Grosvenor Bridge

History
The Grosvenor Bridge was built between 1827-1833 in order to ease congestion on the Old Dee Bridge at Handbridge, which by the beginning of the 19th century was the only crossing across the River Dee in Chester. The bridge is located on the A483 Grosvenor Road. The medieval Old Dee Bridge was almost constantly congested and an alternative route was "urgently" required.



In 1808, Chester Corporation decided to hold a competition to select the best plans for a new bridge across the Dee. A committee was empowered to consider plans, surveys and estimates. Nothing much happened for ten years. However, a serious blow for the viability of the Port of Chester was the building of what is now the A5 by engineer noted Thomas Telford from Shrewsbury up to Holyhead. The committee "woke up" in 1815 when Telford was appointed to the new road project and it was seen as a threat to Chester's Irish trade. At its first meeting, held on 3 October 1818, the architect Thomas Harrison was requested to supply plans for a new bridge.

At that time Chester was still a shipbuilding city. The Dee is a tidal river up to the Old Dee Bridge and the weir, with the result that the water level beneath the bridge can vary significantly during the day. Thus, the new bridge needed to be high enough to allow ships to pass beneath. All plans then came to a standstill until 1824 (Telford had started work on the Menai Bridge in 1819 and it was now nearing its completion in 1826), when on 17th August another public meeting was held at the Exchange, the outcome of which was an appeal to Parliament for an Act to empower the construction of a new bridge and the construction of the appropriate roads. This involved the demolition of St Bridget's Church and other buildings.



Although Harrison was appointed the chief architect for the bridge, his designs were by no means readily accepted. Harrison at first submitted a design for an iron bridge which was rejected in favour of a stone structure. Harrison put forward a radical design with a single stone arch spanning an incredible 200ft. Again, this was rejected - hence the scale model which now stands near Chester Castle was designed to counter arguments which claimed a bridge with such a large sandstone arch was not possible.

The worries of the sub committee are evident from the Dee Bridge Commissioners Minute Book:


 * ".. Your committee would have been highly gratified could they have honestly recommended to your adoption a single arch of masonry. There can be no doubt that such a bridge would have been most worthy of the genius of the venerable architect, and would have best harmonised with that noble edifice, the castle. But the immense expense attending upon every part of its execution - the foundation of its abutments - the centring and the importation of the granite, of which it must be built for the freestones of our district would not bear the pressure, compels us to abandon it .."

In the event Harrison's proposal for a single arch made of sandstone was accepted, after taking into consideration his comparatively tiny scale model. Problems with finding stable ground for the foundations and the required parliamentary permissions then delayed matters for several years. Eventually enginner Thomas Telford found a stable region of the bank where the bridge could be safely constructed. The delay of parliamentary permissions is interesting, given that Chester's MP's at the time were both Grosvenors. It is often stated that the first stone of Harrison's Grosvenor Bridge was put in place by the Marquis of Westminster. This is not entirely accurate as the stone was laid on the 1 October 1827, when Robert was still Earl Grosvenor. However the bridge did give him a very impressive overture to the driveway leading to his new mansion, variously described as:


 * "the most gaudy concern I ever saw .. a vast pile of mongrel gothic which ... is a monument of wealth, ignorance and bad taste".

Harrison did not live to see his bridge completed. He died aged 85 at his self-designed home, St Martin's Lodge - overlooking the bridge - in 1829. He was buried in the churchyard of the new St Bridget's Church which replaced the old one which had been demolished when his bridge was being built. Work on the bridge was completed by his pupil, William Cole (1800-1892) who, upon completion of the bridge treated himself to a trip to Italy, Greece, Asia Minor, Egypt and Morocco.



The bridge was opened by Princess Victoria of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld on 17 October 1832, although it did not open to traffic until November 1833 (after delay over payments to the contractor). It might seem that the king should have opened so prestigous a bridge, but at the time of its opening there was an ongoing crisis over the Reform Act, which had just granted seats in the House of Commons to large cities that had sprung up during the Industrial Revolution, and removed seats from the "rotten boroughs": those with very small electorates and usually dominated by a wealthy patron.

At its opening, the Grosvenor Bridge was the longest existing single-span stone arch road bridge – at 200 feet across and 60 feet high – in the world (the Trezzo sull'Adda Bridge completed in 1377 had been longer, but was destroyed during a seige 1416). The Grosvenor Bridge held the world record for thirty years when it was surpassed by the "Cabin John Bridge" in the USA, 220 feet across and 57 feet 3 inches high. The Grosvenor Bridge is still the longest masonry arch in the UK, and number 19 in the world. The arch is of Anglesey limestone, the rest red and cream Peckforton sandstone ashlar. The abutments were built directly onto sandstone on the North bank of the River Dee, the South side being built off a stone 'table' supported on timber piles driven into the boulder clay. The spandrels are constructed with voids to reduce the self weight. The "Cabin John" bridge looks very similar to the Grosvenor Bridge but is narrower, and has single lane operation. The chief builder of the Grosvenor Bridge, James Trubshaw, described it as:


 * "a lasting monument to the glory and superiority of Great Britain".



Tolls wer imposed to recover the £50,000 (£4,240,000 as of 2016) cost of construction. Hemingway, pro-Grosvenor editor of the "Chester Chronicle" considered them excessive and was critical of them, writing:


 * "While the erection of this bridge is allowed to be a decided improvement and a great ornament to the city, some doubt whether the excessive tolls will not materially injure its trade. Already, new roads have been made and coaches set up by which Chester is avoided as a thoroughfare. Hitherto the shareholders have had no reason to congratulate themselves on their speculation."



The toll was abolished in 1885 when maintenance was transferred to the Chester Corporation, as payment hindered the use of the bridge. The bridge carried a tramline over the River Dee from 1879 to 1930. The Chester Tramways Company was required by the Chester Tramways Act (41 & 42 Vict. c. clxxiv, 1878) to pay to the Dee Bridge Commissioners an annual sum for the use of Grosvenor Bridge. The Improvement Act of 1884 gave the Chester Tramways Company the option of either contributing £1,000 towards freeing the tolls (which it did), or paying £85 per annum to Chester Corporation until 1899.

Was it really needed?
One odd thing about the bridge is that the shipyards and the moorings at Chester all seemed to have been downstream of the bridge, which only gives access to less than a mile of river before the Old Dee Bridge and the weir prevent any further progress upstream. Another odd thing is that while the Grosvenor Bridge was completed in 1833 with space for ships to pass beneath, Robert Stephensons Dee Railway Bridge of 1846, which is a little way downstream of the Grosvenor Bridge is not nearly so high.

The reopening of the Dee by the "New Cut" in 1737 did not halt Chester's decline as a port. In 1701 Chester shipowners had 25 vessels, and in the early 1710s the total tonnage, no more than 3,400, was less than half that owned at Liverpool. The "New Cut" made the city accessible during spring tides to ships drawing up to 15 ft. in the 1770s. By the mid 1740s a wharf had been reestablished west of the Roodee and there were large timber yards near by. About 1760 the city built a new warehouse for cheese, with its own quay, just to the north, and was planning a further dock, warehouses, and a new road from the Watergate, later called New Crane Street. By the 1730s it had fallen to around 1,650 tons (a tenth of Liverpool's total) and in the late 1750s Chester's 1,000-1,400 tons was scarcely a twentieth of Liverpool's fleet. The linen trade with Ireland reached its peak around the early 1770's. By the 1830's traditional manufacturing trades, including the making of clay-pipes, clocks and gloves were in serious decline, if not entirely extinct. Ship-building was entering a terminal phase and rope-making barely survived. Both of the two cotton mills had closed by the 1820's, so one of the leading industries of the Industrial Revolution had failed to establish itself in Chester. While in the 18thC. the City Fair's had been dominated by linen (the trade peaked in the 1770's), by 1830 the trade was dead.

So if it was perhaps so obvious that trade was in serious decline, with shipbuilding in Chester coming to an end and with no apparent need to access a short length of the River Dee, why build so tall a bridge? It could be there was political motivation. At the time, politics in Chester continued to be a riotous affair. Hemingway, writing in 1826 shortly after Robert Grosvenor, (1st Baron Ebury and the third son of the Robert Grosvenor after whom the bridge was named) was returned in absentia after a severe contest, reported:


 * "Of all the places in the kingdom which have heen contested during the late general Election, the city of Chester has heen distinguished ahove most others for the virulence of party feeling, the acrimony of personal hostility, and the violence of popular outrage."

Grosvenor presented Chester’s civic address to Princess (later Queen) Victoria when she opened the Grosvenor Bridge in 1832, and she sponsored his daughter Victoria Charlotte at her christening next day. The Grosvenor family's direct influence over the corporation was broken by the Municipal Corporations Act of 1835 and the first council elections at the end of that year.

In the alternative, it may be that the Grosvenor Bridge was just another example of speculation by its investots - hence the "excessive" tolls.



The Grosvenor Bridge was recently assessed for EU highway loadings and shows little signs of distress since it's 1834 opening during which time there have been no significant repairs or alterations. However, Harrison did not rest easy in his grave - just like the first St Bridget the second lay in the path of a construction project and his bones were moved in about 1964 to Blacon, where they lie in an un-marked grave.

links and sources

 * Grosvenor Bridge on Wikipedia;
 * Grosvenor Bridge on English Heritage;
 * Grosvenor Bridge on Structurae database;
 * The Scale Model of Grosvenor Bridge;
 * Grosvenor Bridge at Virtual Stroll has some more information;