When I photographed the Iron Bridge at Ironbridge during twilight, its tracery-like decoration, silhouetted against the dusk, echoed the sacred geometry I see in stained-glass windows.
In fact, this bridge is a kind of sacred thing - a first in material and imagination. Erected in 1779, it was the world’s first bridge built of iron.
Yet this revolutionary structure was assembled using familiar carpentry techniques - mortise-and-tenon joints, dovetails, wedges and shouldered joints - as though a timber bridge had been translated into metal.
Its geometry is both structural and ornamental. Great semicircular ribs spring across the Severn, while circles, ogees and radiating members fill the spaces between structure and roadway.
Most of its components were individually cast and fitted, leaving subtle variations that reveal the human hand. It stands at a threshold - part timber tradition, part industrial future - a bridge not only between two riverbanks, but between two ages.
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