A 'ludicrously ugly' bridge is Exhibit A that Britain has lost its mojo

Posted by nextos 3 days ago

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Comment by roryirvine 3 days ago

If you look it up on Google Streetview, it replaces a fairly basic concrete bridge with limited road clearance which had very clearly been hit multiple times.

https://maps.app.goo.gl/BgYYwfWmkzbnZHCW7

Bridge strikes are expensive - the railway often has to be shut as a precaution - and with the increase in rail services, it doesn't seem unreasonable to have lowered the level of the road to create more headroom. Yes, that's time consuming and expensive to do but the alternative would have been to ban lorries and double decker buses.

Really, it's now more of an underpass than a bridge. I don't think I've ever seen a pretty underpass, and this doesn't even appear to be a particularly grim example. It's actually much better than what it replaces, both in terms of function as well as aesthetically.

Comment by dwroberts 3 days ago

Made a comment to similar effect - I lived near a bridge/underpass that was built at the end of the 1800s and it was pretty much an iron box. The assumption that these things need to be attractive or decorative just makes me think the writer hasn’t been around much in the UK

Comment by tonyedgecombe 2 days ago

It’s way better for pedestrians and cyclists, you took your life in your hands cycling under the old one.

Comment by mikestew 3 days ago

"Man, architecture nerds, amirite? Let's click and see how...OMG!" Yeah, that is ridiculously ugly for what it is. Like someone went out of their way.

Comment by Joker_vD 3 days ago

A regular remainder that brutalism, despite what many people think, was originally invented in the UK.

Comment by tim333 3 days ago

Britain has produced loads of ugly concrete stuff in the past. It was probably worst in the 60s/70s.

On the other hand one of the best looking bridges of modern times (2004) has a British architect https://www.designingbuildings.co.uk/wiki/The_Millau_Viaduct

Comment by vannevar 3 days ago

It could be worse, you could have a grotesquely over-sized Triumphal Arch in Trafalgar Square, Number 10 could be decked out with gold cherubs and eagles everywhere, with a series of plaques honoring former Prime Ministers by insulting them, and Big Ben could be officially renamed "Big Andy".

Then you'd really know you've lost your mojo.

Comment by ben_w 3 days ago

Now I'm wondering, did the UK get most of its equivalent to stuff like that at the peak of the Empire, or before, or after?

e.g. while Trafalgar Square may not have an arch, it famously has Nelson's Column, and there's WW1-and-2 memorials all over the country.

Are such things the symbols of the present whose remembrance becomes hubris that becomes a fall, or a desperate attempt to return to past glories in a cargo-culty attempt to bring them back?

Comment by silverFork 3 days ago

wow "a quarter of a billion dollars" for that.

My guess is that with modular precast forms, it would be something $500k max!

Somebody pocketed some big amount of cash, I would guess.

Comment by Arnt 3 days ago

They needed more headroom under the bridge. The expensive part on the pictures you've seen is air.

There were hundreds of temporary supports, there were gas leaks and when they found a hand grenade from WW2 there was an expensive search for more surprises.

Comment by ben_w 3 days ago

Not impossible, but they did have to deal with gas leaks and a WW2 grenade, and this is a rail bridge on an actively used line.

Still, there's an undeniable sense of "why is this more expensive to replace than it was to build in the first place?" with a lot of infrastructure in the modern world.

Comment by silverFork 3 days ago

Some firms prebuild bridges and slide them in. 20-30% more expensive apparently but a lot faster. Lets say $2M by quading it. Gas line is a nothinger, they would need to shut it down and reconnect it anyways. Grenade removal, they do it in war zones and it is not that expensive in my opinion.

Comment by estearum 3 days ago

Surely there are no salient differences between a war zone and an active rail line in Oxford!

Comment by rcbdev 3 days ago

The differences are disappearing more and more every day.

Comment by ben_w 3 days ago

Only in the same sense that the differences between me and Richard Branson are disappearing.

75% depopulation in some cities in current war zones; Detroit comes to mind, except even then war zones have it worse.

Comment by ajb 3 days ago

It's " a major element of a £237m scheme to upgrade Oxford rail station". Most likely it is more expensive than it should be, but not to that extent

Comment by silverFork 3 days ago

$237 million to upgrade a rail station.. The number is up there but at least it is not the cost of the bridge; that explains it to me to some degree; must have been some structural issues; something must have caved in; water problem; who knows.

Comment by dofm 3 days ago

It's a bit more than that — rebuilt platform, a new platform (so new track and signalling), a new entrance in the station, rebuilding another bridge, preparing to connect to two other railway lines (the newish East West railway and the old line out to Cowley in the suburbs which is being returned to passenger use).

All of this happens in the middle of a busy, very old city. The £237M figure includes work scheduled in 2029.

Comment by rdtsc 3 days ago

Maybe that is the mojo, spending 250M and making something ugly. It’s like a rich person buying a banana stuck to the wall as art for $1M. They are showing the world they can do it not that they think the banana is delicious or pretty.

Comment by oh_fiddlesticks 3 days ago

They had to down tools because they found roman ruins or something and consult archeology to proceed.

Whats interesting is that this bridge build effectively partitioned the city. You had to drive to the city limits to the ring road, drive around the edge to access that area. The local council found this agreeable, and they rolled out an entire traffic policy, which also reached international attention, that effectively splits the city into sectors, forcing drivers to drive around the crust to get into their destination slice.

Comment by pseudohadamard 3 days ago

Not quite, but the Spectator goes into quite some detail: https://spectator.com/article/why-does-it-cost-237-million-t...

tl;dr, there was a ton of stuff down there that no-one really knew about, and each bit of the stuff was covered by a different authority, none of whom could agree with each other over how to handle it.

Comment by unrented7977 2 days ago

It looks like every other overpass I've ever seen in any country. Nothing in any way remarkable.

Comment by dwroberts 3 days ago

This is a really weird article if you’ve seen basically any non-decorative railway bridge anywhere in the UK.

Starting to make these WSJ stories of ‘UK is doing <whatever> wrong’ look a little forced?

Since it’s paywalled hard to tell if they included the actual facts about why it took so long too:

> The works in Botley Road were initially due to be completed in October 2024. Setbacks ranged from archaeological finds, the discovery of a World War Two grenade and essential work to replace part of the gas network

Comment by specproc 3 days ago

Wait till you hear about HS2.

Comment by dofm 3 days ago

Going to go out on a limb and say, without reading the article and based just on the domain name and the headline, that the story is not going to be as simple as that, and the WSJ, not exactly a stellar publication at the best of times, is merely furthering the typical American business cultural loathing of the UK, or regulations, or some other nonsense.

Comment by mna_ 3 days ago

Spot on.