The tiny footbridge at St Saviour’s
Dock, not far from Tower Bridge, is quite different. Designed by Nicholas
Lacey Partners with Whitby and Bird (now part of Ramboll), it spans the
entrance to a small dock basin just off the River Thames. It can swing open
to allow boats to pass through, although I suspect it doesn’t have to do so
very often.
It's a small bridge, only about 30m long, with a 15m main span. It cost
£750,000 to build in 1996, and was fabricated by Littlehampton Welding on
behalf of Christiani & Nielsen.
It’s a difficult bridge to photograph, as there is only public access to its
riverside face, but hopefully its form can be understood from my pictures.
It’s an asymmetric cable-stayed bridge, with a short backspan balancing the
longer main span.
One mast sits either side of the deck, with the cables arranged in a
harp-type layout on each side. The deck is timber, but pretty much
everything else is stainless steel, and as a result it has worn well, not
having changed at all since I first visited it many years ago.
Apart from the pivot, which is enormous and completely out of scale with the
rest of the bridge, all the other structural members, including the masts,
are as slender as possible. This comes at a significant cost: almost every
part of the bridge is extensively braced with stainless steel cables. The
deck, for example, has to be pulled down with a network of cables because
otherwise it would simply be too light to place the main cables into
reliable tension – the cables are therefore presumably stressed against each
other.
The result resembles a complex piano-wire cat’s cradle assembled by a severe
sufferer from OCD. It’s fussy, confusing, and way over-the-top for such a
small bridge. There is a certain attraction to its geometric intricacy, but
for me this doesn’t outweigh the problems. Even the short side-span at its
west end seems over-detailed (not to mention quite different in style to the
main deck).
By far the worst feature is the presence of massive security gates at the
western end, which hugely detract from the structure and give it the
appearance of an ultra-modern security facility.
Whitbybird produced many better bridges after this, and it must rank as a
very interesting but ultimately unsuccessful experiment.