ON SUNDAY, May 14, the inaugural Tees Heritage Walk is being arranged by Middlesbrough Erimus Rotary and many partners, including Middlesbrough College.
It is a fund-raising walk which also aims to bring the generations together – the college’s youngsters with Rotarians who are a little bit older. Another aim is to celebrate the amazing heritage that is to be found on the riverbank from the Ironmasters District round to Stockton.
Walkers will get views of seven bridges, starting with the iconic – an over-used word, but in this case appropriate –Transporter Bridge.
When the bridge was built in 1911, the Tees was full of shipping which could not be disrupted. For the high masts to continue to sail unhindered would have required a sky-scraper of bridge. When that idea was dismissed, a swing bridge was considered, but it would have wiped out many smaller craft as it swung to and from, and at £154,000, a tunnel was just too expensive.
So the novel solution was the Transporter, with its car deck going across the river – one of just 16 of its type built around the world.
It cost £84,000 and used 2,600 tons of steelwork, and by the 1930s, it was carrying 350,000 vehicles and 1.5m paying passengers a year, and even more non-paying passengers walked up the 160ft of steps and across the 571ft span to the other side rather than travel for a fee in the gondola.
Often overlooked, although practically as revolutionary as the Transporter, is the second bridge the walkers will come to as they walk along the river on banks that are largely made of slag from the late Victorian blast furnaces – the ironmasters believed they had reached a good deal with the port authorities who agreed to take away the slag at 4d a ton, but rather than take the slag out to sea, it was dumped beneath the ironmasters’ noses to create 20 miles of walls to constrain the river.
With the slag walls in place, the river flowed more swiftly and so became self-dredging.
That second bridge is the Newport Bridge which represents another novel approach to spanning a busy river in such a flatland.
Newport Bridge, Middlesbrough, being built in 1933. Pictures: Teesside Archives
Newport Bridge under construction, an amazing picture from Old Middlesbrough by Paul Chrystal
The Newport Bridge opened on February 28, 1934, and was the country’s first vertical lift bridge – when a ship needed to sail beneath it, the deck lifted up 37 metres out of the way.
The Newport Bridge, built by Teesside’s own Dorman, Long and Company, cost £512,000 and used 8,000 tons of steel.
The royal cavalcade, carrying the Duke and Duchess of York (who became George VI and Queen Elizabeth), heads through the crowds towards the Newport bridge for its formal opening on February 28, 1934. Picture: Araf Chohan
It had two electric motors that could lift the bridge in 90 seconds, and one petrol motor on stand-by for if the electric ones failed. If the petrol one failed as well, 12 men could manually lift the deck although it would take them about eight hours.
How thankful they must have been that the motors didn’t fail: in an average week in the 1940s, 800 vessels passed beneath the bridge and in a record week in the 1930s, it performed 1,400 lifts in seven days.
However, after the Second World war, shipping on the Tees declined, and in 1989, the legal necessity for the Newport Bridge to be able to lift itself out of the way was removed. Its final lift was performed on November 18, 1990, and its deck became fixed to carry traffic on the A1032.
Still its mighty towers will look fabulously industrial when the walkers pass beneath them.
Newport Bridge in 1934, with the deck down
The walkers set off from Middlesbrough College from 9.30am to 11am, with the full 12 miles expected to take about four hours. There are, though, shorter routes possible – a return to Newport Bridge is six miles.
Entry is £5 per adult, or £10 for families, which goes to charity, with people collecting additional sponsorship if they wish. To register, and to see a map of the various walks with plenty more information, go to erimusrotary.org or call 07864-630755.
READ MORE: A PUB CRAWL THROUGH TIME IN OLD MIDDLESBROUGH
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