Many rivers to cross sang Jimmy Cliff back in 1969, and there are many ways to cross water, and what better way than by bridge, said I in 2025.
Building bridges is no mean feat but something we’ve been doing for eons. Once decided that a span is worthy of such a structure and a ferry or a tunnel just won’t cut it, then you’re onto the consideration thesedays of what type of bridge you’d like. For the elders of Marlow, a then small rural village beside the Thames in Buckinghamshire, the decision to create a grand entrance from the Berkshire bank was never in doubt.
Abingdon further up river had shone a light with thinking big, itself deciding to erect a huge wedding cake in the centre of their town square. These illusions of grandeur were all part and parcel of outdoing your rival neighbour.
On a granular level it’s been a constant one-upmanship to outdo each another since the first humans nabbed the best looking cave and on it went with the rise of tribes.
From Baghdad to Basingstoke, having a navigable river has always provided a valuable source of income, but with the rise of wheeled traffic and then metal rails, the little village of Marlow wasn’t going to take any of these evolutionary leaps laying down.
Out with the old, so they demolished their old bridge and built this stonkingly striking replacement. Still standing and carrying traffic after 200years but it never ceases to amaze that some fools were set to sell this for scrap back in the 1970’s. Hilarious now but a chilling reminder that many great structures have been lost to vandalism over the last 50 years.