Austhorpe Lane Bridge, HUL4/21, Cross Gates and Whinmoor, Leeds

Summary

Railway basket arch overbridge, c1830-34 by James Walker of Walker & Burges for Leeds & Selby Railway.

Description

Railway basket arch overbridge, c1830-34 by James Walker of Walker & Burges for Leeds & Selby Railway.

MATERIALS: Sandstone ashlar and Bramley Fall gritstone.

PLAN: single-span carrying a road over the railway which has provision to accommodate four tracks.

One of a sequence of bridges on the Leeds & Selby Railway which share a common design. The bridge is built of squared, coursed and tooled stone blocks. The basket arch of Bramley Fall gritstone has stepped, tooled and inscribed, v-jointed voussoirs springing from a wide, horizontally-tooled impost band. The arch soffit is constructed of large, stone blocks. The outer walls of the abutments and wing walls are formed of long, narrow blocks of tooled, v-jointed sandstone ashlar, now weathered. The inner abutment walls are heavily tooled with v-joints. The parapets are of larger blocks of Bramley Fall gritstone with pronounced horizontal tooling and terminate in characteristic oval piers. They are set on square-cut, tooled and inscribed string courses and have asymmetrically-curved coping with horizontal tooling.

EXCLUSIONS: the west face of the bridge has been obscured by a separate concrete and steel footbridge constructed immediately adjacent in 1961.This later bridge is not of special interest and the structure is excluded from the listing.

History

In the early C19 Leeds was a major textile manufacturing centre and needed a good transport connection to the sea for the import of raw wool and export of finished cloth. The pre-existing river and canal system to Hull was slow and expensive and a railway link from Leeds to Selby and then onwards to Hull was considered to have potential to improve the transport infrastructure, and could also benefit local coal mine and quarry owners.

In 1825 George Stephenson was asked to survey a possible route to Selby. However, financial uncertainties led to the project being postponed and Stephenson concentrated on the Liverpool & Manchester Railway instead. In 1829 the engineer James Walker was asked to review the Stephenson proposal. Walker (1781-1862) is best known for designing harbours, docks and lighthouses, having been appointed consulting engineer to Trinity House in 1825. However, he also played an important role in the early development of the railway system. In 1829 he went into partnership with his assistant, Alfred Burges (1797-1886, father of architect William Burges), though Burges does not appear to have been involved in Walker's railway projects. Having resurveyed the route Walker suggested some adjustments to enable the use of horse or locomotive power without the inclusion of inclined planes worked with stationary steam engines. The proposed route ran from Leeds to the River Ouse at Selby via Crossgates, Garforth and Milford, a distance of just over 19 miles. Walker also suggested that the plan put before Parliament allowed sufficient land to be purchased for the construction of a four track line. It was authorised by Parliament in 1830, four months before the pioneering Liverpool & Manchester Railway opened, and was fully opened by December 1834.

Walker acted as consulting engineer, and in common with other early railway builders, had a resident engineer for the day-to-day supervision and some of the detailed design, using Thomas Dyson, and, from 1832, George Smith. Nowell & Sons of Dewsbury and Homer & Pratt of Goole were the two contractors. The scale of the project was unusual because of the decision to provide four tracks. This resulted in a trackbed of 66ft (20.1m) rather than the typical two track line which had a trackbed of 30ft (9.1m); even Brunel designing for his broad-gauge track used that dimension. The extra width gave the railway a quite different character from the simple lines and waggonways that had preceded it. The most distinctive characteristic of the line was the design for the overbridges, which had to span the four tracks rather than the usual two tracks. Walker did not use a twin-span bridge, but designed a bridge with a single, basket arch (three-centred arch where the height is less than half the span) and an unprecedented span of around 60ft (18.2m). In the event only a twin-track line was laid, and in many cases one side of the arch is obscured by the earth embankment. The bridges were built of stone with the exception of a brick underbridge at Barwick Road, Garforth, and two iron bridges, one of which survives at Crawshaw Woods.

Austhorpe Lane Bridge is an overbridge built by the contractors Hamer & Pratt of Goole. The bridge carries Austhorpe Lane over the railway bed which was constructed to accommodate four tracks.

The west face of the bridge was obscured by a separate concrete and steel footbridge constructed immediately adjacent in 1961.

Reasons for Listing

Austhorpe Lane Bridge, HUL 4-21, of c1830-34 by James Walker of Walker & Burges for Leeds & Selby Railway, is listed at Grade II for the following principal reasons:
* Historic interest: as an original overbridge built between 1830 and 1834 on the pioneering, first phase Leeds & Selby Railway;
* Engineer: designed by James Walker, a renowned C19 engineer, who constructed the line with a four-track bed and distinctive, single-span overbridges with unprecedented spans of 60ft (18.2m) rather than the standard 30ft (9.1m) span and twin-span bridges used by other early and later railway engineers;
* Architectural interest: as a single-span, basket-arch bridge demonstrating a high level of craftsmanship in its construction, detailing, and dressing;
* Intactness: the bridge is largely unaltered and retains its original parapets;
* Group value: the bridge is architecturally inter-related to the other c1830-34 stone bridges on the Leeds & Selby Railway designed by James Walker, sharing distinctive characteristics such as the use of single-span basket arches, stepped voussoirs, and oval piers to the horizontally-tooled parapets.

External Links

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