" by Ronald Yee

Where does engineering end and architecture begin? That's the question I was left with after reading Ronald Yee's wide-ranging and informative "The Architecture of British Bridges" (Crowood Press, 2021, 224 pages).

Books on the bridges of Britain tend to fall into three camps: big national surveys; more selective surveys following the author's specific tastes; and studies of niche topics like railway bridges. The new book by specialist bridge architect Ronald Yee surprised me by coming closest to the first camp.

The core of the book is a survey of bridges from around the UK, not comprehensive but very well-chosen. This is bookended by an introductory chapter on the architecture of bridges, and two final chapters on bridge parapets and lighting. There is a useful index but nothing in the way of references or bibliography.

Since much of the first chapter is given over to a layperson's guide to different structural forms, there are actually only three or four pages which specifically tackle the architecture of bridges. I had definitely hoped to read more about this, given the author's own area of expertise. There is a bit of a gap in the market here, as most books and articles about bridge aesthetics are written by engineers, not the architects who now play such a key role in bridge design.

Yee's own architectural approach is one that is very closely aligned to the engineering: he is not one for the outlandish or decorative. His approach to the book's topic is to "show, not tell", allowing the idea of good bridge architecture to emerge through example rather than through a didactic approach.

The message I got from the main part of the book is that Yee sees architecture and engineering as being to some extent complementary and to some extent inseparable. Bridges from all periods are described straightforwardly, with the same attention given to how they work (structurally), as to their place in history, their visual appearance, or their local context. Yes, they may have specific architectural attributes (the description of Chester's Grosvenor Bridge includes its "archivolts of red Peckforton sandston ashlar" and "a frieze and cornice with rectangular modillions", amongst other features; Stirling's Forthside Footbridge's "visual effect is gymnastic and an undeniably spectacular sight"), but these are never anything other than part of the wider story.

This leaves many of the individual bridge entries a little dry, even where the bridges themselves can be seen to have some degree of special interest. In other cases, Yee ventures more of an opinion and I'd certainly like to have seen more of this.

The key strength of the book lies in how well the entries have been curated, and illustrated with generally excellent photographs. Given that Yee is well known for his sketches and drawings, I'd love to have seen more of those - they are few and far between.

I have read many books about bridges in Britain, but I still found plenty here that I was unaware of or which has not been celebrated previously in print. It surveys an excellent range of often exemplary bridges, at all scales great and small.

Presenting the bridges in a gazetteer format, structured by materials and bridge typology, does mean that much is left unsaid about architecture: the way in which bridge design in Britain moved through phases of craft construction, master builders, the era of "scientific" engineering, and the slow and then more rapid rise of architects as the leaders of the design narrative. Yee's book therefore leaves room for some very different treatments of the subject, and hopefully others will step into the breach.

"Transporter Bridges: an Illustrated History" by John Hannavy

Transporter Bridges by John Hannavy (Pen and Sword, 268pp, 2020) is, I think, the first book to bring these unusual structures together in a comprehensive record. Subtitled "An Illustrated History", this is indeed a highly pictorial and well-detailed account of what was a very short-lived type of structure. Nineteen were built between 1893 and 1916, before the growth in motor traffic made them a less attractive form of river crossing.

The concept of a transporter bridge dated back to the mid-19th century. At a time when tall boats still used major rivers, there were essentially four ways to transport vehicles across such an obstacle. Ferry boats were common, but could only carry a few vehicles at a time, and could be unreliable. Fixed bridges were the highest-capacity, most reliable solution, but expensive both in construction and land-take. Moveable bridges were, in their earlier years, complex and expensive, and suitable only for moderate spans. The transporter bridge could cover longer spans, but carrying loads more in line with those on a ferry.

Hannavy documents early proposals for transporter bridges in detail: H.N. Houghton's idea for a railway crossing in New York (1852); J.W. Morse's plan for a similar crossing (1869); Charles Smith's proposal in Middlesbrough (1873); and others.

However, the first proposal to be built was the Viscaya bridge at Portugalete near Bilbao, completed in 1893. The designers Alberto Palacio and Ferdinand Arnodin took out patents for the transporter concept, and Arnodin went on to complete eight more such bridges.

Hannavy's history covers most of the transporter bridges with relative brevity - I say relative as they all get plenty of detail. He takes the story right up to recent decades where new transporter bridges have been proposed (e.g. at Royal Victoria Dock, Nantes, Marseilles and Brest). Of these, the Royal Victoria Dock Bridge is the only that was built, but its transporter gondola was never installed.

Beyond the basic history, the book discusses the "Systeme Arnodin" in detail, and there are chapters covering five of the few surviving transporter spans at length as fine examples of the type: the Viscaya bridge, Newport Transporter Bridge, the Tees Transporter Bridge, Crosfield's Warrington Transporter Bridge (and its now-demolished sibling), and the Rochefort Bridge. A further chapter considers the Widnes-Runcorn Bridge, which was closed in 1961. All five of the transporter bridges ever built in the UK are therefore given close attention.

Each of these is covered thoroughly, with quotes from contemporary journals and an excellent variety of historic and recent photographs. Hannavy's research has clearly been in-depth. The chapter on the Rochefort bridge is particularly interesting, as it mainly documents the massive refurbishment project undertaken to prolong the life of the bridge and to restore it closer to the original Arnodin design.

In addition to the main chapters, the book concludes with a series of one-page summaries of all the known transporter bridges both built and unbuilt.

This is, without any doubt, the definitive book on transporter bridges, and essential for anyone with an interest in them. More generally, it should appeal to those with a broader interest in historic bridges. It is not entirely faultless, unfortunately, as there is no bibliography and no referencing of any sort. This is a shame for any serious researchers, but probably not a big issue for the more general reader.

"Bill Brown's Bridges" by David Boxall

I've remarked in the past how few books there are on the great bridge designers of the 20th century, other than one or two of the earliest decades such as Robert Maillart and Othmar Ammann. Even many bridge design professionals will struggle to name designers comparable with the likes of the nineteenth century's Telford, Stephenson and Brunel.

In the 20th century, the increase in scientific understanding of structural design and consequent specialisation made large projects more and more the province of a broad team rather than a singular man and his support office. This was especially the case where the scale or sensitivity of projects required decision-making to be collective rather than dictatorial.

Of course, it was always the case that the big names were often just those who fronted up the work of a broader team. That's nothing new, although it does sometimes seem as if in the late 20th and early 21st century the only entities that can be credited for a bridge design are the engineering corporation or the architect. Individual engineers, not so much.

With all that in mind, I was keen to read "Bill Brown's Bridges" by David Boxall (301 Publishing, 2015, 148pp, available from b2.co.uk), a biography of one of Britain's most successful suspension bridge engineers, who worked on the Forth Road Bridge, Severn Bridge, Erskine Bridge, Humber Bridge, two bridges over the Bosphorus straits, and on unbuilt proposals for the Messina Strait Bridge. Brown has been credited with the aerodynamic box girder design for the Severn Bridge, which radically changed the economy and feasibility of major suspension bridges.

Boxall runs a marketing and design agency, but was previously manager of Brown Beech Associates. This book is very much an "official biography", produced with the cooperation of Brown's wife Celia, and its aim is to document and cement the legacy of one of Britain's most successful bridge engineers.

Born in south Wales in 1928, Brown studied engineering at Southampton and then completed a PhD at Imperial College. His family background was technical in that his grandfather and father were both cabinetmakers. On graduating from Imperial in 1951, Brown was fortunate to go straight into employment with the engineer Gilbert Roberts at Freeman Fox.

Roberts was one of the top engineers of the day, responsible for the structural design of the Dome of Discovery for the Festival of Britain. He had worked with Sir Ralph Freeman on the design of the Sydney Harbour Bridge (1932), and on a suspension bridge on the Zambia - Zimbabwe border (1939).

Over the course of eighteen years until Roberts retired in 1969, Brown was exposed to progressively more challenging engineering and greater levels of responsibility. By the time he became a partner in the Freeman Fox firm in 1970, he had worked on some truly exceptional projects.

His early years included work on major cranes, and a major steel arch structure, Adomi Bridge in the Ghana (1957). Developments in welding and higher-strength structural steels during the 1950s were to prove essential for what would follow in the 1960s.

Freeman Fox's design team, led by Gilbert Roberts, were appointed (alongside Mott, Hay and Anderson) to develop designs for both the Forth Road Bridge (1964) and Severn Bridge (1966). These were spans well in excess of the largest suspension bridge recently built in the UK (Tamar Bridge, 1961). It had been two decades since the collapse of the ill-fated Tacoma Narrows bridge, but aerodynamic concerns remained high in engineers' minds.

Both the Severn and Forth bridges were initially designed to be built using the truss decks then seen as the norm. Fortuitously, an accident in wind tunnel testing during design of the Severn bridge led to a model being mostly destroyed. The book recounts that for the replacement model Brown sketched out a very different slender box-girder geometry, that could be built quickly out of plywood and used for the remaining testing. Severn went on to become the first large suspension bridge built using an aerodynamically stable box girder, a major innovation.

What the book doesn't say is that the slender box-girder concept was not new to the Severn crossing: German engineer Fritz Leonhardt had proposed the same idea for the Tagus suspension bridge in 1960, albeit with two separated box girders rather than just one. Indeed, much of the development of welding and stiffened steel plates for bridge construction had been undertaken in Germany.

The book goes big on Brown's role here (and elsewhere) as an innovator, but says nothing about the Severn Bridge's legacy of problems: fatigue in the inclined suspension hangers, issues with the quality of welded plate, and the need for expensive strengthening. Innovation is never without risk, and on this scale, the consequences can be significant.

Box girders were also used by Freeman Fox for the nearby Wye Bridge, the Erskine Bridge, and for the West Gate Bridge in Melbourne, Australia. The latter collapsed, killing 35 people, in October 1970, and Brown was amongst the senior Freeman Fox staff summoned to testify at the subsequent inquiry in Australia. Boxall records partner Dr Oleg Kerensky's view that the collapse was the fault of the contractors, and that the design had been sound. This is misleading: Freeman Fox's design calculations and site supervision were condemned as completely inadequate by the inquiry.

At the time the West Gate Bridge collapsed, Freeman Fox had already been working on plans for a new suspension bridge across the Bosphorus for three years. This adopted both the aerofoil deck from the Severn Bridge, and also the triangulated layout for the suspension hangers, an idea which had seen little if any use elsewhere.

Completed in 1973, the first Bosphorus Bridge was the longest span outside the USA at the time it was built, and is quite possibly Roberts and Brown's finest achievement. Freeman Fox took on significant overall responsibility for guiding and supervising the project, not just its design, and Brown relocated to Istanbul for most of the construction phase.

By the time of the even longer Second Bosphorus Bridge (1988), Brown had left Freeman Fox and set up his own firm, Brown Beech Associates (in a huff, to paraphrase the book's account). His role this time was as the client's technical advisor, rather than as designer. This bridge adopted conventional vertical hangers, unlike the triangulated ones used on Severn and the previous Bosphorus span, and a few years later the latter bridge had its hangers replaced with vertical cables as well.

In his later years, Brown worked as a consultant on a number of structures, including the Messina Strait Bridge and the Storebaelt East Bridge, both developing concept design proposals and advising on more specific issues such as cable-spinning techniques. He passed away aged 76, in 2005. The book includes a gallery of images of nine key structures that he worked on, and they truly are an incredible CV.

I think it's fair to say that this official biography is a partial account - broader and more balanced accounts of the development of twentieth century suspension bridges are available elsewhere. However, the book is well written, well illustrated and well presented. There are dozens of great photographs of some truly epic bridges, and it's great to see a twentieth-century British bridge engineer recognised in this way.

There was a period from the completion of the Severn Bridge to the completion of the Humber Bridge when it appeared that Britain had firmly re-established itself in the vanguard of long-span bridge design, and as part of the Freeman Fox team Bill Brown was clearly central to that.

"Bridging the Tweed" by Jim Lyon

Hello readers. I'm back. Did I miss anything while I was away?

Anyway ...

Bridging the Tweed (self-published, ISBN 978-1-5272-5384-1, 290pp) surveys the bridges of the River Tweed from its source in the Lowther Hills in southern Scotland, to Berwick-upon-Tweed, where it passes into the North Sea.

The author Jim Lyon was born in nearby Hawick, and spent many years as a civil engineer before retiring to the Tweed valley. For a time he worked as a bridge engineer for Maunsell, both in the UK and overseas.

His book took over a decade to write, and describing it as a "labour of love" would hardly do it justice. In addition to detailed accounts of every bridge over the river (including those no longer existing), it diverts (at length) to cover a wide range of related subjects, including historic towns, features of interest, and historic personalities. From time to time, it also wanders briefly up tributaries of the Tweed, allowing it to draw in fine bridges such as the Roxburgh Viaduct Footbridge and Twizel Bridge.

Some readers will love the frequent digressions while others may find them an irritant - it's certainly the case that no stone is left unturned in this book.

The book immediately makes clear what a remarkable heritage of bridges there is along the Tweed, and I was a little startled to discover that I've only reported on three of them, the suspension bridges at Gattonside and Dryburgh, and the Union Chain Bridge.

Many of the bridges are of course prosaic, but even amongst the lesser-known bridges, the author explains how a bridge originally intended to be built in South Sudan came to span the Tweed, discusses a bridge used mainly by sheep, and documents a plastic composite bridge made from recycled milk bottles and car bumpers.

Particularly notable bridges featured in the book include the old bridge at Peebles, the pioneering Kingsmeadows, Galashiels and Dryburgh bridges, Leaderfoot Viaduct, Kalemouth Suspension Bridge, Kelso Bridge, Coldstream Bridge, and the trio of bridges at Berwick. Amongst many bridges that were new to me I'd highlight the unusual and innovative Woodend Footbridge, the charming Ashiestiel Bridge, and the impressive shallow arches of Mertoun Road Bridge.

As just one example of the many bridge-related tales in the book, there is plenty of detail on how celebrated architect Basil Spence and world-famous engineer Ralph Freeman designed but failed to complete a bridge in Peebles, quite a sorry tale of hubris and muddle.

Characters who appear in the book include many famous bridge-builders such as Brown, Stephenson, Telford, Rennie, Smeaton, Adam Clark, Fairbairn, Robert and William Mylne, John Miller, and of course the unfortunate Ralph Freeman. Amongst the others who have played a part in Tweed history (including its bridges) are Robert Burns, Sir Walter Scott, Earl Haig, Mary Somerville, and Sir Thomas Makdougall Brisbane. They each get a turn in the spotlight, alongside a lesser-known cast such as the county surveyor whose mother fell victim to an axe-murderer, and the Johannesburg mayor who funded a new bridge across the river.

For a self-published book, it is generally of very good quality, well written and illustrated with plenty of colour photographs and images. There are occasional gremlins such as misplaced photo captions, and although there is a comprehensive bibliography, the lack of referencing is a disappointment - it looks like the draft text included references but these were omitted in the published version.

My only other quibble is that there is (relatively) little about the river itself, its wildlife or ecology. The majority of the book focuses on human artefacts and human goings-on. Nonetheless, this book should be valuable both to armchair pontists and those interested in the history of the Tweed Valley. It is not widely available, but at the time of writing this post, Main Street Books have it for sale online.

Some recent books about bridges

I have a couple of posts on recent bridge visits in preparation, but meanwhile here's a quick round-up of a few books about bridges that have recently arrived at Pontist Towers ...

From Brycgstow to Bristol in 45 Bridges by Jeff Lucas and Thilo Gross (Bristol Books, 144pp, ISBN 978-1-90944-618-2, 2019) is a catalogue of all the bridges spanning Bristol's main waterways (at least, those that can be crossed by foot), presented in the order of a possible walking tour (albeit quite a long walk). The city is mentioned as Brycgstow in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, translated as "place by the bridge", sited at the confluence of the Rivers Frome and Avon. Over the years, it expanded as a port, especially after the creation in the early 19th century of the New Cut to divert the main river, turning the remainder into the "Floating Harbour".

Inevitably, a profusion of bridges resulted, and Jeff Lucas shares their stories with his own photographs in this book. It's a general interest book, so more of a travel guide or social history than a book on architecture or engineering, which is fine. The idea to write the book arose from an article by mathematician Thilo Gross applying the Königsberg Bridge Problem to Bristol, and a chapter by Gross explains this topological network puzzle in more detail.

Thomas Telford's remarkable bridge over the Menai Straits was opened in 1826, so to find an excuse for a bicentennial history, Menai Suspension Bridge: The First 200 Years (Menai Heritage, 206pp, ISBN 978-0-9932351-3-9, 2019), the author Bob Daimond has had to date events to the laying of the first stone, in August 1819. Spanning 176m, this was the longest bridge in the world when completed, a tremendous achievement given the state of engineering knowledge at the time.

Daimond's book is a definitive history of Telford's masterpiece, and very well illustrated with extracts from archive drawings, photographs etc. It discusses in detail the planning, testing, design and construction of the bridge, and its subsequent history including storm-induced failures, alterations and eventual reconstruction in the mid-20th century. As a history of engineering it is exemplary; my only complaint would be that it has little to say beyond that, on the bridge's cultural status, on the people who use it, and on its place in the wider history of suspension bridges.

Bridges by David Ross (Amber Books, 224pp, ISBN 978-1-78274-576-1, 2018) is essentially just a coffee-table photo book, a collection of photographs (with short descriptive text), arranged chronologically. The bridges are from all around the world and the photos are from a variety of photographers, so there's no special theme or style. Nonetheless, I found it a very enjoyable book. The photos are very well-chosen, and well presented, often across two pages. There are plenty of familiar bridges, plus quite a few that are less well-known, or were to me, anyway. A real effort has been made to span the globe, and the result is a fine reminder of the variety and ingenuity that bridge-builders have brought to their art over many centuries.

Ann-Mary Paterson is the great-grand-niece of William and Murdoch Paterson, two of the engineers responsible for construction of various railway lines radiating from Inverness in Scotland in the late 19th century. Her 2017 book, Spanning the Gaps: Highland Railway Bridges and Viaducts (Highland Railway Society, 96pp, ISBN 978-0-9927311-1-3; my copy was purchased from Old School Beauly) describes the history of the Highland Railways, with a focus on the structures that carried traffic through often quite difficult terrain.

The book is very well illustrated, with a mixture of historic and modern photographs, and several historic drawings. There are some informative photographs of construction, and some following various disasters, such as the 1989 collapse of the Ness Viaduct. There are some fascinating and impressive bridges along these railway routes: Culloden Viaduct, William Fairbairn's box girder bridges across the Rivers Findhorn and Spey; the timber Aultnaslanach Viaduct; Findhorn Viaduct; swing bridges over the Caledonian Canal; ornate castellated viaducts at Blair Atholl and elsewhere; and many more.

"Tower Bridge: 1894 to date. Operations Manual"

Haynes Publishing must be best known for their car and motorcycle maintenance manuals, but they have increasingly branched out into other territories, with recent publications including "The Human DNA Manual" and the "Milky Way Owner's Workshop Manual". In the areas of architecture and infrastructure they have published Manuals for "London Underground", "The Great Pyramid", "Hadrian's Wall" and now "Tower Bridge" (188pp, 2019, ISBN 978-1-78521-649-7).

It is, of course, Tower Bridge's 125th anniversary this year, and this new book by engineer John Smith joins books by Kenneth Powell and Harry Cory Wright published to mark the occasion. A comparison against the Powell book is inevitable, and although there is plenty of overlap between the two, there are some very clear differences.

Powell's book has, on the whole, the better photographs, and is a much easier read for a non-engineer, with much more detail on the context and a strong narrative surrounding those who designed and built the structure. As befits its publication by Haynes, Smith's book has far more detail on the construction work, the bridge components, and its operating technology.

The early sections of the book give a fairly comprehensive account of the somewhat tortuous process by which the bridge was eventually conceived, including the sometimes ingenious and sometimes monstrous alternative designs put forward.

The real dive into detail begins in the third chapter, documenting the eight separate contracts which were let for construction of the bridge, dividing up the works required for the piers and abutments, approach structures, metal superstructure, masonry superstructure, hydraulic machinery, paving and lighting. No client today would take this approach, retaining the entire liability for integrating a complex construction process on their own, but when the bridge was built there would have been no single contractor with the capability to do it all.

It's interesting here to see the extent to which the contract conditions used in the 1890s are very similar to those still in widespread use at the end of the 20th century. Extracts from the very first contract (for the piers and abutments) make this clear: the power of the resident engineer, payment retention, liquidated damages etc. The unrealistic timescales demanded by the client, and unrealistic prices submitted to win the work, also remain familiar today.

The core of the book consists of four chapters which itemise every single element of the bridge, describing them in exquisite detail and explaining just how every piece fits together. At times, the level of detail presented, with dimensions, plate thicknesses, etc, is numbing rather than interesting. For the engineering reader, there are several interesting extracts from drawings included, and the comprehensive nature of the text does mean that there appear to be no significant details left unmentioned.

There are many aspects of the bridge explained here which are essentially absent from the account in Powell's book. One example is the presence of stiffening girders concealed within the balustrades of the southern span, which ensure that water pipes carried across this span were protected against excessive movement. Another is the explanation of the arrangement of the high-level footways, the suspension bridge ties which pass through these, and the additional suspension cable added in 1960 to relieve the footway girders of the weight of those ties. These elements of the bridge are not immediately apparent to the casual visitor, but Smith's text, photographs and drawings make everything clear.

The book contains one excellent cutaway diagram showing how the components of the bridge fit together, and it's a shame there weren't more. My over-riding impression, after reading this book, is quite how complex Tower Bridge really is, and how well it merits this wealth of information. It really is an engineering masterpiece, whatever anyone may think of its architectural merits.

The book concludes with biographies of the main participants in the bridge's design and construction, and a detailed timeline of alterations and maintenance work in the period from 1894 to date. One of three appendices gives a detailed breakdown of the author's calculations of loads and forces in the bridge's key structural elements.

I couldn't, with any honesty, recommend this book to anyone who is not an engineer, but it is so detailed that it will probably remain a key reference work for Tower Bridge for the indefinite future. It is clear, thorough (sometimes too much so!) and well-illustrated throughout.

"An Encyclopaedia of British Bridges" by David McFetrich

David McFetrich's "An Encyclopaedia of British Bridges" (Pen and Sword Books, ISBN 978-1-52675-295-6, 2019, 444pp) is the 2nd edition (with a very slight change in title) of a volume previously published in 2010.

It updates and expands its predecessor with one-third more structures discussed across 1,600 individual entries (previously 1,350), and a page-count increased by a quarter. Size does matter in an effort like this - it can never possibly be comprehensive, but an already impressive reference work has been made significantly more valuable.

The additions are from all periods of history, bridges both ancient and modern, and many of them are structures I'd never heard of. Picking the letter K at random, the bridges added are Karlsruhe Friendship Bridge, various Kew Gardens bridges, Kildrummy Castle Bridge, Glasgow's Kingston Bridge, and Knostrop Weir Footbridge. One of these is an inexplicable omission from the previous volume, and the others are all worthy inclusions.

The core of the book remains a well-illustrated alphabetised compendium of notable bridges (I should declare an interest here, as some images in the new volume have been provided by the Happy Pontist). Descriptions vary in detail but always convey the core facts and usually offer interesting information or context. Some entries have been expanded from the previous edition. The Encyclopaedia is frequently my first point of reference when investigating British bridges, and helpfully includes cross-references to other sources and a thorough bibliography.

The book is topped-and-tailed with a brief history of Britain's transport infrastructure, details of how bridges work, a fine glossary, lists of record-breaking bridges and a very helpful geographic index. A length "miscellany" puts the bridges in many different contexts, covering not just "timber bridges" or "suspension bridges" but less obvious subjects such as "tea house bridges", "relocated bridges", "finback bridges" and "ugly bridges".

Every time I open the book, I discover something new, and I imagine most readers will find the same. If you already own the first edition, it may be difficult to justify this new one, unless your interest in the subject is serious. If you don't, and you are at all interested in British bridges, I think this book is indispensable. If you are involved in the bridge design or engineering community, you may even find some of your own bridges here - I certainly did!

An Encyclopaedia of British Bridges is currently available at a discounted price of £54 (postage free in the UK) from the publisher, and also on Kindle via Amazon.

"Ordsall Chord - Manchester's Missing Link"

This is the third and last of a set of "souvenir" books I'm featuring which document recent major UK bridge projects.

The Ordsall Chord is quite a different beast to either the Mersey Gateway or the Queensferry Crossing, with the largest bridge span a relatively modest 89m. The Chord is a new railway connection linking Manchester's Piccadilly and Victoria stations, and although there were evidently plenty of bridge works involved, the nature of this book makes clear that it was more of a multi-disciplinary project in nature. The civil engineering construction accounts for only 38 pages, with substantial chapters given over to other topics such as railway signalling, track and overhead electrification.

The Ordsall Chord - Manchester's Missing Link (Mercury Group Limited, 2018, 168pp) was written by members of the project delivery team, and this gives it quite a different slant to either of the other two books I've featured, with a strong focus not just on the project objectives or the construction efforts, but more material on how the project was procured and organised. I think this book is therefore potentially of more interest to professionals than the general public, although I'm sure there are many railway enthusiasts who'd enjoy it.

The foreword to the Mersey Gateway book is by a politician, while the Queensferry Crossing book has multiple forewords from different perspectives. The Ordsall Chord book is introduced by the lead director from the delivery organisation, who introduces a theme that runs throughout the book, "great people working collaboratively". I think it's a interesting that this needs to be highlighted - it suggests that the construction industry is often populated by not-so-great people, not working collaboratively, so that anything else is an anomaly.

The main part of the book opens with a short chapter explaining the history of the site (the project runs right across part of the historic 1830 Liverpool and Manchester Railway), and the need for the new railway line.

The heritage theme continues into a chapter exploring the project's constraints and how the design was developed. This is a better attempt at explaining design issues than in either of the other two books, crediting and naming specific individuals rather than submerging them in corporate anonymity, exploring the challenges of working amongst numerous protected heritage structures, explaining how visual sense was made from a disparate variety of structural forms, and of how the architecture and engineering work in conjunction. The focus is very much on the architecture, but that's a relief after seeing it largely ignored in the other books.

A thorough chapter discusses the Northern Hub Alliance, a contractual partnership which brought client Network Rail together with their contractors to deliver the scheme. My experience is that Alliance arrangements are unusual in UK transport infrastructure, and while I found this chapter very interesting as a professional, I can imagine some readers' eyes glazing over.

The main message I take away from the chapter on civil engineering is the difficulty of building a project of this sort in a constrained urban environment. This is reflected in the way a large number of smaller structural elements were constructed in a "piecemeal" manner, with plenty of off-site fabrication and precasting.

The text never delves into the level of detail that would satisfy a bridge engineer, and I was left with a large number of questions, while recognising that I'm not really the main audience for such a book. The word "success" is used relentlessly, but fortunately leavened with a few short acknowledgements of real problems encountered during the project, such as issues with the stressing of the network arch bridge hangers.

The remaining chapters cover the other railway disciplines and (briefly) the project's outcome and legacy. I'm no trainspotter, but I think I did learn a few new things from reading these.

It's very well-illustrated throughout, with plenty of photographs.

The book is available for £25 plus £5 postage from a dedicated website, or from Amazon.

Further information:

• Official project website