Ingenious and life-enhancing: a tale of two new London footbridges

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One rolling across a divide, the other narrowly avoiding rowers and rare snails, the Cody Dock Rolling Bridge and Dukes Meadows Footbridge are both old-school feats of engineering

ll the world loves a bridge that moves. Usually, the point of a bridge is that it is fixed – when so much trouble has been taken to overcome gravity and tame nature, instability is the last thing that you want – so there is surprise and delight when it confounds its own rigidity. I give you as an example Tower Bridge.

As its name says, the bridge rolls. It crosses a channel that runs from the Lea to an adjoining dock, and most of the time it provides a flat steel deck, level with the ground, which pedestrians and cyclists can use to get from one side to the other. When necessary, those squares can be turned through 180 degrees, such that the deck is raised in the air and turned upside down, which gives enough headroom for boats to pass underneath.

‘A mild frisson of peril’: the Dukes Meadows Footbridge, snaking below Barnes Railway Bridge, allows the Thames-side path to follow the river without diversion.The result is faceted and intriguing, its irregularity driven by the imaginative response to circumstance. “It’s marvellous,” says an elderly user, unsolicited.

 

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