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‘The design of the bridge is very safety conscious. The single hangers attach to each of the three chains in turn so that the deck is supported equally by all three.’

Indeed, but that wasn’t Brunel’s idea. His bridge only had two suspension chains and fewer hangers.

Brunel’s ‘first child, my darling' was unfinished in his lifetime. He died in 1859 and his colleagues in the Institution of Civil Engineers felt that completion of the bridge would be a fitting memorial and started to raise fresh funds.

The project was placed in the hands of Sir John Hawkshaw and William Henry Barlow, who made such substantial alterations to Brunel’s original design that it has been argued that the credit for the bridge as executed should go Barlow and Hawkshaw. The bridge is Brunel’s memorial but not his design.

• Brunel's bridge deck had two suspension chains supporting it, Hawkshaw and Barlow’s has three, with a third more hangers from the chains down to the road deck
• The completed bridge has an entirely different system for attaching the hangers to the chains, to correct the twisting effect that Brunel's design would have had on the chains
• Barlow and Hawkshaw made the bridge deck wider and higher than Brunel’s—had they not done so it is likely that the bridge would be purely pedestrian today
• Brunel proposed a system of wooden struts under the bridge deck to stiffen it, Hawkshaw and Barlow considered these wholly inadequate and replaced them with riveted wrought-iron latticed girders
• Barlow and Hawkshaw made the roadside railings a load-bearing part of the structure while in Brunel's design the railings had no structural rôle
• The pylons were left as rough stone rather than being finished with Egyptian-inspired ornamentation, and the sphinxes were omitted

Brunel’s masterpiece? Up to a point, Nick….