Why was this Darlington roundabout on University Challenge?

The Robert Gordon University team from Aberdeen got three questions on the work of Cleveland Bridge, which, said Mr Paxman, was founded in Darlington in 1877 – and at least one of the students looked horrified by the prospect (below).

The first question was a doddle: the King Edward VII, built in 1906, carried the East Coast Main Line over which river in a north of England city. Obvious, the Tyne.

The second question was much harder: the Batman Bridge, built in 1968, over the Tamar River is in what Australian state. Answer, difficult, Tasmania. They got it wrong.

The third question was the one all Darlington should have known: the Tsing Ma Bridge, said Mr Paxman, was completed in 1997 when it was the second longest suspension bridge in the world, in which Asian city?

The Tsing Ma Bridge in Hong Kong under construction by Cleveland Bridge

Hong Kong was the answer, as every Darlingtonian should have known because for nearly 20 years they drove round and round and round a replica of that very bridge.

The Tsing Ma Bridge cost £550m and joined two of Hong Kong’s island. Its main span, built largely in Darlington and assembled by a team of 40 engineers from Yarm Road over three years, is 4,518ft, or 1,377 metres long. It has six lanes of motor traffic above two railway lines, which meant that when it opened it was the longest span of any railway bridge in the world.

Ian Hunter, the engineering manager at Cleveland Bridge, told the Echo after Margaret Thatcher had opened the bridge: "The time scale really was record breaking. It was a very real challenge, and that's no understatement because of the sheer scale of the bridge. From an engineering point of view, it's the biggest job Cleveland Bridge has ever done. And we completed to budget and precisely on time."

But the work on the bridge was not complete.

Because Darlington in the 1990s was a national leader in Britain in Bloom, it was invited to enter a garden of its own into the Chelsea Flower Show in 1998. Apprentices from Cleveland Bridge knocked up a 15ft scale model of the Tsing Ma as a centrepiece for the garden, which also featured a model of Locomotion No 1 to show the past and present of Darlington’s great engineering history.

The model of the Tsing Ma Bridge at the centre of Darlington's entry in the 1998 Chelsea Flower Show

The judges were impressed and awarded the council a rose bowl.

When the show was over, the garden was dismantled, and the Tsing Ma replica came home to Darlington and, painted bright blue, it was placed at the centre of the inner ring road roundabout outside Halford’s – the Freeman’s Place roundabout, as it is properly known.

The bright blue replica of the Tsing Ma Bridge in the centre of the inner ring road roundabout outside Halford's. Picture: Google StreetView

There this little piece of Hong Kong stood for 18 years with cars going round and round and round and probably not even noticing it.

And then, one day, in 2016 it was gone. The roundabout was re-landscaped, much of the expensive planting was removed, along with the bridge, and replaced by coloured gravel.

We believe the model went back to Cleveland Bridge, and so the next quiz question is – your starter for 10 and no conferring – what happened to it when the historic firm closed in late 2021?