Thomas Telford

“…some of the horses are unsettled by the drop…”

Thomas Telford 1826

I’m not one for heroes, but I make an exception for Thomas Telford (1757-1843), the son of a Dumfriesshire shepherd who became one of Britain’s most outstanding engineers, the first President of the Institute of Civil Engineers and the man who left us with many astonishing structures still in daily use. Not the least of his many achievements are Scotland’s 60-mile Caledonian Canal and the magnificent Pontcysyllte Aqueduct whose still working canal crosses the River Dee near Llangollen in Wales.

And then there is the Menai Bridge that bridges the strait between mainland Wales and the island of Anglesey, with arches tall enough to allow ships to pass without lowering their sails. With a span of 580 feet it was, in its day, the longest suspension bridge ever constructed. Work began in 1819 and the bridge was opened to coach traffic in 1826. The project was part of Telford’s major improvements of the road from the Anglesey port Holyhead to London, otherwise known as the A5. One object was to ensure the swift, safe transport of Irish Members of Parliament to Westminster. Before the bridge, they had to risk a perilous ferry crossing between Anglesey and Bangor.

Telford was not only a man of vision in construction terms, but he always looked to the bigger picture, building roads that, though expensive to construct, were well drained and low maintenance, always looking to create integrated transport systems that would bring local and national prosperity. He was fastidious, too, in his project planning, and astute when it came to political lobbying and fund raising. He was also a man who made fast friendships and was a diligent letter writer, and he did much to encourage the young engineers who would succeed him.

In fact he never stopped working. Only death at the age of 77 concluded his prodigious career. There was never time to marry either (though there were near misses) and only in his late years did he bother to buy his London house. Even then he still kept travelling, racketing around in a coach from project to project, the length and breadth of the British Isles. He was certainly a man who knew his own worth, but he was modest too. Here’s a letter he wrote to one of his Menai Bridge contractors, Nye Vaughn, owner of the Castle Iron Works which provided the iron chains.

My Dear Vaughn,

You will be pleased to learn that the bridge at Menai is finished and opened to mail coaches last month. I confess the admiralty demand to hang the road a hundred feet above the sea to allow sailing ships to pass was a daunting requirement. However the bridge is built and, I must say, I am proud of it. It seems I am to be known as the ‘Colossus of Roads’ ** . An odd name don’t you think? Your iron chains were a devil to hang across the straits but they are firm and there is little movement when the coaches pass across although some of the horses are unsettled by the drop. Thank your son for his suggestion to coat the chains in linseed oil to protect them from corrosion. His idea has proved better than the lead paint we planned to use. To be doubly sure we have done both. When he proposed linseed oil I believed he was repaying me for teasing you in the sealing of Pontcysyllte Aqueduct. I hope you forgive my jest. Please accept my compliments and thank your foundry men. Tell them we found no flaws in the links we tested. When I am next in need of heavy castings I will call on you.

My very best regards,

Telford

** It was Telford’s close friend and poet Robert Southey who coined this term Colossus of Roads

When we were on Anglesey back in January the bridge had been closed for three months. It was quite an emergency. Some structural upgrading carried out during the war years 1938 and 1941 showed serious signs of failing. Brittle hanging sockets were the problem and “analysis showed there was a credible risk of an unzipping failure of the bridge deck.”

An unzipping suspension bridge of Menai’s scale sounds horrendous. It’s good to know the bridge is now back in business. It opened again at the start of February. All the same, I wonder what Thomas Telford and Nye Vaughn would have had to say about brittle hanging sockets.

Cee’s Black & White Photo Challenge: Arches, domes and half circles

Telford is Much Wenlock’s closest town, just a few miles away across the River Severn. It’s a new town in fact, begun in the 1960s when its developers laid claim to the brownfield land between the traditional coalfield communities of Wellington, Madeley, Ironbridge, Dawley and Oakengates, places whose inhabitants had played their part in Britain’s industrial revolution from at least the 17th century.

One new-town aim was to provide fresh work opportunities and decent housing for families of the ever-expanding West Midlands (Birmingham-Wolverhampton) conurbations. Another was to revive the old Shropshire coalfield towns and villages, including Ironbridge, which by the 1960s, with their declining local industries, appeared to have lost the will to live. Back then I recall visiting Ironbridge on a school history trip. We peered at the decaying bottle kilns of the Coalport China Works through a jungle of waste-ground weeds and wondered why on earth Miss Price had brought us to such a dreary place.

From the start, then, Telford Development Corporation (TDC) panjandrums had a mission: their new town had heritage. They chose to name it after a man of vision: Thomas Telford 1757-1843, father of modern civil engineering and a man with strong local connections. At the start of his career, after leaving his Scottish homeland, he had been Surveyor and Engineer for Shropshire. He left us many striking landmarks too, including the breath-taking Pontcysyllte Aqueduct.

The ‘new town with a past’ message was not simply a piece of window-dressing. TDC committed huge resources to saving the historic industrial fabric of the coalfield settlements, deploying teams of conservation architects and builders across the district, restoring everything from workers’ cottages and toll houses, to ironworks warehouses and riverside tile factories. It is probably fair to say that without all the new-town investment in conservation, the internationally famous Ironbridge Gorge Museums might never have made it off the starting blocks.

This particular high-rise, Darby House, is also a nod to the past. HQ for the Telford and Wrekin Council, it rises above one of town centre’s notoriously numerous traffic islands, and salutes the ingenuity of the Darby ironmasters of Coalbrookdale. (Abraham Darby I invented the means to smelt iron using coke instead of charcoal, and Abraham Darby III built the world’s first cast iron bridge over the River Severn).

One can’t help but wonder though what Thomas Telford and the Darbys would think of these tributes – the new-fangled new-town architecture, the dizzying, multiplying networks of roads, shops, business parks and housing. But then you could say these were men who started it all; played their part in the pioneering of cast-iron construction which gave rise to the high-rise and more besides.

Anyway, here, by contrast, is a building that the Coalbrookdale ironmasters considered ‘just the thing’ in its day. Designed in the Gothic style around 1840, it was the riverside warehouse for the despatch cast iron goods down the River Severn to Bristol. It is also one of the many buildings saved from decay by Telford Development Corporation and now part of the Ironbridge Gorge Museum complex.

And finally the Iron Bridge (1779) (restored and owned by English Heritage).

For those of us who tend to think the modern more ugly than picturesque and prefer to take comfort in the ‘antique’, it is worth remembering that in its day, this bridge, the manner of its construction, was unthinkable for most people. There it was, replacing the stalwart, heavily buttressed stone bridges that everyone had used for hundreds of years. It literally was ‘the shock of the new’, a daring piece of pioneering technology designed to show off and sell a concept. In this respect then, you could say it has very much in common with the enterprise and entrepreneurial zeal that gave rise to Telford ‘new town’. Surprising or no, the connections are real ones.

Cee’s Black & White Photo Challenge: Buildings

Tish Farrell

Writer on the Edge

Spanning The Straits: Thomas Telford’s Magnificent Menai Suspension Bridge

Sky-Rise