STRATFIELD SAYE 1801 Thomas Wilson River Loddon Hampshire HEW 1344 SU706 624 N51o 20' 44" W1o 0' 3.8"
This bridge is on a private estate formerly owned by George Pitt, Lord Rivers, who would have commissioned the bridge. A plaque at the crown of the arch gives the date of 1801. The estate was bought by the Duke of Wellington after the 1815 Battle of Waterloo being a gift from his grateful nation and it is still the private home of his descendants.
The bridge carries an estate road over the River Loddon. It was designed by Thomas Wilson (ca. 1750-ca. 1820) who was most likely introduced to Pitt by Rowland Burdon a Member of Parliament from County Durham where Pitt's family owned vast coalfields. Burdon had commissioned Thomas Wilson to build the Sunderland Bridge across the River Wear (Act 1792). The iron work was cast by the Walkers' Foundry at Rotherham for both bridges.
This is a particularly beautiful bridge: deceptively simple looking but with sensuous curves. The airy iron work spanning the river is anchored by handsome stolid stone abutments and crowned with a simple parapet whose insistent vertical bars serve to both unite the masonry and the iron while delineating the curves and contrasting with the circles in the spandrels. They are subtly repeated but with different spacing in the arched voussoirs.
Wilson patented his technique of inserting a rectangular cast-iron frame the full width of the bridge to give lateral stability. In addition, there are light cross-strays connecting the four ribs. The decking was originally planking. The span between abutments is 40 feet and the width between parapets is 13 ½ feet. Andrew Smith was the consulting engineer when the bridge was restored in the 1990's.
Thomas Wilson is a legend among devotees of early iron bridges. His Sunderland Bridge (Act 1792) was the second major iron bridge built after the first Iron Bridge at Coalbrookdale. Wilson built a number of significant bridges during his lifetime of which only three of which are known to remain today: this one (1801-1802); a bridge at Spanish Town, Jamaica (1800-1801); and the Tickford Bridge at Newport Pagnell (1809-10).