Ten historic British footbridges: a challenge to the modern designer

This paper examines ten outstanding historic British footbridges. The author’s belief is that several of these structures continue to offer lessons and present challenges to today’s designers.

The paper discusses issues such as

• the ability of craft, experiment and pragmatism to innovate in ways difficult to replicate in the computer age;
• levels of slenderness, free from irksome wobble, which are unmatched in the modern age;
• and what can be achieved with adaptation to the real requirements of the context, rather than to arbitrary one size fi ts all regulation.

Britain’s best known pioneering achievements in bridge design have been at a large scale, such as Stephenson’s tubular bridges, Brunel’s lenticular bridge at Saltash, the Forth Railway Bridge, Brown’s and Telford’s suspension bridges, and, in the modern era, the Severn suspension bridge.

However, the author suggests that the innovation and level of engineering achievement evident in these much smaller scale footbridges deserves to be equally well known.

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