M1 River Trent Crossing

Today was a lovely day off, and much needed after six long days in a row and a 57 hour week! 

I saw my best friend and his girlfriend who were briefly in town and we grabbed a city centre coffee together! Great timing on his part because it mean't my planned morning walk was now in the afternoon, and oh how much better was the weather! 

So having driven up to Shardlow, just across into Derbyshire I walked east along the River Trent towards Sawley. It was a long meandering walk with many stops, mostly to photograph and take in the bridges that span the Trent and in doing so link Leicestershire to Derbyshire.  

The most prominent ( and beautiful ) for me is this great cantilevered concrete of the M1 River Trent Crossing. Completed in 1966 this bridge has carried long distance traffic across an unnoticed moment of transition for fifty years. The M1 in this area a magic carpet ride atop a hinterland of river mouths, canals, flood plains, aqueducts and county boundaries; its concrete piers and textural spans rising above the autumnal patchwork. While the bridge's structure so beautifully reflecting the organic nature of its setting as its board-formed concrete carries the wood-grain of the shuttering it was born into. And speaking of reflections, the lines of precast segmental mid span illuminated by the low late afternoon sunshine rippled beautifully in the Trent; lines so defined above but distorted and dishevelled below making a continuously changing wave pattern, an oscillation, resolving to me like a weakening radio signal as the cars pass silently overhead. All this while I was listening to BBC Radio 4's 'Conversations on a Bench' from the Mumbles in South Wales with industrial visions across Swansea Bay towards Port Talbot. Linking nicely to another concrete span of the M4 by the very same engineer as this beauty.

The other major bridge I sampled is the Harrington Bridge that again spans the River Trent and the county line just south of Sawley. A hybrid of a structure with masonry and steel. The original central section having been washed away by the ferocious Trent. 

Book coming on nicely!