The Iron Bridge

Many years ago a temporary foot bridge was built over the River Stort in Bishop’s Stortford linking a car park outside a Chinese restaurant with a car park outside the train station. It’s was never much of a bridge, but it served a purpose of allowing pedestrians, many of them hurrying to catch a train, to cross half way between the two available road crossings, thereby saving themselves a walk of about 1000 metres.

A couple of years ago the council got a lottery grant to put something more aesthetically pleasing in place. The project has the rather utilitarian title of “Bishop’s Stortford Goods Yard Bridge”. The main drawback with the old bridge was that it had quite steep steps up each side, so it was out of bounds to mothers with prams and pushchairs. The new bridge design is to have shallow ramps up each side, almost parallel with the river, with steps providing a shortcut for unencumbered, able-bodied pedestrians. Work started a few months ago, and they removed the old bridge and replaced it with an even less inspiring, even more temporary wooden affair, a few metres downstream of the original. Ground work then began to build the foundations for the new structure.

A few weeks ago I walked that way to the station in the morning, and noticed that some of the structure had started to arrive. Then last week I again walked that way for some reason, and was able to witness what may have been the first person to cross the new bridge. All they had in place were the pedestrian steps up one side and down the other, and a section of the main span linking the two. A workman was crossing over to tighten some bolts on the other side. It looked smaller than I was expecting, but it was far from complete. That evening I walked back that way, and the bridge was open – my first chance to cross it.

Since then, the rest of the bridge has continued to go up, and it’s as massive as I was expecting. Have a look at this.