A Vista Of Bridges Over The Tyne – Part 1: Tyne Bridge
Share:
Venice and Amsterdam are famous for their canals, Sydney is famous for its harbour and Rio De Janeiro is famous for its golden beaches. Closer to home, Newcastle-Upon-Tyne is famous for a vista of iconic bridges spanning one of Britain’s most illustrious rivers. Most of the world’s greatest cities have long relied on their waterways to – well – keep their heads above water…
The seven bridges across the river Tyne each tell a different story. They paint a picture of Tyneside through the years like no person or book possibly could. Speaking as a young person, the seven imposing structures seem like they’ve always been there, yet the landscape of the Tyne has changed massively across our city’s history.
Over the next seven weeks, we’ll be publishing a different article focusing on each one of the Tyne’s seven iconic bridges.
This week, we’re looking at the granddaddy of them all: the Tyne Bridge.
There has been a bridge on the site of the current Tyne Bridge since the ‘Pons Aelius’ bridge was built by the Romans. The next bridge on the site was built in 1270, and was eventually destroyed by flooding in 1771, to be replaced by a newer stone bridge on the same site in 1781. However, as the industrial revolution gathered pace, increasing shipping demands rendered the stone bridge impractical and it was replaced by the Swing Bridge (which still ‘swings’ using its original mechanisms) to accommodate larger ships. The prospect of another high level bridge to supplement the aptly named ‘High Level Bridge’ and ‘King Edward VII Bridge’ led to construction of the Tyne Bridge starting in 1925. Remarkably, despite working at heights of around 175 feet without any safety equipment, only one construction worker died whilst working on the bridge. The tragic Nathaniel Collins fell from the top of the bridge just weeks before completion. Crashing into the icy wintry waters, gallant efforts were made to try and save him by John James Carr, employed specifically for such rescues, but to no avail. More than anyone or anything else, Nathaniel Collins epitomises the blood, sweat and tears that went into building the Tyne Bridge. We salute him.
The bridge was built by Middlesbrough-based company Dorman Long, who went on to built the similar Sydney Harbour Bridge, essentially the bigger brother to our Tyne Bridge. The granite towers on either end of the bridge originally contained a lift tower connecting the quayside to the high level, which we can still see the signs of due to the wooden doors at the bottom of the tower (just by all the pigeon mess). Opened by King George V in 1928 to a jubilant crowd and 20,000 schoolchildren – who had been given the day off – Newcastle gained its most famous landmark: a bridge designed to stand out from the crowd, in a city designed to stand out from the crowd.
Fun fact: The Tyne Bridge has exactly 777,124 rivets!
(And no, I haven’t personally authenticated that!)