Tagged: swing-bridge
A Swing of the Plimsoll Bridge
24 Apr 2022
I was originally going to head over to the Ashton area to see if I'd missed any bits around the football stadium—and also to grab some lunch from the Tobacco Factory Market—but in the end I got a little distracted by having accidentally chosen exactly the right time to see the Plimsoll Bridge swing on one of the first busy days of Spring, where a lot of pleasure trips tend to head out down the Avon (and possibly the New Cut) from Hotwells.
In the end I mostly snapped that, and just a couple of photos from the Ashton area where I grabbed some lunch but didn't do any new exploring.
My first hint that there might be something interesting to look at was that the lock gates that I was planning on walking over were open rather than closed. Then I spotted the pleasure boat in the lock, just behind the descending steps from the footbridge there.
The Plimsoll Bridge is definitely not the oldest swinger in town. In fact, it may be the youngest swinger in town. I think the only other functioning swing bridges on the floating harbour (side-to-side rather than up-down like Redcliffe Bascule) are Junction Bridge (hidden in this picture, it's on the far side of the Cumberland Basin, carrying Merchants Road) and Prince Street Bridge, built in 1925 and 1879 respectively. The Plimsoll Bridge is mid-1960s.
You don't often see this view of the brutalist bridge abutment, because the bridge itself is normally blocking and overshadowing the view here. Excuse me while I take far too many photos of it to be healthy.
I've always particularly liked the spiral staircases and the control tower, which looks like it's escaped from a prison camp.
The brutalist bridge abutment is the old bit, of course, as it's mid-1960s. The boat that looks like John Cabot's 15th century caravel is the new bit. This replica was made in the 1990s, and replicated the original's 1497 trip to Newfoundland in 1997, arriving in June at Bonavista, to be greeted by Queen Elizabeth.
She's just had her annual inspection in the Albion dry dock, so I suppose this is one of her first gorge trips of the summer season.
You can see the man whose job it is to work the rather complicated-looking controls in the control tower has come out onto his balcony now the opening procedure is done.
