Hell Gate Bodge

There is a delightful and erudite article on the provenance of the Sydney Harbour Bridge in the Guardian today. The writer is Germaine Greer, who, like Stilton, or Damon Albarn, is getting much better with age, especially over the expansion of Stansted Airport.

Please do read the whole thing, if only for this nugget:

"It is sometimes said that the single-arch bridge built by Dorman Long over the Tyne at Newcastle is the model for the Sydney Harbour bridge, but this was opened only in 1929, five years after the Dorman Long tender had been accepted. The real model is almost certainly the Hell Gate arch over the East River in New York."

So, while we wail and gnash and fret and weep about the fact that the US is losing its edge as the Wild West of late-period capitalism, we can be reassured by the fact that the iconic bridge of the Asia-Pacific region is modelled after a structure that is barely glamourous enough for the average New Yorker to overdose under.

[Image from Tom Fletcher's wonderful architecture site]