Lost in the name of sustainability

The fight is on — perhaps too late — to save what the city council hasn’t managed to demolish of the Bowstring Bridge at the junction of Leicester’s Western Boulevard and Braunston Gate. You would have to be deeply thick to even think of wrecking this special stretch of late Victorian engineering.

Sadly, English Heritage and the Department of Culture, Media and, like, Whatevah, have declined to list this innovative steel lattice girder bridge built by Henry Lovatt of Wolverhampton for the Great Central Railway’s continental-gauge extension, from Nottingham to London Marylebone, which opened in 1899.

The bridge is the surviving part, though demolition is under way, of a thrilling, mile-and-a-half-long viaduct crossing Leicester and the River Soar. The Bowstring Bridge, championed for years by the Leicester Civic Society, is an intriguing design. Slightly askew, for reasons of local geography, the main beams on either side of the bridge are of different lengths. The design had to be exceptionally good to counteract the different rates of expansion on either side of the bridge’s structure and the poundings of steam expresses and fast goods trains thundering over its girders until the Great Central line was stupidly closed in 1966.

Leicester's Bowstring bridge

The really dim thing is that the bridge is being demolished in our zealously “green” age — when almost every architect is holier-than-BD’s editor on this scientifically unresolved issue — at a cost of nearly £500,000, to make way for a swimming pool for De Montfort University. The university has already built a banal sports centre close to the bridge. It would have taken a single particle of the brain of a half-decent architect or engineer to recommend that the university could have its swimming pool and the bridge.

In this profound age of sustainability, however, such things are below the salt. Our “green” sensibility, backed by the government and English Heritage, tells us that precious resources and huge sums of money must be directed to demolish a fine work of civic engineering that should have lasted centuries so that we can build an uninteresting swimming pool for a university unable to commission thoughtful design.

Now imagine if thoughtful architects and forensically minded engineers had been brought on board. Leicester and De Montfort could have had a swimming pool that would have caught the global imagination and a fine railway bridge that, in just a few years time, would have borne the steam trains of the preserved Great Central Railway. Wouldn’t that be fun?

Swimming in an ultra-modern pool that is good enough, in design terms, to joust with Zaha Hadid’s Olympics Aquatic Centre, while 20th century steam trains roll over a beautifully restored 19th century bridge?

Oh, forget it. Knock it all down at improbable cost. Build rubbish in its place. Then, call the dim result “sustainable” (innit!). And sod Leicester, history, a sense of place and intelligent design.