A book of bridges

by Walter Shaw Sparrow

One day, let us hope, most men will realise that it is woefully commonplace to be as other men; then conventions will go out of vogue. Courts and clubs will invent new and good etiquettes every year; no game will be stereotyped; and laws will command that such and such things be altered and improved by given dates. For example, if an Act of Parliament decreed that during the next ten years all the railway bridges in England must be made less uncomely and less at odds with the needs of military defence, I have no doubt that compulsion, the scout of civil progress, would discover among engineers more than enough invention.

Railway bridges have been built in obedience to a brace of conventional arguments. It has been argued, first, that because traffic and trade are the main considerations, therefore art is not a matter to be considered; next, that because boards of directors have to please their shareholders, therefore a most strenuous economy must be advertised in a very evident manner, even although its results blot fine landscapes with the shame of uninspired craftsmanship.

Thirty-four years have passed since the late E. M. Barry, R.A., in a thoughtful book, asked the public to understand that modern engineering was not architecture at all, but mere building; and he chose as an example of horrible work the Britannia Bridge over the Menai Straits. “Here we have the adoption of the trabeated principle of large iron beams laid upon supports of masonry, which rise from the valley beneath, and tower up above the beams to a height far exceeding that which is necessary for their support. I well remember the animated discussions in scientific circles as to the form and design of these beams, which were ultimately decided upon as rectangular tubes. In the many discussions of the merits and defects of circular, elliptical and square sections, I do not recollect that a word was said about architectural effect [or about military convenience and strategy]. Had anyone ventured to suggest that this, too, was an important matter, and that an unsightly structure would be an eyesore for all time, he would have been promptly told that the forms to be employed were an affair of science alone, and that utility pure and simple would dictate their arrangement. In the result a lovely valley was defaced....”

The same convention in mean tradecraft is shown in the tale about Tennyson and the jerry-builder. “Why do you cut down these trees?” the poet asked reprovingly. “Trees are beautiful things.” “Ah!” answered the jerry-builder, “trees are luxuries; what we need is utility.” And what this utility has done for us may be seen in a thousand railway bridges as bad as those that disgrace even the Harrow Road, near by Paddington Station.

It is not my argument that every railway bridge in England is underbred and crapulous; here and there an engineer has made an effort to be architectural, but the usual level of taste is exceedingly vulgar, and not in railway bridges only. Even the Tower Bridge, London, a vast feat in engineering, is so conventional with a meretricious mediævalism that it needs the screening dust and mist that veil the Thames. This is among the modern bridges that Brangwyn has drawn and painted, raising them into art as a record of current history. Nothing moves him more than the huge mechanisms that seize upon to-day’s life and turn it into their obedient slave. Men dwindle ever more and more in scale as machines become fatal in their enormous bulk, like Super-Dreadnoughts and the “Titanic”; not to forget such vulnerable monsters as the bridges of New York, which airships sent forth by Mr. H. G. Wells have already attacked with prophetic success. Is man really doomed to be the tool of machines? Is this to be his final convention?

In one great picture by Brangwyn the High Level Bridge at Newcastle represents our time. Historically the High Level Bridge has much interest; it displaced the Britannia Bridge as an object of scientific veneration, and from the first it has ranked high in the conventional ugliness that the British public has accepted from engineers. When the Britannia Bridge was proved to be a bad railway line (trains were the decisive critics), and when men of science after weighing their after-thoughts began to find fault with the distribution of metal in the section of its tubes, then engineers said, “And now—now we must have a good railway bridge, completely scientific in all respects.” It was to be built with two roadways, the one for common traffic passing under a railway, so that business folk might be comforted by the noise overhead, which would be as music to any believer in a pushful industrialism. Six arches of metal would be united to five piers and the abutments; their spans would have precisely the same width, i.e. 138 ft. 10 in., for minds long used to office hours and ledgers would enjoy a dead uniformity. Indeed, everybody was pleased with these plans; and in 1849, when Queen Victoria opened the High Level Bridge, artists alone were unexcited with joy. All the rest of the English world imagined that science, at the cost of only £243,000, had achieved a metal masterpiece. New London Bridge had cost six times as much (i.e. £1,458,311), and her materials were stones, not metals, so once more the north of England had scored heavily over the south. “Besides,” remarked the engineers, “we have put into the superstructure 321 tons of wrought-iron, and into the arched ribs 4,728 tons of cast-iron. Economy.... Scientific economy.... And we have now in use a perfect example of the true bowstring arch in which no cross-bracing is needed.” All this, when discussed at dinners, enriched the flavour of champagne; and opinion became so “heady” that even the “Encyclopædia Britannica” in its eighth edition received the High Level Bridge as an inspired work, and gave to its engineering as much space as the thrifty Romans would have given to all their Spanish bridges and aqueducts.

At last, and all of a sudden, a reaction came; enthusiasm not only caught a chill, it passed in a hurry from its tropical summer into a bad winter of discontent. Scientists went so far as to declare that the High Level Bridge was a youthful indiscretion, advertised publicly in a material which might endure for centuries; and this change of opinion had a great effect on the “Encyclopædia Britannica,” whose ninth edition gave only eighteen lines to its former favourite. Even the bowstring arch was praised no longer, “being essentially more expensive and heavier than a true girder.”

THE TOWER BRIDGE, LONDON