International Journal of Architectural Heritage The production of Berwick Bridge 9781315249513, 0486213080

Table of contents :
Abstract
1. Introduction
2. Berwick and the fortifications
3. Wooden bridge
4. The stone bridge
4.1. National infrastructure and the sufferance of a wooden bridge
4.2. Construction timeline
4.3. Foundations and construction methodology
4.4. The stone design
5. Conclusions
Disclosure statement
References

Citation preview

International Journal of Architectural Heritage Conservation, Analysis, and Restoration

ISSN: (Print) (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/uarc20

The Production of Berwick Bridge Felix Birch & Dimitris Theodossopoulos To cite this article: Felix Birch & Dimitris Theodossopoulos (2023): The Production of Berwick Bridge, International Journal of Architectural Heritage, DOI: 10.1080/15583058.2023.2254268 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/15583058.2023.2254268

Published online: 04 Sep 2023.

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INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF ARCHITECTURAL HERITAGE https://doi.org/10.1080/15583058.2023.2254268

The Production of Berwick Bridge Felix Bircha and Dimitris Theodossopoulosb a

The School of Geosciences, The University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK; bEdinburgh College of Art, The University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK ABSTRACT

ARTICLE HISTORY

This paper builds upon histories of Berwick Bridge, setting out a new interdisciplinary appraisal of its conception, design choices, and construction to account for its unique arch profile. Berwick Bridge is a sandstone bridge of 15 arches that spans the Tweed, a river that delimits much of the English-Scottish border on the east coast of Great Britain. Constructed between 1611 and 1624, after the Union of the Crowns in 1603, Berwick Bridge is a rare example of a state-funded building project during peacetime, and it represents an embryonic form of national infrastructure that would not re-emerge until the 19th century. However, the economic importance of Berwick-uponTweed belies the sufferance of the unreliable crossings that had previously served the town until the stone bridge was finished, and an explanation of the bridge’s geometry is absent from current literature. By pairing a history of the town’s experience of construction embodied in wooden iterations of the bridge and the fortifications, the technical confidence of the principal designers is affirmed in the shifting arch shapes as reflexive to material and monetary availability—as well as the site’s challenging physical geography.

Received 22 December 2022 Accepted 27 August 2023

1. Introduction Berwick Bridge was the first entirely stone crossing to carry The Great North Road from London to Edinburgh over the River Tweed. During the bridge’s construction between 1611 and 1624 however, interest had turned away from relative domestic peace, and eyes wandered across the channel to the European conflict brewing over Flanders and Bohemia that would stretch on for 30 years. The colossal fortifications on the north bank that had once defined Berwick-upon-Tweed (hereafter simply Berwick) as a “strong Town of War” now stood empty and redundant after the Union of the Scottish and English Crowns in 1603 (Van Vliet 2017). This heralded a decline for Berwick, as its sudden lack of military or political function halted the huge sums of Crown money that had once regularly flowed into the town, indeed, its bastion fort (visible below in Figure 1 (b)) had been the most expensive building project of Elizabeth I’s 44-year reign (Colvin 1963, 664). Despite Berwick’s slow exit from the national stage, Berwick Bridge would shortly become the town’s second megastructure as the longest bridge built in Britain in the 17th century (Skempton 2002, 109). As shown in Table 1, London Bridge had a total length of approxi­ mately 282 m against Berwick Bridge’s 355 m total span, and whilst both bridges cross tidal water, Berwick Bridge persists through destructive flood events and CONTACT Felix Birch © 2023 Taylor & Francis

[email protected]

KEYWORDS

17th century; Berwick bridge; Berwick-upon-Tweed; Great North Road; James burrell; masonry bridge; northumberland; public infrastructure; Richard neile; river tweed

drastic ice drifts that are common in northern rivers. Considering Berwick’s great distance from London or other administrative centres, Berwick Bridge is even more impressive when compared to its contemporaries in Table 1 that were major works in European capitals like Paris and Madrid, or incredibly wealthy city states like Florence. The ability to prioritise infrastructure varied consider­ ably between the European powers in the early 17th century. In the UK, the Reformation had stripped the Catholic church of a great deal of wealth that had once been used to create and maintain bridges. Berwick being an exception, the 17th century was a fallow period for bridge building in the UK, and the road network con­ tinued to follow routes and crossing sites that would have been familiar to Saxon travellers (Harrison 2006, 3). A similar situation was to be found in the Iberian Peninsula. After two centuries where travel infrastructure works were largely limited to maintenance, the road system that was developed during the 18th century was not a novel design, but a consolidation of the radial net­ work that had been centred around Madrid since the 16th century (Pablo-Martí, Alañónpardo, and Sánchez 2021). The proliferation of architecture and construction that had characterised Italy in the 15th and 16th centuries was also slowing. The southern city states had begun to fall behind the north in terms of infrastructure development,

The School of Geosciences, The University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK

2

F. BIRCH AND D. THEODOSSOPOULOS

Figure 1. Maps to show the position of Berwick-upon-tweed within the British Isles. Produced in QGIS (QGIS Development Team 2022) using google aerial maps (Google 2022). A simplified version of the Great North Road from Ogilby’s (1675) Britannia has been used, as well as Northumberland sheet IV.SW 1899 to confirm the site of old quarries (Survey 1899). Clockwise from top left: (a) shows the towns in the northeast of England that are mentioned within this work, as well as the Great North Road and the English-Scottish border; (b) shows the town of Berwick-upon-Tweed and the likely location of the sandstone quarry used to supply Berwick bridge’s construction; (c) shows a closer plan view of Berwick bridge. All figures to scale. Table 1. Table to show the physical dimensions of Berwick bridge’s contemporaries, in ascending chronological order. The exact date of Twizel Bridge’s construction is unknown, but its earliest known mention is 1511. Name and place Old London Bridge, London, UK Twizel Bridge, Duddo, UK Ponte Santa Trinita, Florence, Italy Puente de Segovia, Madrid, Spain Le Pont Neuf, Paris, France Le Pont Neuf, Toulouse, France Berwick Bridge, Berwick, UK

Year opened 1209