Original subtitles

Britain's iconic bridges, spanning our most dramatic landscapes

have not only linked our island, but made it great.

These are the bridges that are known around the world,

built by visionaries like Stephenson and Brunel,

who are famous, even today.

Look at this!

From the banks of the Tyne to the mighty Thames,

from the Firth of Forth to the Menai Strait...

I'm on a journey to discover how those great bridges were built...

Here we go.

And the sweat and sacrifice that went into their constructions.

Stopping traffic.

I'll uncover the huge egos, flawed geniuses and jealous rivalries

behind their creation.

It's as if he'd been airbrushed from the whole story.

These are Britain's Greatest Bridges.

This is the mouth of the River Tyne,

but over 100km long, it's the artery that pumped life

into two of England's greatest industrial centres -

Gateshead on the south, and Newcastle on the north side.

Once, the Tyne was the most important industrial river in the land.

Millions of tonnes of coal would travel down it,

powering the rest of the country.

While along its banks, great shipyards constructed the ships

that helped build the British Empire

and put the North East on the map.

But if you're a Geordie,

it's not the River Tyne that reminds you of home, it's this...

the Tyne Bridge!

Eight thousand tonnes of solid steel and granite

that dominate the skyline.

It might not be one of the biggest bridges in the world

but it's definitely one of the most famous.

This is such a striking piece of civil engineering on the landscape.

It's just stunning.

For the locals, the Geordies,

this bridge symbolises everything that's great about the North East,

because the Tyne Bridge is truly a local bridge.

To understand why the Geordies love this bridge so much

you only have to look out across the landscape.

Almost everything that built this bridge came from here.

The refinery where all the steel was made

was just an hour down the coast, at Redcar.

The iron ore was mined from the Cleveland Hills,

just 40 miles south from here.

And the coal used to smelt it

would have probably been mined just outside Gateshead, just over there.

And the skilled labour that built it over a period of three years

all came direct from the Tyneside shipyards.

This is a bridge more than any other

that embodies the story of the North East.

And the rise...

and fall of one of our country's great industrial centres.

Even now, 90 years after its construction,

the Tyne Bridge stands as symbol of the pride and passion of the Geordies

who built it and live with it.

I absolutely love the Tyne Bridge.

It reminds us of home and we just love it.

I think it's the iconic image of Tyneside.

Something that the North East is very, very proud of.

The Tyne Bridge is by far the most famous bridge over the river.

It's a bridge that re-wrote the engineering rulebook,

and an icon men risked their lives to build.

But it wasn't the first bridge to be built here.

Back in the 1920s, when construction started,

Newcastle already had two bridges.

The advent of trains in the 1840s

had brought Robert Stephenson's High Level Bridge.

It was built for what had become the London and North Eastern Railway

and the trains still thunder across today.

But it also carried trams and pedestrians on this road deck here,

beneath the trains.

And just a little further downstream is the Swing Bridge.

Both did exactly what they were designed to do -

get people and traffic across the Tyne

without stopping shipping on the river.

But with the Swing Bridge opening almost 20 times a day,

Newcastle really needed a new bridge.

But it wasn't queuing Geordies

that finally prompted the building of the Tyne Bridge,

it was a far bigger problem.

These great arches have been linking Newcastle and Gateshead

for almost 90 years now

but it's not just a bridge joining two sides of the river.

For all its magnificence, stone and steel work,

this bridge was, in fact, a political bridge,

built in part to keep the country from falling to pieces.

In 1918, when World War I ended,

the men of the North East returned from the trenches

to what they hoped would be a land fit for heroes.

Instead, many of them found themselves out of work

and barely able to feed their families.

The war had caused a global downturn in trade.

The coal mines cut wages

and there were few new orders for the shipyards.

By the early 1920s,

over a third of the Tyneside shipyards had closed down.

And unemployment among the Regent ship builders was as high as 40%.

As protests swept the rest of the country,

the government of the day was terrified trouble was brewing

in the North East.

In a bid to protect one of the country's most important industries,

the first Labour prime minister, Ramsay MacDonald,

came up with a radical plan -

building the Tyne Bridge.

By using the skills of Tyneside's unemployed riveters and steelworkers,

the bridge would serve as a massive employment scheme,

not just keeping families out of poverty,

but keeping alive those essential shipbuilding skills it was hoped

would once again be needed when the great recession was finally over.

To make sure the plan happened,

the government put up over half the cost of the new bridge -

around £40 million in today's money.

With money on the table, the local council acted fast.

The entire design and contracting process taking just ten months.

The bidding process to win the job

became a battle between two of the North East's industrial giants.

A favourite to win was

the engineering firm of Armstrong Whitworth,

then one the biggest employers in Newcastle.

Armstrongs, who'd already built the Swing Bridge there,

bid for the contract to build it,

but their bid of nearly £750,000 was just too expensive.

Instead the contract went to Dorman Long.

Based just a few miles south of Newcastle, in Middlesbrough,

Dorman Long was one of the biggest steel manufacturers in the world.

But Dorman Long wasn't just a steel manufacturer,

it was a construction company too,

using its steel to build bridges throughout the Empire.

But despite its vast experience building big and complicated bridges

in far flung places like Egypt and Zimbabwe,

the Tyne Bridge was to be the steel company's greatest ever challenge.

And the reason was down to Dorman Long's original competitor

for the construction contract - Armstrong Whitworth.

Central to this industrial empire, founded by William Armstrong,

was one of the most important munitions works in the land.

Supplying huge guns to the British Army and Navy,

Armstrong Whitworth was situated just upstream

from where the Tyne Bridge was to be built,

and nothing was allowed to interfere

with boats heading to and from the factory,

not even the much-needed Tyne Bridge.

So Dorman Long's engineers were faced with a massive problem -

how to build an 8,000 tonne steel bridge 170 feet in the air,

without affecting the river below.

The solution would push the company's engineers to their limits.

In 1925, building Newcastle's iconic Tyne Bridge

forced its engineers to rewrite the rulebook.

The incredible 8,000 tonne steel structure

was built using techniques never tried before

and the reason lay in the Tyne River itself.

Although the aftermath of World War I had triggered a nationwide recession,

the River Tyne was still a vital artery for the nation's trade.

And because that river traffic was so important,

Parliament ruled that it couldn't be disrupted in any way.

If the constructors, Dorman Long, were to succeed,

they needed to find a whole new approach to bridge building.

So how do you build a bridge like that, without clogging the river up,

full of barges to hoist the steel up from?

Well, the clue is at the end of the arches on each side.

The entire weight of the arches rest on these round bearings.

In effect, a simple hinge

which allowed the whole bridge to be built from above, rather than below.

Thick steel cables ran from the top of the arches

to great winches on the banks,

holding them up as they were gradually built outwards

across the river.

20-ton cranes were erected on top of the start of each arch,

lifting beams from the bank and placing them out over the river,

extending the arch.

More beams were then positioned for the flat deck beneath.

And once a whole section had been finished,

the crane would move out further along the arch,

further out over the river and the whole process would start again.

It was an engineering triumph.

And it's led many Geordies to believe that the building of the Tyne Bridge

was a dress rehearsal for an even bigger project

on the other side of the planet...

Australia's Sydney Harbour Bridge.

They copied ours.

This was here first and, yeah,

as a city, we're very, very proud of it.

It's as famous, if not more famous, than the Sydney Harbour Bridge,

I would've thought, which is three times the size,

but we think ours is the better of the two.

But is there really any truth in the idea

that the two bridges are connected?

Superficially, they do look similar.

Both are so-called 'through arches',

with the bridge deck going through

the arch, rather than on top.

Both are constructed

from great steel girders

and both were built

at roughly the same time.

But is that just a coincidence?

To find out, I've travelled 200 miles south,

to the Institution of Civil Engineers in London.

Deep in its vaults is one

of the largest engineering archives on the planet.

It contains thousands of documents and plans

from engineering projects around the world.

Some going back to the dawn of the Industrial Revolution.

So if there is a link between these two great bridges,

I should find it here.

From the archives I've managed to dig out

an original plan of the Sydney Harbour Bridge.

And this is a copy of a plan of the Tyne Bridge

that I've brought with me.

And straightaway, you can see there's an obvious similarity.

They've both got the big steel arch, two towers at each end,

and the flat suspended section.

But have a closer look

and it seems that connection goes a little deeper,

because both bridges were manufactured

by Dorman Long and Company of Middlesbrough.

There it is clearly on both plans.

In fact, Dorman Long also produced the materials for both bridges,

shipping over 42,000 tonnes of specialist steel

all the way to Australia, for the Sydney Harbour Bridge.

But that doesn't answer the question of which one came first and whether,

as many Geordies believe,

the design of the Sydney Harbour Bridge was based on the Tyne Bridge.

Look back in the corners of the drawings though,

and we can see two different firms of engineers who drew up the plans,

the bridge designers.

Here, for the Tyne Bridge,

we've got Mott, Hay and Anderson.

And for Sydney Harbour Bridge,

it's Douglas Fox and Partners.

Now, dig a little further

and there's another name on the Tyne Bridge drawings, Ralph Freeman.

Ralph Freeman, later Sir Ralph Freeman,

was one of Britain's greatest structural engineers

and THE man to go to if you were planning to build a massive bridge.

Now, we know at the time Freeman was working for Douglas Fox and Partners,

the company who designed the Sydney Harbour Bridge.

His name appearing on the Tyne Bridge drawings at least suggests

he was a consulting engineer on the Tyne Bridge project.

So Freeman could be the reason

as to why these two bridges look so similar.

But, personally, I doubt it.

Impressive as both bridges are, they're far from unique.

20 years before the Tyne Bridge was built,

New York had this.

The Hell Gate Bridge -

one of many so-called through arch bridges built around 1900.

But if you really want to find the inspiration for the Tyne Bridge,

you don't have to cross an ocean,

you simply have to travel a few miles upstream.

It's a steel arch bridge called the Wylam Railway Bridge.

Built in 1874, almost 50 years before the Tyne Bridge was designed,

it's virtually identical to its cousin, just ten miles downstream.

And key to both bridges' success

is one of man's greatest engineering successes...

the arch.

Arch bridges have been built around the world for thousands of years,

made out of either wood or stone, like this one.

But the Wylam Bridge was one of the first to be built of metal,

hundreds of tonnes of it.

Keeping the whole thing up is the principal of the arch,

something bridge builders have relied on since before Roman times.

Let me explain what I mean.

And the materials used to build an arch bridge,

be it wood, concrete, steel or stone,

are all relatively strong in compression,

which means they're good at resisting forces trying to squeeze them.

Now, if I build a very simple model beam bridge here.

Here is my beam on my two supports on the side of the canoe.

If I apply a force, a load, onto the top, the beam bends.

The two ends come up and the middle goes down and the whole beam bends.

And that bottom surface of the beam is what's called being in tension.

It's being stretched.

If I kept pushing and kept pushing,

it would bend and stretch so much until it broke -

the bridge would fail.

Now, instead, if I restrain the two ends and form an arch shape,

as I put load on the top there, as I push down,

the material here is in compression.

It's resisting it well, as well. Agh!

So the load I push down is carried out

through the curves of the arch

and down into our strong, solid anchor points at each end.

And that's what makes an arch bridge so strong.

Just like the Wylam Bridge, the Tyne Bridge looks the way it does

because it exploits the same ancient structure.

All the weight of the bridge being passed along the arch,

down to the ground.

So as long as the ends of the arch cannot move outward,

the arch will stay super strong.

This is the bottom of the Tyne Bridge's towering arch,

here on the Newcastle side of the river.

Thousands of tonnes of steel supporting a good chunk

of Newcastle's busy traffic, day and night.

But that traffic remains safe above me because the ends of the arch

are supported by these anchor points, the abutments,

wedged firmly into the bank itself

behind the stone cladding of the tower here.

No matter how many lorries pass above me, this bridge stands strong.

Back in 1925, it was those great abutments that were

the first stage of the arch to be built.

But as the bridge moved upwards, things got a lot more complicated.

Its engineers having to devise radical new construction techniques.

Building the bridge downwards from the sky,

allowing the all-important river traffic to flow freely underneath.

But the real heroes were the men of the Tyne themselves.

Thousands of former shipyard workers who risked life and limb

to create this engineering marvel.

Back then, there was no safety gear.

Your life depended on a steady sense of balance and a good run of luck.

It was a tragedy waiting to happen.

And on the 18 February, 1928, it did.

For almost 90 years

the Tyne Bridge has been the symbol of the North East.

The men who built it were seen as heroes.

Their skills symbolising the industrial might of the time.

For four years thousands of people laboured to build this bridge,

working at heights of up to 200 feet, without any protection whatsoever.

Deaths on constructions like this were taken as part of the job,

but the Tyne Bridge seemed blessed.

The monkeys working up on the high beams seemed invincible

and dozens of people would regularly gather down below

to watch as they scampered about.

But just six days before the great arch was completed,

those crowds saw something they'd never forget.

According to the accounts at the time,

and this is a newspaper article from the Northern Daily Mail,

on the morning of Saturday 18 February, 1928,

a scaffold erector by the name of Nathaniel Collins, aged just 33,

was walking along one of those beams

when he lost his footing and fell into the river, some 175 feet below.

Incredibly, he surfaced alive and was pulled out by a boatman

employed by Dorman Long for exactly that purpose.

According to the newspapers,

Nathaniel Collins was the 57th man who'd fallen in

and had had to be rescued,

but the only one who didn't recover from his injuries.

His grandson, Bob Collins, still lives in the city

and remembers the impact Nathaniel's death had on the family.

Hello there. Hey, I'm Rob.

Bob. Hello there, Rob. Nice to meet you.

Welcome, come on in. Thank you.

There's the grandfather, there.

Do you have some more photos of Nathaniel?

Well, all I've got is...

Actually, there he is in his Light Infantry uniform.

Wow.

This was from First World War? Yes.

That was an article about when he fell off...

There he is, Nathaniel, scaffolder...

Yes, scaffolder.

"Fell at about 175 feet above the river"

"and watchers gasped as he tumbled off the bridge."

His body hit the foot... That's the bottom of the bridge there,

and bounced off that and he went in the river.

But he died of a fractured skull... Yeah.

And then the policemen and one of the staff

came to tell my nanna in the afternoon and that was that.

End of a life.

She was left with four children to bring up

but she never married again.

She was...

She wasn't too fond of the bridge, and that's a fact.

She hated the bridge as well, you know, for what it did to the family.

Very sad.

That's very tragic, Bob. Yes.

But there was only one man killed and that was him, unfortunately.

Yep.

So, how does it make you feel,

whenever you see the Tyne Bridge or walk across it, even?

You think of him every time? Yes. Every single time. Yeah.

Despite the fatality, work on the Tyne Bridge continued at pace.

For three years, great cranes had been inching out over the waters,

lifting 8,000 tonnes of steel into place.

Finally, on 23 February, 1928,

just a few days after Nathaniel Collins' death,

the last parts were lowered into position.

But the gap was still not closed.

From the start of construction,

each half of the arch had been held up by great cables

attached to winches at each side of the bank.

Now those cables were slackened

and both halves pivoted on their huge hinges until they met,

almost 200 feet above the Tyne.

From that moment on, the bridge became self-supporting,

all its weight being taken down through the hinges, onto each bank.

Today, the steel arches over the river

are as solid as they were 90 years ago.

But building these massive arches...

was only half the story.

Now, this central span is 161 metres,

but on either side are the approach bands,

each over 100 metres long, and supported by steel pillars.

And building those was almost as difficult

as building the bit over the river.

Just like the great arches,

building the approach roads changed the way bridges were built.

Employing a revolutionary technique called 'launching'.

This is Lombard Street, one of the key areas of old Newcastle.

Now, these buildings were here a good 60 years

before the bridge was even thought about,

and the people living here had no choice but to watch

as the huge approaches slowly crept out

over the top of their homes.

As with the arches, the aim here was to build the approaches

without disturbing the businesses below.

And it's all down to the way they were constructed.

Essentially, they're two huge steel beams,

held apart by those smaller cross pieces.

Like everything else on the bridge, they were built on site.

This is where the ones on the Gateshead side were built.

But instead of being built on the ground,

these were built on massive rollers.

That meant the beams could be rolled forward as they were constructed.

Literally, pushed out over the drop.

Imagine the scene -

a huge crane lifting steel sections off railway wagons

and swinging them into place.

Dozens of men riveting them together in real time.

And here, a powerful winch, operated by ten men,

cranking it round and pulling the bridge forward.

Incredibly, thousands of tonnes of steel would have been on the move,

creeping out at up to six inches a minute,

so, literally, the bridge would have been pushed out over that bank there,

as life went on as normal down below.

And then, every 30 metres or so,

it would meet one of these sturdy, steel vertical supports.

On top of those pillars were more bearings,

and once the bridge reached them,

it simply rolled onwards towards the next set of supports

some 30 metres further on.

Key to every part of this bridge,

from the approach roads to the high arches, are rivets.

The whole structure relies on nearly a million of them

to keep it together.

A rivet is no more than a mushroom-shaped steel peg.

Heated white-hot, it's pushed into a hole drilled through the steel,

to be joined together.

Then, powerful hammers form a second head.

As it cools, the rivet pulls the two parts of the metal together,

forming a bond almost as strong as a modern weld.

The Tyne Bridge was one of the last really big engineering projects

to use these things, rivets.

So I've come here to an engineering works just outside Newcastle,

to find out more about them.

The firm specialises in restoring old structures

like the Tyne Bridge and is run by Doug Judd.

So, Doug, any chance you can show me the whole riveting process?

How they built the Tyne Bridge? Yes, I can, actually.

How we do it by modern standards.

This is the first process, to heat up the rivets. To heat the rivets, yeah.

This is what you use here now, and this is what, sorry? This is an induction heater.

If we press this button here,

it shows you how long it takes to heat the rivet up.

Wow, we've got smoke coming off the rivet here within...

a second of pressing the button.

Before they can be hammered in, the rivets need to be heated up

to an incredible 1,000 degrees Centigrade.

Doug uses a modern induction heater,

but in the 1920s it was far more basic.

'Cause this must've been dangerous work, then?

Very dangerous work.

So they wouldn't have used this when they were building the Tyne Bridge?

No, they would use a grazer.

When it heated up to around 1,000 degrees Cs,

someone would man the fire and then throw them up where they

would be either caught in a bucket or caught by hand

and then placed in the steelwork before being riveted up.

So they chucked these things at around 1,000 degrees C?

Yeah. Flippin' heck!

So when I'm on that rivet gun, any tips? Just hold it down?

Just hold it down and gently... Don't let it kick back too much.

Just hold it down and sort of go in a circular motion.

Whoa! Look at that.

Right, you can feel the heat off that.

This is not dissimilar to a kind of gun they would've used...

Yeah, exactly the same.

Building the Tyne?

Right, let's get that down. Go for it.

Am I going? Away you go.

OK, here we go.

Is that alright? Nice work, yeah.

Look at that!

I'm quite proud of that. That looks great.

Good job. Thanks, Doug.

Yeah, I guess if you're doing that...

I mean, I guess, what, 100 a day?

I would not like to try putting in 100 a day.

But when they were back building the bridge, they would've done, what?

They would have done 100 a day easily, without a doubt.

After my brief apprenticeship as a riveter,

I cannot help but have a huge amount of respect

for the men who built this bridge.

Of all the bridges in Britain, building the Tyne Bridge

must've been one of the toughest assignments going.

The government clause saying it had to be built from above,

causing both a design and structural nightmare.

The men risking their necks, six days a week, hundreds of feet up,

often in gales and rain blowing in off the North Sea,

but somehow the Geordies managed it.

And on the 10 October, 1928,

the bridge was officially opened by King George and his wife, Queen Mary.

It is my earnest hope that this notable improvement

may help to bring back to your city the full tide of prosperity

which your courage and patience

and the recent difficulties so justly deserve.

I have much pleasure in declaring the Tyne Bridge open

for the use of the public.

But despite the pomp and ceremony and the years of hard graft,

the multi-million pound gamble didn't work.

The North East was still in deep trouble.

By 1931, just a few years after the bridge was completed,

14 yards on the Tyne had closed, including the mighty Palmers,

who'd launched over 1,000 ships.

As a means of keeping the men of Tyneside

employed and off the streets,

building the bridge helped for a while,

but it didn't bring the old time back to life.

In fact, you can even see evidence of its death

inside the bridge tower here.

The towers on either side of the bridge are normally locked,

but we've been given special access to show you inside.

Because it's in here that you can clearly see

why the building of the Tyne Bridge

marked the beginning of the end of Newcastle's golden age.

Symbol of the North East,

the Tyne Bridge has stood above the river for almost 90 years.

Built in the depression of the 1920s,

it's role was not just to take traffic across the busy river below,

but to help boost employment and keep the engineering skills

of the North East alive, until its industries boomed again.

Sadly, that never happened,

and the bridge itself stands testament

to just how much Newcastle has changed.

These towers were meant to be vast warehouses

serving industry on the River Tyne,

industry everyone hoped would boom again like the old days.

I mean, just look at this place, it's cavernous,

and not at all what you'd expect from the outside.

The hope was that once the bridge was built,

the recession would be over and Tyneside would return to its role

as the great manufacturing hub of the North East.

These towers would be packed with five floors of merchandise,

waiting to be transported around the country.

Lifts were even installed

to carry the goods up and down from the quayside.

But it was not to be and these warehouses were never even finished.

It really is quite spooky up here.

The echo of the voice, the constant rumbling of traffic,

the birds flapping about.

It's such an empty void.

They never even got to putting the floors in.

And since then, it's just been gathering dust.

Whoo.

Made it.

And from the top of the towers,

you get a really good idea

of how much the River Tyne has transformed over the years.

Look at that view.

The Tyne I'm looking at,

the Tyne this bridge has stood over for almost 90 years,

has completely changed.

When this bridge was first built,

almost every inch of the riverbanks would have been covered in shipyards.

It's sad.

For over 150 years,

thousands of ships were launched from the yards

that once stretched over 11 miles along the River Tyne.

The most famous company, Swan Hunter, used to provide a job for life.

The huge ships they built once towering over the city streets.

But in 2006 it was all over.

In April that year, this ship, the RFA Largs Bay, left the Tyne.

And its builders, the mighty Swan Hunters,

closed its doors forever.

Both John Ashburner and his father worked for Swan Hunter

and witnessed the industry's fatal decline.

30,000 workers, when I was there. Aye.

I mean, when I first started, there were 600 apprentices...

Aye, aye. ..taken on each year. Aye.

And that just petered out as the years went by. Wow, wow, wow.

600. 600 apprentices.

That number, 30,000, to then suddenly not have employment...

It slowly just dwindled away.

So, how does it make you feel to look at this site now?

I... I can't really believe it, it's all gone.

But I knew it would get less and less,

but there's none at all now, shipyards on the Tyne.

You'd never think in my lifetime you wouldn't see a ship being built.

Really, just unimaginable, when you were there

with the amount of activity down there.

Job for life, you know.

And how quickly things changed. Thousands being laid off.

It's sad to see it just sat here like this now, isn't it?

Tyneside's shipbuilding industry,

which the building of the Tyne Bridge had desperately tried to protect,

was finally given the death blow

when the last great cranes at the Swan Hunter yard

were demolished in June, 2010.

But as the industry on the Tyne declined, nature quickly moved in.

One of the most telling indicators of the scale of change here

is not the number of empty hardhats further downstream,

but these little guys here, kittiwakes.

For me, the fact that this bridge is now one of the most successful

breeding grounds for kittiwakes in the country

shows just how much change this bridge has seen.

The first pair of kittiwakes nested on the bridge in 1997.

Now, there are over 700.

But the Tyneside they fly over is far from dead.

Its population is now again growing fast.

The heavy industries may have all but disappeared,

but 21st-century high-tech Newcastle is buzzing with energy and optimism.

Since the Tyne Bridge was built,

another six bridges have spanned the river to deal with the city's growth.

The last of those built in 2001, this...

the incredible Gateshead Millennium Bridge.

Known locally as the Blinking Eye,

this 21st-century bridge is a celebration of a new, cool Newcastle.

One where the old quaysides are now packed with hip bars,

restaurants, and stunning modern architecture.

But at the end of the day, there will only be one bridge

that truly embodies this part of the world.

I think the Tyne Bridge means, when you see it, that you're coming home.

See that bridge, it just...

it just makes you feel that you're back at home.

And everybody says the same, we just love it.

Throughout all those changes,

this bridge, the Tyne Bridge, remains an icon,

a testament to the skill and determination of the Geordies.

You only have to mention it to people round here

to see how proud they are.

And in my view, they've every right to be so.

Captions by Ericsson Access Services SBS Australia 2017