Growing up ‘Over Stoke’, the view from my back bedroom window of our house on an elevated position of Rectory Road, halfway up the steep Station Street hill, was of the chimneys and structure  of the coal-fired Ipswich power station at the end of Cliff Quay. I could see past the power station, where cormorants used to fish off the coaling jetties, past Freston Reach, and towards Pin Mill.

The Ipswich power station was sanctioned in 1939, with construction commencing in 1945, and final commissioning for electricity generation in 1949. It suffered a disastrous fire in 1982 and was finally closed in 1985. It was a familiar sight for me, particularly when bird-watching along Freston Reach, when I wondered precisely what the  processes were inside the building. I never managed to go on a tour inside, but a friend’s father had retired from being an engineer there, so I learnt a little. It was finally demolished in 1994, a spectacle watched by hundreds of people along the river shore.

After getting married and leaving home in 1978, I used to regularly visit my mother at Rectory Road. After many years of planning, the long awaited Ipswich Southern By-pass was being created, and as part and parcel of the scheme a new road bridge was being constructed across the River Orwell at Freston Reach to carry the road. The view from my old back bedroom window was fantastic, particularly when cranes on barges were lifting into place the 18 spans which would constitute the structure of the bridge. My late mother was enthralled and excited about what was happening. Every time I visited we would look out of the window at the work in ‘real time’ or, if not, she would update me on the progress. It also gave her a positive outlook in her final years, replacing the sometimes prevalent memories of raiding German aircraft following the route of the Orwell to unleash their deadly cargo on the docks and engineering works of Ipswich.

Fast forward to the current times, and the dire situation posed by lockdowns during the pandemic. When one is unable to do ‘normal activities’ to fill up the available time, other jobs are suggested and are tackled, often with surprising results. While loft-clearing, an Ipswich Evening Star supplement of 16th December 1982 relating to the Orwell Bridge fluttered down through the trapdoor. By that stage it had been constructed with the official opening very much on the horizon. Some interesting facts emerge.

I can recall the proposals to accept ‘overspill’ population from London to expand the town. Shankland Cox Associates were appointed consultant architects and they proposed two options: one a linear town along the banks of the Orwell to Felixstowe and the other development to the south of the town in the Wherstead/Belstead area. As part of an assignment for my fifth year examinations, I somehow managed to secure an interview with a member of the consultant’s staff who told me about the project brief and more details of the proposals.

The supplement states that: ‘since the war the expansion of Ipswich has been hampered by the lack of an efficient communication system round and within the town. In the early 1960s the Vincent report was the first of many expansion planning reports on how and where expansion would happen. With monotonous regularity, these reports were prepared, reported on, studied, debated, and then consigned to files or waste paper baskets as Whitehall policies changed.

‘The Orwell bridge idea was born in a Cliff Quay office of Fisons at a meeting of the transport committee of the Ipswich Chamber of Commerce and Shipping in 1965. At the time Ipswich had suffered another of many enquiries into its development and in this one, a particularly silly idea was mooted – proposing to infill a section of the dock by the lock gates and run an internal main traffic route over it. This would have had the effect of isolating the inner dock area, including  Cranfields, Pauls and Whites and the south-west quay.’

The Chairman of the Transport Committee was Fisons transport manager, Mr H.C. Chandler. He recalled that: ‘during  a routine lunchtime examination of our shipping and transport position I had this matter very much in mind and, from the bridge of one of the ships, I had an excellent view down-river with the high ground at Wherstead in the background, the view south of Cliff Quay power station showed up markedly. The thought occurred: a bridge somewhere around this area might provide the solution. The ability to pick up Felixstowe dock traffic and by-pass Ipswich was immediately apparent, plus the opportunity to spur off and pick up our own dock and industrial traffic.’

In 1966 the Chamber of Commerce issued its report upon the consultant’s proposals and the bridge concept was fully backed. It was eventually decided that the River Orwell should be bridged and not tunnelled under. In 1980 the exact route of the southern by-pass was decided after a public inquiry. I can remember seeing plans of the route options for the Southern By-pass. I believe that the preferred route was as exists now, but prior to the public inquiry it appeared that the Ipswich Borough Council had purchased potential housing land in the Bobbits Hole area with the intention perhaps of achieving a route of the by-pass at a point nearer to Capel St Mary! 

The route of the new  road serving the bridge (the A45, later the A14) had to be adjusted in the Seven Hills area of Foxhall/ Nacton, to avoid a bronze age burial ground, of which there were possibly as many as 14 tumuli. The £10.2 million south-eastern section of the Ipswich Southern By-pass was diverted to avoid a very visible mound, designated 007, which averaged 100 feet in diameter. It was estimated that the mound-builders lived between 2000BC and 1500BC.

Why ‘Seven Hills’? There are other ‘Seven Hills’ between Ingham and Great Livermere, near to Bury St Edmunds and another near Brettenham, in Norfolk. Others exist in Berkshire and Hampshire. The archaeological Field Officer, Mr Martin, suggested that the ‘seven’ did not relate to the number of long barrows on  the cemetery site, but that the number had a special significance for the Anglo-Saxons: a breach of the peace by seven or more men was considered to be an act of war and not an act of private violence. This also brings to mind the Biblical ‘seven years of plenty and seven years of dearth’. This has neatly answered a long standing question of mine regarding the name of the interchange which was built here!

Construction work started from the east bank of the Orwell by driving foundations deep into the river bed, and slightly later from the west bank with eventually the concrete foundations rising up from the river bed like motionless guardsmen. Then the bridge itself began to take shape with the first sections of the 18-span box girder structure being lifted into place. Although the construction was well underway it apparently was ‘not yet impressive enough to quieten local people who are not convinced even at this time that they want a bridge across the Orwell’. When the final sections were lifted into place, a bystander, measuring with his eye, thought that the two ends would not meet – an optical trick as it happened. The chief engineer on the bridge project  was Mr Sydney Telford, so there could be no error. The internal structure of the bridge is also a viaduct and an aqueduct, as it contains a steel pipe carrying a flow of up to eight million gallons of purified and treated water from Alton Water for domestic and commercial use in Ipswich and Felixstowe. Whilst construction was in progress several ‘finds’ were made – a sarsen stone (initially thought to be an unexploded bomb), shark teeth and the indentures of an apprentice doctor, in a canvas bag. The last of these was some 200 years old at that time; it had been probably thrown overboard from a ship leaving Ipswich as perhaps the apprentice had some second thoughts about a medical career.

The Orwell Bridge was finally opened by the Secretary of State for Transport, David Howells MP, on Friday 17th December 1982. The preceding Sunday some 5,000 people were able to walk across the bridge before it was opened, many raising money for charity by their endeavours. As explained by the Evening Star: ‘the thorn in the side of politicians and planners – the Ipswich traffic bottleneck will be eased tomorrow – the official ceremony will take place at 11.30am near the A143 Wherstead Road interchange at the Orwell Bridge. It will be followed at 1.30pm with the public opening, when traffic will be able to use it for the first time’.

It was also recognised that the bridge would benefit drivers  going to the coast, but also regional traffic, around-town drivers and home-owners – who would notice a vast difference on the streets of Ipswich. The original expectation was that the western section of the by-pass, the bridge, would be able to accommodate some 22,000 vehicles a day. To use this, the largest pre-stressed concrete bridge in the UK, there would be no toll charges, and this situation has mercifully never changed.

However, high as the bridge is, the project manager, a Mr Lewis, stated that ‘compared to the high bridges and westerly winds in the west of England and in Scotland, in relative terms, there should be no particular wind problems’. In the event of there being high winds, provision had been made for tall vehicles to be diverted. As we all know, bridge closures over the years have caused traffic chaos with the town and resultant economic impact. Hopefully, now that there are options to reduce speeds on the bridge in high winds, threats to closure will be reduced. But who really knows as the changing climate in the UK often causes unexpected problems? In Orwell bridge terms, this was probably not considered to be significant almost forty years ago.

From conception to completion of construction was a period of ten years. Although the traffic situation in Ipswich itself has worsened over the years, it would  have been next to impossible had the bridge not been constructed. When approaching the town from the Shotley direction the sight of the bridge is still impressive and a really graceful structure across the Orwell.

I would have hoped that either the ruby anniversary of the bridge opening, or even the silver anniversary, was marked or celebrated in some way. We must never be careless of our history.

Claude Monet once said: ‘My garden is my most beautiful masterpiece’. The Orwell Bridge nearly forty years on is still a beautiful, inspiring masterpiece. As for Mr Telford: ‘Didn’t he do well!’. 

Graham Day

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