Pedestrian Bridges of London: A Short Guide

Updated 27th July 2014 - THIS OFFER IS NOW CLOSED (see below)

I mentioned this little booklet recently. It was given free to attendees at the recent Footbridge 2014 conference in London. It is based on (much shortened) articles about significant footbridges in London, with all text and photos contributed by The Happy Pontist.

There are twenty pages, covering the following bridges: Bridge of Aspiration; Challenge of Materials Footbridge; Millennium Bridge; Golden Jubilee Footbridges; Chelsea Bridge Wharf Link Footbridge; St Saviours Dock Bridge; Royal Victoria Dock Bridge; South Quay Footbridge; West India Quay Bridge; Plashet School Footbridge; Stratford Town Centre Link; Green Bridge; Rolling Bridge; Merchant's Square Footbridge; Sackler Crossing; Xstrata Treetop Walkway.

The booklet also provides some (very) brief details on significant bridges and structures encountered along the River Thames, the conference's Gala Dinner boat cruise route.

I have eight of these booklets left over from the conference, and I will post them to the first people to email me (happypontist at gmail dot com), having first made a donation to Bridges to Prosperity. I wrote about B2P and their excellent efforts to build low-cost footbridges in the developing world, way back in 2009.

The booklets will never be reprinted, so this is a unique chance to get a copy.

It's very simple:

1. Donate to B2P whatever amount you wish, although an absolute minimum of US$5 please.
2. Email me your address and a copy of your B2P donation receipt - if you want to keep any details private, just take a screenshot and cut out any private bits.
3. This is a bit silly since I blog anonymously, but I will sign the booklet on request. Minimum US$10 donation for a signed copy.
4. I will post you a copy of the booklet, free of charge. Please bear in mind that I am covering international postage when you decide how much to donate to B2P!
5. I will post here when all copies are gone, but there can be no refunds - if you donate, and I've run out of copies, never mind, at least B2P will benefit!
6. Did you attend the conference and already have a copy of the booklet? That's great, but please consider donating to B2P anyway, they're a great organisation.

Updated 27th July 2014 - THIS OFFER IS NOW CLOSED

All the spare booklets are now allocated, many thanks to those who have donated to Bridges to Prosperity! I have also made a donation myself, and together we have raised US$350 to support their excellent work around the world. I'm absolutely delighted to have helped create this opportunity.

Pontist in print

I'm currently visiting Footbridge 2014, and very pleased to note that the Happy Pontist is now in print for the first time. All the attendees at the event are being provided with a short guide to the pedestrian bridges of London in booklet form, with all the text and images provided from past blog posts here (edited for length!)

If you're attending the conference, and want to read more about any of the bridges featured in the booklet, just google "Happy Pontist" and the name of the bridge, and you should find a link to the relevant post.

Bridges in Japan

I don't know how many of my readers also follow the Japanese bridge photography blog, Tabikappa, but they've covered some truly brilliant ultra-lightweight footbridges in the last few days, so I'd really recommend you take a look. I hope they don't mind me re-posting one of their photographs here as a taster! My three favourites: Monkey Nishikawa, Nishikawa / KH Masago, Nishikawa / Nagai.

New bridges blogs

Now that Tallbridgeguy has sadly retired, it's good to discover more bridges blogs out there.

I've added Life, On a Bridged to the list of blogs on the Happy Pontist's main page. Based in Connecticut, USA, it offers some very interesting reports on bridges in that area and beyond.

I haven't added Bridgewright to my main page as it seems to cross my areas of interest so obliquely, but it is still well worth a look. It's by a specialist in traditional bridge carpentry.

Blogs roundup

It's time for a quick roundup of what you can read about bridges on various other blogs, as something of a stopgap before I embark on a set of reports covering nearly a dozen bridges in the Merseyside area, as well as catching up on several posts that I've had gestating for some time now.

Tallbridgeguy and Bridge Photo of the Day form something of a triumvirate of the more prolific bridge blogs (together with this one, of course).

TBG is the most diverse, with everything from off-the-wall design concepts through to the sort of practical day-to-day issues that actually take up an engineer's time. It even strays away from bridges quite a bit - I have a self-imposed rule not to do so (simply because I spend more than enough time on bridges without getting distracted!) TBG also writes the Google Sketchup for Engineers blog.

BPHOD is the Ronseal of the two blogs, often featuring bridges chosen from fact-finding trips around the world to areas which have been hit by earthquakes, which in recent months means India and New Zealand.

Tabikappa is a similar blog from Japan, although with a focus on photographs of bridges, hardly ever much text. They've been quiet recently, but returned with a quite marvellous double lenticular truss bridge.

ArchDaily chucks out posts like bullets from a machine gun, corpuscles of architectural gloss splattered across an internet canvas. They featured a bridge recently, Caltrava's Bac de Roda highway bridge, one of the Spanish designer's earlier and hence marginally more orthodox designs.

It's not a blog, but a monthly email, but Bill Harvey's Bridge of the Month is often interesting. Bill is an expert in masonry arch bridges, and generally finds an interesting technical angle on the bridges he covers. The most recent issue features Pyne Bridge, a very unusual set of brick arch spans supported on granite columns.

I can also recommend Bridgink's Bridge of the Month, a monthly "name that bridge" quiz with a book given away to one of the successful entrants every month.

Finally, tired of all these bridges? Perhaps you need to refresh yourself with the blog from the British Water Tower Appreciation Society. Or lift your head up high with the Pylon of the Month blog.

Blogwatch

I haven't done a roundup of what you could read on other blogs (if you weren't too busy reading this one) for some time, so here goes ...

As always, my favourite of the bridge blogs is Tabikappa, who seems to post a seemingly inexhaustible supply of minor suspension bridges in his native Japan. My recent favourite was a marvel of bridge-building on the cheap, and I also very much liked this example of a bridge where you sit in a basket and pull yourself across (the only UK example I can think of, in Glen Etive, is called a "bucket bridge").

Bridge Photo of the Day is currently documenting an extensive trip around the spans of Brisbane, Sydney and elsewhere in Australia, including the bizarre Kurilpa Bridge and, of course, the Sydney Harbour Bridge.

I'm always slightly amazed that someone is letting the author of Always Civil post close-up photos of bridges he has recently inspected, complete with shoddy defects, but it's great that they are, as the blog is a rare public representation of how bridge engineering is for most civil engineers: the day-to-day maintenance issues that pay the bills and are a world away from the fancy footbridges niche market.

I've linked several times recently to Frame and Form, a Spanish blog (with English translation) about bridge and structural design. They've recently been providing links and images for the structures shortlisted in the Footbridge 2011 Awards, but often cover other interesting topics, like tensairity bridges or the work of Thomas Heatherwick.

Tallbridgeguy has a wide-ranging interest in bridge design, and writes probably the most personal and personable blog on the subject. Recent posts are a mix of observation on the architectural and engineering worlds, thoughts (and videos) on using the Sketchup software for bridge visualisation, and a few entirely original bridge concepts (daft yet endearing).

The last blog I'll mention this time is the Bridgehunter's Chronicles, part of the movement in the US to preserve historic bridges (often metal trusses), many of which have limited legal protection and are threatened with neglect or reconstruction. The Chronicles often include lengthy, detailed reports on bridge preservation news, as well as from the author's own bridge visits (currently covering the Schleswig-Holstein area in Germany).

Blogwatch

Time is still keeping me from longer posts, so instead, what are the other bridges blogs up to?

Bridge Photo of the Day has returned after an absence of several months, with a series of wintry Alaskan bridges, although sadly it looks like the archive of photos from before their hiatus has disappeared.

My perennial favourite, Tabikappa, seems to visit an inexhaustible supply of interesting bridges in Japan, particularly pedestrian suspension bridges. There was a series of great postings on particularly ramshackle examples that I've mentioned before, but more recent ones have included several unusual asymmetric spans.

Tallbridgeguy is one of the few blogs to discuss bridge design rather than just depict it, and has recently used various posts to focus on the theme of sustainability in bridge engineering.

Frame and Form is an irregular Spanish blog (with English translation). I particularly enjoyed two recent posts on bridges designed by Anta, which are unusual yet simple and attractive.

Bridgehunter provides a database of historic bridge structures in the United States, campaigns for their preservation and restoration, and always makes for interesting reading. Recent highlights include their Top Twelve threatened but saveable bridges, as well as a roundup of preservation success stories from 2010.

From Korea, Bridgeworld publishes a wide variety of short features on bridges, often unusual ones. I particularly liked the stressed ribbon bridge examples they showed recently, a variation on this design that's not often seen.