13

Ironbridge

Where It All Started

The Severn Gorge near Telford in Shropshire has always been a daunting prospect to cross. The river itself flows fast and turbulent, and is quick to rise when there is rainfall in the hills to the west. The energy of the water has cut a deep, steep-sided rocky gorge that proved to be a major barrier to travellers heading east towards the emerging new industrial centres around Coalbrookdale and modern Telford. And then, in the 1770s, what must have seemed like a miracle happened: the world’s first massive iron bridge was constructed across the gorge. It was built without fuss and disasters and is still standing: a tribute to the genius of those early ironmasters and the skill of the men who worked with them. For me, Ironbridge is the Stonehenge of the industrial era. Every time I walk across it, I feel incredibly privileged. Indeed, it’s probably as close as I will ever get to a religious experience.

The bridge, built nearly 240 years ago, is immensely impressive. Its great central span springs off arched piers on either side of the gorge, which were themselves rebuilt about forty years later when their timber precursors were in need of repair. This detail put me in mind of the timber frame within the great spire at Salisbury Cathedral: wood with stone. In medieval times, builders were far more relaxed about mixing wood with other more durable materials than was the case by even the mid-nineteenth century. Builders were prepared to return to their projects and gradually make them more permanent. People were less obsessed with instant perfection: it was recognized that some things took time to get right.

I tend to approach Ironbridge with respect and a degree of deference, much as a religious person might approach the high altar in a great cathedral. I still find that the best way to appreciate the magnificence of the structure is from below. Walking slowly along the river bank beneath, I wait until I’m directly under the centre of the bridge before allowing myself to look up. It’s an awe-inspiring experience, and I must have done it half a dozen times. The hundreds of iron girders seem to float upwards, with extraordinary lightness. The bridge itself feels organic, as if just flexing its muscles after centuries of repose.

When first looking at the bridge this way, I remember being struck by the lack of bolts and rivets. At the time I had been researching ancient woodworking, and I immediately recognized that the individual girders and spars high above me had been joined together using carpenters’ joints, which were integral to the pieces concerned. In other words, each piece had been shaped to join with those alongside it. And it would have made excellent sense at the time, because many of these joints get stronger when under compression. The techniques those early ironwork engineers used had been borrowed from the more ancient traditions of carpentry, just as the prehistoric builders of Stonehenge had used mortice and tenon joints to join the massive uprights and lintels.

I then walk further along the gorge. This is another world. We could be a hundred miles away from the bustling heart of nearby Telford: trees and shrubs perch perilously on the craggy sides of the gorge; herons stand grey, still and alert, staring intently down into the waters. Then the path turns and I climb back up to the town level, where I make my way to the bridge for the culmination of my visit: a slow walk across, and then back, high above the gorge. Sometimes I might stop for a bite of lunch on the other side, but not until I have crossed the bridge in both directions, pausing to gaze downstream when I reach the centre, on my outwards walk towards Wales, and again, this time looking upstream, on my return. I know it sounds obsessive, but that’s how I like to do it – and it ensures I miss nothing. I also like to admire the unostentatious toll buildings on the west side of the bridge, which prominently display a list of charges for people, horses, carts and wagons. These businesslike, quietly elegant buildings are typical of those you would have encountered on many a turnpike road in their late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century heyday.

I have avoided using the phrase ‘Industrial Revolution’. A true revolution is something that happens quickly. The development of industry in Britain, however, spanned four hundred years: beginning in the sixteenth century, it was still under way in the first half of the nineteenth.1 This idea of it being a revolution was, however, underscored by the prominent role played by certain individuals, often known as ironmasters, of whom the Darbys of Coalbrookdale are among the best known. Traditionally, such men are portrayed as lone geniuses, the entrepreneurial equivalent of Newton, whose ideas blazed a pioneering trail. We know now, however, that this was far from the case. Rather, they developed their new ideas in close collaboration with the skilled and very knowledgeable men who worked with them in their forges and workshops – or, to put it in modern terms, the early ironmasters were highly gifted and creative team leaders.²

The teams they led would not have been possible in a country with a more rigid social, political and religious hierarchy. Britain had gone through some major changes at the end of the medieval period and, if anything, these accelerated after the English Civil War of the mid-seventeenth century. What we saw was a huge loosening of the medieval system of inherited class distinction, which in rural areas was based around the manor. This is the system that still survives, albeit altered, at Laxton. The process was hastened by three centuries of epidemics, starting with the Black Death of 1348 and lasting through to London’s great plague of 1665–6. Continuing shortages of manpower gave greater influence to the workforce and accelerated change. Although, as we will see, further reforms were still to come, by the start of the eighteenth century Britain was becoming an excellent place to be an entrepreneur.

The landscapes of the upper and mid-Severn valley, though, had never been part of the manor-based Open Field System so characteristic of the English midlands. Instead, a less regulated system had developed, based around livestock, grazing and woodland. By the 1600s we see the rise of a new class, the so-called ‘yeoman farmer’, who owned his own land and was not directly answerable to any lord of the manor. This new class of independent smaller farmers could not rely on rents or other sources of income to feed themselves and their families over the leaner months of the farming year, which usually meant winter and early spring. So they were prepared to turn their hands to almost anything to make a little money. Some people diversified the wool side of their sheep enterprises, turning to spinning and weaving. Others tried their hands at mining and mineral extraction. Still others looked to smithing and metal-working. By the middle of the eighteenth century, many of these once-secondary sources of family income had grown in importance, so the spinning and weaving that had once taken place at home was now being done in workshops and even in factories. The metal-working that had begun around Coalbrookdale was now prospering, and workshops were proliferating.

The arrangement of settlements along the upper Severn valley around Coalbrookdale is rather different from what you might find elsewhere in England. The familiar hierarchy of hamlets, villages and small towns is replaced by a more dispersed and less readily defined pattern, which today resembles light urban sprawl. If you carefully examine the date of the various buildings, it becomes possible to identify what would once have been separated farmsteads and workshops. This reveals a pattern of settlement that did not focus on, or cluster around, a major town or city. Each unit was self-contained and independent. We now realize that this was because they needed plenty of space around them to store ore and fuel, and – just as important – to allow smoke and fumes to disperse.

The great bridge at Ironbridge was built between 1777 and 1782, but it could not have happened without what may well have been the biggest single technological development of the early industrial era.3 In 1709 Abraham Darby I worked out how to smelt (i.e. extract) iron from iron ore by using coke, a form of pre-heated coal. Before that, the smelting process had had to use wood charcoal, which was both slow and relatively expensive to produce. The iron for the great bridge was manufactured by Abraham Darby III in Coalbrookdale, and the bridge itself was designed by the wonderfully named Thomas Farnolls Pritchard. If you are not just passing through, I would suggest you spend the rest of your day at Coalbrookdale in the Museum and walking round the Darby furnaces and forge. I can’t think of anywhere better to steep yourself in the pioneering phase of the modern world.

The landscapes of the early industrial era are unsung monuments to those four post-medieval centuries of social and political change. Today schoolchildren learn about kings, queens, politicians and great generals, but for me, men like Abraham Darby in far off Coalbrookdale were just as remarkable. They were the first great technologists, who were able to alter the world around them through their own abilities, rather than their birth and inheritance alone. I find places like Ironbridge uplifting: they project the optimism, the guts and the sheer, bloody-minded determination that ultimately gave us the modern world. The town is named after the great Iron Bridge, but there is far more to it than that. Many of the workshops still survive along the gorge and in Coalbrookdale. Yes, they have been restored and made visitor-friendly, but the heat-reddened stonework of the furnaces tells its own story of the hard, dangerous, yet skilled work that took place there. It remains a living and constantly developing story, because every year local industrial archaeologists are producing fresh revelations. And the more we discover, the more we respect those extraordinary self-made men and women who did so much that affects our lives to this day.