Icons of England
  • Introduction
  • The Icons
  • Nominations
  • News
  • Learn & Play
  • Your Comments

The Iron Bridge

The Basics

A modestly sized bridge across a river gorge in Shropshire doesn’t necessarily look like it ought to have changed the world, but it did. Wood or stone were what bridges were made of. Iron was for making cooking pots and shoeing horses. When young Abraham Darby, whose family had been producing iron in the village of Coalbrookdale for generations, first proposed the idea in the mid-18th century, you could say the family’s attitude was that the idea was just crazy enough to work.

ironbridge silhouette
The Bridge was completed in 1779. Constructed almost entirely of solid iron girders supported on two massive stone abutments, it represented a major turning-point in the industrial revolution. People came from all over Europe and America to see the Iron Bridge, a little town with a hotel rapidly grew up around it, and it was declared illegal to attempt to cross the Severn here by any other means than the tollbridge.

Before long, there were iron constructions everywhere. A century later, an iconic tower would be built in the centre of Paris almost entirely of iron. It had become the pre-eminent building material of the Victorian age, all thanks to Abraham Darby’s Shropshire bridge.