Herries Road Bridge info wanted.

[Hayley1]

I'm sure someone here will be able to help.

 

I'd like to know what and why are there shield type things on the bridge over Herries Road please.

 

Thanks

[muddycoffee]

Do you mean the Five arches bridge.

 

This is a railway viaduct built to carry the railway from Victoria to Manchester.

 

The shield things I think you mean will be plates at the end of the steel tie bars.

[Hayley1]

so they're purely functional then, ok thanks muddy

[muddycoffee]

Yes many old buildings have tie bars fitted. They stop the walls from bellowing out. Sort of keeps everything straight and in line..

[sweetdexter]

Yes many old buildings have tie bars fitted. They stop the walls from bellowing out. Sort of keeps everything straight and in line..

 

Very common on houses in mining towns . for obvious reasons

[david weston]

Don't know if it's still visible, but during the early ( ?)70's there was a painted slogan on the Five Arches, on the side going towards the football ground. It read, if I remember correctly, 'NF SAYS STOP IMMIGRATION'. It puzzled everyone at the time as to how it had been done, dangerously high above the roadway.

[Plain Talker]

Don't know if it's still visible, but during the early ( ?)70's there was a painted slogan on the Five Arches, on the side going towards the football ground. It read, if I remember correctly, 'NF SAYS STOP IMMIGRATION'. It puzzled everyone at the time as to how it had been done, dangerously high above the roadway.

 

I lived right beside the bridge and railway line in the early eighties, and I remember at least a couple of different pieces of graffiti .

 

Considering there's fairly easy foot- access onto the railway track a little way beyond the bridge, and that someone armed with a can of paint-and-a-brush, or an aerosol paint-can, there's no big mystery.

 

Someone walked a few hundred yards along the line, (which by then didn't have much more than football-special trains running along it).

 

They reached the bridge, and leaned over the parapet.

 

They daubed their slogan on the stone work. (in the same way as the other people who did the other piece of graffiti the bridge was famous for did it)

 

They then snuck their way off the line.

 

Bingo, job done.

[Plain Talker]

here's a google map of the area of the five-arches bridge,

 

http://maps.google.co.uk/maps?f=d&source=s_d&saddr=53.412075,-1.491078&daddr=Herries+Rd%2FA6102&hl=en&geocode=FesALwMdej_p_w%3BFTUDLwMdzjfp_w&mra=mr&dirflg=w&sll=53.413215,-1.479592&sspn=0.009055,0.01929&ie=UTF8&ll=53.412077,-1.491281&spn=0.002264,0.004823&t=h&z=18

 

it wouldn't let me pin the letter a on the field below Scraith Wood Drive, it insisted on making it on the actual road there.

 

you can see the paths going down toward the railway, and the Wardsend Cemetery immediately below the "a", and where the graffitists would have found access to the railway line.

 

The letter b is the actual railway bridge.

 

you can see how close they are to each other.

[skippy]

Here's a really old picture of the arches, notice the width of the road.

 

It was a great adventure playing around the arches in the 50's, we used to jump onto slow moving trains from the black bridge near the graveyard and jump off further down the track behind the gas works or near Rutland road.

Heaps of kids played on the Medda's [Meadows], which stretched from Herries Road to Rutland Road, so it was like a big playground for the kids from Shirecliffe and Parkwood Springs areas, and we never got into much trouble.

[hillsbro]

This old postcard view is dated 1914 and doesn't show the steel strengthening. Perhaps the tie-bars were added when Herries Road was built in the 1920s.

 

The Five Arches were indeed popular with graffiti painters. One slogan I remember from c. 1959 was FIGHT TORY RENT INCREASES ACT NOW!