Bridges - even those of simple and unadorned design - can capture the imagination, and can delight. Functional perfection and economy of design can possess a sublime quality that raises bridges from mere engineering to poetic works of art.
And, perhaps paradoxically, even bridges of the most simple and most functional type do not - as a rule - harm the natural beauty of their setting. Rather, far more often than not, they enhance their setting because one can compliment the other.
Bridges are, at one level, demonstrations of the forces of nature being harnessed, through engineering genius, to overcome the challenges of nature.
This can make a bridge a wonder to behold and a create a unity between man-made structure of bold design and its complex natural setting.
Not all bridges achieve this harmony or quality but - in their different ways - all the best do. Bridges are, by their nature, daring and heroic, often experimental and pioneering in their technology of construction - occasionally thrillingly minimal.
This can make bridges tremendously popular - indeed far more so than most other modern made-made structures - and the most intensely romantic and fiercely guarded expressions of local pride and identity.
Boxted Bridge, to judge by the intensity of the campaign to save it, is such a bridge.
Indeed even a cursory inspection reveals it to have the functional and to a degree abstracted perfection that distinguishes many of the best bridges.
It was built in 1897 when the use of decorative historic references was finally, in bridge design at least, giving way to the conviction that the most fitting ornament for a functional structure is simply the honest expression of its means and materials of construction.
As the building of Boxted Bridge got under way the Forth Bridge, in Scotland, had just been completed.
It showed the brave future of bridge design - honest, even ruthless, in design and execution, denuded of all superfluous ornament, but glorious and beautiful. Boxted Bridge is of this heroic stamp.
Being in possession of this miniature engineering wonder, which is evidently - and most understandably - well loved by the public and those who use it, and that continues to fulfill functional demands, you would imagine that its guardian would protect it with jealous intensity.
Instead Essex Highways not only refuses to acknowledge the historic importance and artistic power of Boxted Bridge but are actively pressing for its destruction. A larger bridge is being proposed, for reasons of safety and function.
Better still, surely, is to heed the overwhelming local support for the bridge and find a solution that saves it while, with sensitivity, achieving some modernization.
This is the civilized approach that would naturally be followed if the bridge were statutorily listed as a structure of special historic or architectural importance. It should be but it is not.
However the bridge’s status as a key structure within a designated Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty and as a ‘non-designated Heritage Asset’ surely bestows upon it some of dignity and safeguards of a listed building.
Its destruction would be an assault on local pride and an act of desecration that the people of Dedham Vale would not forgive and that future generations would simply not understand.
A live planning application detailing the future of the Boxted Bridge can be found HERE.
Dan Cruickshank is historian and author of‘Bridges: Heroic Designs that Changed the World.’
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