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.

 

Airborne over the Great Orme

Situated to the north west of the North Wales seaside resort of Llandudno is the Great Orme, a chunky limestone headland, operated as a country park and nature conservation area. Copper mining has left behind a vast and only partially explored network of tunnels that have been made into a visitor attraction. A tramway opened in 1902 to link the town below with the summit and now provides an anachronistic visitor experience in open sided vehicles driven by a continuous running cable embedded in the trackway.  In 1969 a Cable Car began to offer an additional connection with the town with 20 cabins in circulation at intervals of one minute. For the voyeuristically inclined this aerial parade of 4 person pods makes for an interesting spectacle.  From the slopes below it’s easy to observe the various behaviours the overhead voyagers display - some are absorbed in recording a movie on their mobiles while others affect an air of lofty indifference as they sail by.  Visually, the point where the cars cross is the most striking as the space between contracts and expands.  These photos were taken in September 2016.

 

W H Smith Decorative Tiles

Newsagents and booksellers for more than 200 years, W H Smith has more than 600 stores on British high streets plus another 700 at airports, train stations and motorway services. In most of these locations it is unchallenged by any competition. Despite its longevity and ubiquity it seems to command little affection on the part of its customers. The shops are fitted out to a rigid and universal formula and the range of products is severely restricted to items that can be reliably sold in large quantities. Harsh lighting, artificial fibre floor coverings and a persistent smell of cleaning products makes for an uncomfortable browsing experience. It’s common to find only a single staffed checkout with a long, slow moving queue from which shoppers can contemplate the generous provision of frequently malfunctioning self-service checkouts. Any staff savings are cancelled out by the need for attendants to sort out all the customer problems. It wasn’t always so – in the inter-war years the business had a reputation for its ornate oak shop fronts (a few of which survive) and decorative pictorial tile panels designed and manufactured by Carter & Co. of Poole. An exhaustive survey of these panels was published in the 2015 Journal of the Tiles and Architectural Ceramics Society by Ian M Betts who listed 60 stores where examples can still be seen. The four examples shown here come from the branch in Mostyn Street, Llandudno – the postcard shows a W H Smith store in the right foreground. The present store where these photographs were taken is some half a mile further up Mostyn Street – presumably the tiled panels migrated with the shop to its new location.

Church Island

Church Island lies in the Menai Strait, between the Menai and Britannia Bridges. A short causeway connects it with Anglesey. It is entirely occupied by the church of St. Tysilio and its surrounding graveyard. On the highest point there’s a simple memorial to the local servicemen who lost their lives in the two world wars. Without being at all remote, the quiet offshore location with its omnipresent signals of mortality is conducive to reflection. The war memorial is all the more affecting for the absence of rhetoric - the beautifully carved roll of honour with dates and places of death carries a lot of weight. Each name stands for a fractured family and the grief of relatives and friends. As the poppy emblem mutates from a message of “Peace among Nations” to a nationalistic symbol of patriotism, it’s a relief to be reminded of more dignified and restrained methods of commemorating human sacrifice than indulging in a phoney war with FIFA. 

 An English translation of the above inscription: "To the glory of God and in memory of the men who fell in the war. That their name will live forever."