Secret life of a city bridge
September 2007
BRIDGE STREET BY NIGHT: Where nightclubs open and close like Livingstone daisies. Photograph by Mark Chalmers
by Mark Chalmers
The Bridge is a Manichean place, inhabited by two separate populations, the day people and the night people. It takes in all the city’s different worlds: shops and offices; railways and roads; penthouse and pavement.
In Italo Calvino’s book Invisible Cities, Kublai Khan commands a census of the empire he rules, but has never visited. Civil servants report back to him from the airts: populations, trade figures, crop yields all pour into the imperial chancery. Yet he needs to know more: what are his cities actually like? He asks a visitor to his court (who turns out to be Marco Polo) to describe the cities of his empire. It transpires there is the city founded by a group of men who all dreamt it, the cities legible only in writing, and the city whose port is everywhere. The great Khan is pleased – but what he doesn’t realise is that all the cities Marco Polo has described are his hometown – Venice.
We experience the same thing as we walk along Union Bridge. And, like Marco Polo, we need never travel outwith the city centre for us to experience the many cities, all living on, in, under and around Union Bridge. Of course, the notion of an inhabited bridge is not a recent one: the Old London Bridge over the Thames, the Ponte Vecchio over the Arno, and Pulteney Bridge in Bath, are its forerunners. This bridge was created as part of an early exercise in town planning and traffic management. Charles Abercrombie, engineer of the turnpike roads in Aberdeenshire, produced a report in 1794 which recommended the construction of King Street and Union Street, in order to make access into the city centre easier. An Act of Parliament in 1800 enabled these long, wide, straight boulevardes to replace the narrow, winding mediaeval gaits.
In the same year that Union Street was named, the Union Bridge foundation stone was laid – 1801. The Bridge was intended as a three-arched structure, but greatly influenced by Thomas Telford’s proposal for a single span bridge, with one mighty 150-foot arch.
His scheme was worked up by Thomas Fletcher into a granite arch with a 130-foot central span, and a built-up arch at each abutment with a span of 50 feet. The keystone was slotted into place in August 1803, although work carried on until 1805.
The half-mile stretch of Union Street from the Adelphi to Diamond Street, which takes in Union Bridge, rests on a series of massive blind arches, forming an artificial causeway which varies from two storeys to over five storeys above the natural level of the ground. Called the Viaduct Approaches, they were designed by Charles Abercrombie and David Hamilton: until buildings were erected on its south side, the arched walls of Union Street towered above The Green.
The costs of building this half-mile megastructure literally bankrupted Aberdeen: the municipality became insolvent in 1817, and it took eight years for the City Fathers to recover the situation. Rather like New York during the 1970s, the city bumped along the bottom, and survived on an extended line of credit in the meantime.
Below the arches of Union Street are catacombs which have been sectioned off, just like the subterranean closes in Edinburgh’s Old Town, or lock-ups under old railway arches. A great tattie store lay almost directly under the old Trinity Hall, 30 feet under the street – there were also cold stores used by meat traders in the New Market – and in 1958, a newspaper article reported that spare parts for the plumbing system of Balmoral Castle were still sitting in a plumber’s store, 100 years after the pipework was completed on Deeside.
The vaults are secure, their temperature is stable, and they are close to the market – but changes in level mean that modern forklift trucks and lorries are excluded, so that the tattie merchants must have humphed many thousands of bags of Kerr’s Pinks and Arran Banner in and out under their oxters.
Today, the arches and nearby streets host a variety of uses, including nightclubs. Buried in solid masonry catacombs with good acoustics, the sound systems can be cranked right up without offending anyone, and the only clue to their existence are the crocodiles of party people who queue impatiently in the cold air.
The night people also congregate on Bridge Street in a true basement of six-metre high vaults sitting on solid rock, with a ‘basement’ bar above it, and a street-level mezzanine above that. The bar is zinc-topped, and the floor is timber from which the varnish has long since worn off. There are low stools upholstered in cream leather, and masses of colourful flyers pinned to the walls.
Amongst the piped music, giant screens and groaning optics, are the lost keepsakes of last night’s conquest. A sparkle of shattered glass, a button separated from its cuff, and a lone shoe– perhaps left behind at 11.59 in the rush to grab a cab in what the taxi-drivers call ‘Mutant Alley’. The air is 10% CKOne, 90% testosterone, and 140° proof.
Of course, every city has its underbelly where nightclubs co-habit with seedy bars. They open and close like Livingstone daisies: under South Bridge in Edinburgh, part of which recently burnt down; the Arches in Glasgow; and the vaults under the Tay Hotel in Dundee, latterly the Purple Rooms. For the Little Caesars who own them, these nighteries can be great money-spinners, but much of their effect relies on novelty and the work of their designers may only last a couple of years. Their destiny is to roll over and be replaced.
It is a different bridge as dawn approaches, when the sad, washed-up clubbers are chucked out through fire escapes and they make their way to all-night kebab houses and chippers. Finally, as the sun comes up, they take the walk of shame, with shirt tails unfurled from breeks, and mascara running down cheeks in black streams. Then catch the early bus home and fall into a fitful sleep just as the early shift clocks on.
The scaffies roll their wheeliebins out of pends, collect the night’s detritus in black bags. The bin lorries, with their flashing orange lights, are the scourge of hungover night owls in nearby flats, but an object of wonder to light-sleeping children and early birds. An unearthly scream rises from the depths, the dying cry of thousands of bottles of obscure Continental lager as they meet their end in the collection lorry.
Calvino talks about Venice’s rubbish, too, which “little by little would invade the world, if, from beyond the final crest of its boundless rubbish heap, the street cleaners of other cities were not pressing, also pushing mountains of refuse in front of them. Perhaps the whole world, beyond the city’s boundaries, is covered by craters of rubbish, each surrounding a metropolis in constant eruption”.
To the west of Union Bridge is Bridge Street, which delves down into the dark rift of the Denburn. Bridge Street was built between 1865 and 1867, and shortly afterwards, the Palace Hotel was put up by the railway for the benefit of travellers. The Palace Hotel eventually burned down during 1941, but in its day, a long queue of fish lorries reached back from the railway station up towards the bridge. Thus we have a resident population of herring gulls – the best-fed vagrants in Aberdeen. Their raucous brothers in Poynernook Road get fresh fish for tea: but the bridge mob feast on cold chips, kebab and vindaloo, spilling from polystyrene pokes dropped by stotious clubbers.
Above Union Bridge’s arches lies another set of high turnover establishments: the shopping centre units. Like the club-owners, the lease-hold tenants revamp their shops every two or three years. Ironically, this throwaway culture surrounds a 200-year old bridge which has evolved slowly, and which looks as if it could last forever.
Union Bridge underwent in 1908 a major widening scheme which was drawn up by William Diack, with Benjamin Baker of Forth Rail Bridge fame as a consultant. The steel side spans which carry today’s pavements were introduced at that time, along with Kelly’s cats, the wee leopards which decorate the balustrade. These leopards have an interesting tale attached to them.
The painter Joseph Farquharson, famous for his Deeside snowscenes featuring sheep and sunsets, liked to base his work on careful observation – but since sheep just will not stand still, he had life-size models made for him. The model sheep could be arranged as the painter wished, marking the place for life models, and were created by William Wilson of Monymusk, who also cast the iron leopards on Union Bridge. The leopards were designed by the architect and antiquarian William Kelly, and according to his biographer, they generated a great deal of debate and controversy. Why the need for ornament – and why represent the city’s coat of arms here?
By the mid-1960s, the southern end of the Denburn Valley was hidden by a great girder bridge built to carry a row of shops. Rather than the graceful arch, this presented a wall of masonry and ducting on the south side of Union Bridge, with a great foliage of cast iron pipework growing up its face.
Kelly’s cats were supplanted by fashion shops full of cool kittens. Later still, the Trinity shopping mall was constructed, creating a wall of concrete which further obscures the bridge-like nature of Union Bridge. In fact, these 1963 shops-on-stilts are an early Scottish example of an ‘Air Rights’ development, where a landowner (often, as in this case, the former British Railways) allows someone else to build immediately above land he owns. They both profit from the harnessing of thin air.
The Union Bridge shops are carried on two 155 foot long, 135 ton girders, and a dual-carriageway now runs along part of the valley floor, where the Inverness railway tracks used to occupy the full width.
On the north side of the bridge, there have been many schemes to gentrify Denburn Park and the area under Union Bridge. Most suggestions rely on roofing over the railway and Union Terrace Gardens in order to span the valley with a number of layers: the top becomes a park raised up to the same level as Union Terrace, with a rank of car parking below; the railway and roads running underneath that, and finally the suppressed Denburn in a culvert beneath it all.
Ian Imlach made the first proposal to raise the Gardens, whilst still a student at Scott Sutherland School of Architecture in 1952: 40 years later, when he taught me at Duncan of Jordanstone College in Dundee, the Gardens remained as before. Despite a more recent Lottery bid in 1997 for funds to create a giant glass-roofed winter garden, things remain largely as they were two centuries ago.
“Until every shape has found its city, new cities will be born,” said Italo Calvino. This stretch of Aberdeen has been reborn several times, it seems, because the Bridge’s very toughness as traffic engineering has allowed it to endure through the ages of horses, trams, buses and cars. Yet not even Italo Calvino was audacious enough to imagine a bridge formed entirely from empty takeaway cartons.
MARK CHALMERS is a writer and architect based in Aberdeen, whose novel Seton was shortlisted in the Dundee Book Prize.
This is an article from the September 2007 edition of Leopard Magazine. To read much more like this every month, see our subscription details.