Bridges of 2022

Another modest year for recording bridges.  Two railway bridges to begin with, the first is on London Overground where it crosses Leytonstone High Road. Next is a Great Western Railway bridge in the Wiltshire town of Chippenham, part of a nine arch viaduct designed by Brunel, completed in 1841 and Grade II* listed. Below is the nine arch Town Bridge that spans the River Avon at Bedford on Avon. It’s a 13th. century former packhorse bridge with the addition of a lock-up in the 17th. century and listed at Grade I. It still carries a heavy flow of traffic.  Another bridge of similar vintage is the Monnow Bridge in Monmouth, the last surviving combined bridge and fortified gatehouse. Listed at Grade 1, it dates from the 1270s and remained in use as a road bridge until 2004 after decades of damage inflicted by careless drivers, when a replacement was built downstream enabling it to be pedestrianised. Finally we have Keadby Bridge over the River Trent in the Lincolnshire village of Althorpe- a road and rail combined Scherzer rolling lift bridge constructed in 1916. The bridge is Grade II listed and has been fixed in place since it was last lifted in 1956.

 

Walala Parade

Leyton is a mainly Victorian terraced, residential district of Waltham Forest. It has a lower league football club with a long history and a modest record of achievement but major landmarks are few and far between other than a late Victorian Library and Town Hall complex built at a time when Leyton was still an Essex town.  Not far from the Town Hall, on the opposite side of Leyton High Road is a parade of shops and small businesses bookended by a tent making business and a Kwik Fit, now home to a community-funded public art project that extends across eight individual properties.  After several years of fund raising and planning it was completed in Summer 2020 by Walala Studios to a design by artist and urban designer, Camille Walala.  

There’s a rhythmic rectilinear grid filled with areas of high intensity colour, overpainted with a repetition of geometric forms, diagonal stripes and a scattering of more fragmented shapes.  Observers have noted the influence of Memphis and South African township decorative art.  There are some echoes of post-comic book mid period Roy Lichtenstein and the industrial geometry of painters on the fringe of Abstract Expressionism such as Al Held, Burgoyne Diller, John M Miller and Leon Polk Smith.  More delicate sensibilities than mine have complained about a lack of refinement but I’m at a loss to imagine just what an exercise in visual refinement could bring to an urban environment of this character.  However mediocre it may look, it does function as a place of economic activity. For me it’s enough that it gives us something better to look at than the surrounding townscape - a passing contact with a fleeting visual delight with an intent to uplift.  Depressing to note that taggers have left their odious signatures in at least three places.  I would have those art world halfwits who, decades ago, affected to take this vandalism seriously, conscripted to remove every last trace of it.