The Production of Berwick Bridge

Abstract

ABSTRACT 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-upon-Tweed 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.