The city of Bristol in the West of England has a proud commercial and industrial history. 

Clifton Suspension Bridge, showing Leigh Woods on the left and the Hotwells on the right. Source: Wikipedia

In the eighteenth century, this was the principal port outside London.  It was also a fashionable resort, affluent suburbs grew up on the south facing heights of Clifton, which rise above the town. Along the river, a fashionable spa grew up at Hotwells, which in its heyday rivalled the delights of the famous spa town of Bath in Somerset. Today, water from the hot well trickles as a filthy stream across black dredged mudflats on a tidal river. But the backdrop is spectacular. From Hotwells to the sea, the River Avon, upon which Bristol built its prosperity, passes through a spectacular river gorge.

A Bristol wine merchant, William Vick must has surveyed the scene in its heyday. The fashionable classes used the spa while tall masted sailing ships plied the river, entering and exiting the great port through the spectacular gorge.  In 1753, in his will, William Vick, decreed that £1,000 be invested, until £10,000 had accumulated for the purpose of building a bridge across the gorge.  Mr Vicks was emphatic that the bridge must be built of stone.  It would become a fantastic portal to a great city.

In 1793 the aptly named William Bridges proposed a fantastic portal.  He wanted to build a massive structure five storeys tall with a grand central arch. His design included town houses, an inn, stables, and all the features of a small town. The stone bridge was clearly going to be very expensive.  

Source: Wikipedia

While the designs were being pondered Britain experienced the full thunder of the industrial revolution.  Iron was the new material.  Suspension bridges were the new design.  In  1779 Abraham Darby built the first wrought iron bridge across the River Severn close to his foundry at Coalbrookdale.  In 1806 Samuel Brown, an officer in the Royal Navy pioneered the use of iron cables in the rigging.  By 1813 he had built an experimental 33m suspension bridge and in 1817 he patented special ”eye-bar” wrought iron chain links that could be used in a suspension bridge.  Samuel Brown built three notable suspension bridges, over the Tweed at Berwick in 1819, at Newhaven in 1820/21 and at Brighton in 1821/22.  In the years between 1819 and 1826 Thomas Telford, the greatest civil engineer of the time, felt sufficiently confident with the ”eye-bar” and suspension bridge design to build a 177m span across the Menai straits in North Wales.   

By 1829 sufficient expertise had been gathered to contemplate a bridge across the River Avon at Hotwells.  A stone bridge was expected to cost ten times the sum allocated by Mr Vicks.  An Act of Parliament would be needed to permit the construction of an iron bridge and permit the collection of tolls to fund the project.  A competition was to be held to determine the final design.  The great Thomas Telford, who had become President of the newly formed Society of Civil Engineers the previous year, was to be the judge.

At the time certain twenty three year old aspiring engineer was convalescing in the Clifton suburbs.  His name was Isambard Kingdom Brunel. He already had engineering experience, working with his father. In 1823 the father, Marc Isambard Brunel,  built two chain bridges on the island of Réunion.  These were ingeniously stiffened against the wind using counter-curved chains below the bridge deck.  Marc Brunel was also the father of the tunnelling shield. In 1818 Marc Brunel and Thomas Cochraine patented this device. It allowed tunnels to be built through soft and difficult terrain.  In 1825 Marc Brunel began to build a tunnel under the Thames, between Rotherhithe and Wapping.  The shield was supposed to hold back the waterlogged sediment and gravel found on the bed of the Thames.  In 1827 he appointed his son as resident engineer.  When the tunnel collapsed in January 1828 six men died and Brunel narrowly escaped with his life. Work on the tunnel was suspended for several years (it was finally completed in 1841).  So, Brunel with time on his hands decided to enter the Clfton competition.  He was determined to win.

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A scale model of the tunnelling shield at the Brunel Museum at Rotherhithe. Source: Wikipedia

Telford was on old man with a lifetime of engineering experience and achievement behind him.  Perhaps he was cautious.  Born in 1757, he had seen his fair share of engineering disasters. Two of his bridges, at Bewdley and Tenbury, were washed away in the winter floods of 1795.  He knew that the new wrought iron suspension bridges were not safe in heavy winds.  The Brighton Chain Pier suffered from wind induced vibrations and had been twice destroyed in major storms.  Perhaps he did not understand the new materials. Sam Brown subjected his iron chains to much greater loads than did Telford.  Perhaps he was simply arrogant.   Perhaps, he thought that Brunel was a young and inexperienced upstart.  One by one, he rejected  the designs including that of Brunel.  Telford maintained that no suspension bridge could exceed the the 600 feet (183 m) span of his own Menai Suspension Bridge. 

A the eleventh hour Telford produced his own design and rushed it through the approving commitee. In  January 1830 the committee put forward a Bill for approval by Parliament.

The Clifton Suspension Bridge proposed by Thomas Telford. Source: Wikipedia

The people of Bristol were furious.  They disliked the Telford design.  The towers would be expensive.  Brunel commented sarcastically that he had not thought of building towers from the sand of the river bed when there were good rock buttresses to build upon. 

In May 1830 when the Parliamentary Bill was approved the committee was £22,000 short of the funds required to complete the Telford design.  The shortfall was a convenient loophole.  The committee had a reason to follow popular opinon to reject the Telford design.

A second competition was set up with a new panel of judges.  It considered proposals from four contenders including four designs by Brunel using different span and abutment arrangements.  When a Mr W.Hawks, who received a 100 guinea prize for his efforts, Brunel contested the decision.  He cajoled the panel to consider one of his designs. With his persuasion the committee unanimously accepted a design that Brunel called the “Egyptian thing” because it included fashionable styled Egyptian towers.  Brunel intended to cap each tower with a sphinx.  On 16 March 1831 Brunel was announced the winner. Apparently there was an open ceremony in which visitors were hauled across the gorge in a wicker basket.

The Clifton Bridge competitions took place during a period of intense political activity.  

In the eighteenth century much of Bristol’s wealth was generated from the slave trade.  It also took part in the sugar trade, importing and refining sugar from the West Indian Plantations.  The slave trade was abolished  throughout the British Empire in 1807 but slaves could still be used on the plantations. This allowed the sugar trade to prosper, but a campaign was afoot to free those slaves.  The 1830 general election was fought in Bristol on the issue of slaves.  Fortunes were at stake.

At the same time, there was an active campaign for political reform.  By the summer of 1831 the Reform Bill had made its way to the House of Lords.  The Bill was rejected after a long debate by the peers on 8th October.  Public outrage led to riots in Derby, Nottingham, Worcester, Bath and most severely Bristol.  For three days from 29 October 1831 an angry mob looted and torched private and council property in the city. Perhaps most outrage was caused by burning down the Bishop’s palace.  The Bishop was a spokesman against reform.

The commercial reputation of Bristol was in tatters.  Work on the suspension bridge was halted.  Isambard Kingdom Brunel was even sworn in as a special constable to quell the riots.

The Reform Act was passed in June 1832. The new voters elected new MPs who had little or no financial involvement and connection with slavery and its associated industries (such as sugar and tobacco). In 1833 they voted for the abolition of slavery through the Emancipation Act. 

Under the Emancipation Act the slaves gain full freedom in 1838.  The slave owners and their supporters received compensation for their loss of property from the government.  Some £20 million in compensation the British government.  Slave owners in Bristol received over £500,000.  Much of this money was invested in houses and engineering projects within Britain.  Charles Pinney, the owner of Caribbean plantations and a Bristol sugar business, like many Bristol merchants invested his money in a new railway project.  Brunel was appointed chief engineer of the new project, The Great Western Railway, which was to link Bristol with London by 1841.  

When confidence returned to the Bristol economy, work resumed on the suspension bridge in 1836.  By 1843, the towers had been built in unfinished stone.  Until 2002 the 110 ft red sandstone butress on the Somerset, or Leigh Woods, side of the gorge was thought to be solid.  In 2002 it was realised that the abutment contained 12 vaulted chambers.  These cavities show that Brunel was trying to save money in the construction.

Even so, the funds were exhausted; Vick’s bequest and subsequent investments were depleted.  In 1851 the iron chains and other ironwork that had been specifically earmarked for the project was sold.  It was used to build the Royal Albert Bridge, also by Brunel, on the railway between Plymouth and Saltash.  By May 1853 even time had run out. The terms of the parliamentary Bill had expired.  Work on the bridge had come to a standstill.  It seemed increasingly unlikely that the bridge would ever be completed.

Brunel never saw the completed bridge.  in 1859 he suffered the indignity of witnessing a major explosion on the Great Eastern is great ship project.  He suffered a stroke on 5th September and died ten days later at the age of 53.  

Isambard Kingdom Brunel standing beside the chains used to launch his famous steamship the Great Eastern. Source: Wikipedia

Fellow engineers at the Institution of Civil Engineers decided that the completion of the Clifton Suspension Bridge would be a fitting memorial to the great engineer and set about raising funds. 

In 1845 Brunel built a the Hungerford suspension bridge. This was a footbridge across the Thames in central London.  In 1860 this bridge had to be removed to make way for a new railway bridge leading to the new terminus of the South Eastern Railway.  Chains from the Hungerford bridge were purchased for use on the Clifton Bridge. 

Two leading engineers of the day, Willam Henry Barlow and Sir John Hawkshaw (the designer of the Hungerford railway and new Charing Cross railway station) made modifications to the Brunel design.  Their design has a wider, higher and sturdier deck than Brunel intended. It uses triple rather than double chains It has towers left as rough stone rather than being finished in Egyptian style. There are practical reasons for each of these points.  The deck was widened to accommodate a local land-owner who wished to drive hos carriage into Bristol without having to negotiate the steep banks of the Avon gorge. He paid for the modifications in exchange for a lifetime pass for his family and household.  The triple chains introduced a level of redundancy which would allow chains to be taken out for repair.  The designers did not want to finish the bridge in Egyptian style replete with sphinxes on each tower on the grounds of expense and taste. Fashions had moved on since the 1830s.

These measurers reduced the cost of finishing the bridge.  In June 1862 work re-started in preparation for the arrival of the Hungerford chains.  Mathematical calculations showed that an extra 500 tons of chain would be required, these were ordered. 

In June 1863 the first wire passed between the two towers. The chains and anchorage were sunk into a 20 ft bed of concrete.  Then the chains were linked together with the rods from which the deck was suspended. 

A view of the Clifton Suspension Bridge, looking from Leigh Woods towards Clifton showing the eye-bar chains. Source: Wikipeda

The opening ceremony took place one year later on 8th December 1864.  A long procession started out from Bristol city centre at 10.00am, headed by representatives of five army regiments and the Royal Navy. The procession included sixteen bands, both military and civil. The route to Clifton was thronged with enthusiastic crowds.  Following the first ceremonial crossing, six field guns fired a salute from the Leigh Woods side, the procession returned to Clifton, where in front of a grandstand many local dignitaries addressed the crowds.

View of the Clifton Suspension Bridge from Clifton looking towards Leigh Woods. Source: Wikipedia