Cross the river at Bewdley and you are walking on Thomas Telford’s work. The three stone arches carrying Load Street over the Severn were built in a single season in 1798, and they replaced a bridge that had stood, patched and repaired, for more than three hundred years. Before that one there were others. The story of how Bewdley got from a ford to a Grade I listed bridge takes in a bishop’s indulgence, the Wars of the Roses, a prison, a chapel, a toll house and one very hard winter.
Before any bridge there was a crossing on foot. A ford lay at the end of what is now Lax Lane, where the Snuff Mill Brook ran down to the river, and coracles, small round boats of wicker lined with skin, were still in use on this stretch of the Severn well into the nineteenth century. In 1313 the only bridge between Gloucester and Bridgnorth was at Worcester, which tells you how far people walked or paid to be rowed.
The first bridges
Building began around 1447, when John Carpenter, Bishop of Worcester, granted an indulgence of forty days to everyone who contributed to the work. That first structure was at least partly stone, and one authority has suggested it may only ever have been a footbridge. It did not last. Bewdley was a Yorkist town, and when it was taken by Lancastrian forces around 1459 the bridge was broken down, its stones granted away to Worcester to mend that city’s walls, gates and bridge. The Patent Rolls record the grant.
The town rebuilt at once, in the timber that the Wyre Forest made easy to come by, standing the new deck on the stone piers and abutments of the old one. That timber bridge served until the 1480s, when a third was built with the help of twenty marks from Richard III, granted to Walter Res, warden of the bridge. It was a bridge of five arches, and it carried more than traffic. A timbered gatehouse stood on one of the piers with strong gates facing Wribbenhall. The north end of the gatehouse was the toll gatherer’s home. The other end, known as the Bridge House, was the borough’s prison. A small timber chapel stood at the northern side, and the corner of town beside it was still being called St Anne’s Corner in the court rolls of 1748.
John Leland, travelling through about 1539, entered the town “by a goodly fayre bridge over Severne of five great Arches of stone, being even then in new reparation”. Repair was the theme. A heavy snowstorm carried part of it away in November 1574. During the Civil War the bridge was a strategic prize, held and fought over, and in June 1662 the corporation recorded that an arch had been broken down “in the time of the late warrs” and that mending it would cost more than the borough could bear alone.
The winter that ended it
The winter of 1794 into 1795 was severe across the Midlands. After a long fall of snow a sudden thaw in February 1795 raised a heavy flood, and the old patchwork bridge, in the words of the town’s Victorian historian, was a pile “that had withstood the floods of more than 300 winters” before it finally gave way. Large parts of it were washed downriver. The abutments were not cleared until October 1800, when what could be recovered was salvaged from the river bed.
By then Bewdley was prosperous enough to send for the best. Thomas Telford, at the time Surveyor of Public Works in Shropshire, was asked for a design. A single span in iron was considered first, but the Coalbrookdale company would not take the work on because it could not also supply stone for the abutments. The Bridge Commissioners settled on three stone arches, one of sixty feet and two of fifty-two. Stone came from Lord Valencia’s estate at Arley, and when that ran short, from Billingsley colliery and a further two thousand tons from Highley.
Telford put his bridge slightly upstream of the old one so that it lined up squarely with Load Street, which meant buying and pulling down houses at the bottom of the street to open the approach. Work began in the late spring of 1798 and the arches were up within months. Telford wrote to a friend that December with obvious satisfaction: the summer’s drought had been bad for canal work, but “it has enabled us to raise Bewdley bridge as if by enchantment. We have thus built a magnificent bridge over the Severn in one season, which is no contemptible work for John Simpson and your humble servant.” Simpson, his foreman of masons, is buried at St Chad’s in Shrewsbury.
The whole thing cost eleven thousand pounds. Miles Peter Andrews, then Member of Parliament for the borough, gave three thousand of it. The rest was raised by loan from local gentlemen and merchants whose names read like a roll call of the town’s money, and among the subscribers, each for two hundred and fifty pounds, were John Simpson and Thomas Telford themselves.
Historic England dates the whole undertaking to 1797 through 1799, which will be the approach works and the flanking arches either side of the three river spans. The arches themselves went up in that one dry summer of 1798.
Tolls, and what became of them
Crossing was not free. The right to collect the tolls was let by the corporation for three hundred pounds a year, and a toll house stood on the Wribbenhall side as part of the design. The bridge was clear of debt by 1834 and the tolls were abolished. The toll house survived until after the Second World War, by which time heavy wartime traffic had cracked its walls and floods had undermined it. Efforts were made to save it. It was demolished in 1960.
The old bridge is still there
Not all of it went downstream. In 1973 members of the British Sub-Aqua Club found the remains of two central piers in the river bed. In 2004, workmen building the Severnside South flood defences lifted a bandstand that had been put up in the 1920s and found the footings and piers of the medieval bridge underneath it, hidden for eighty years. The Environment Agency recorded and protected them before they were backfilled. Two years later, further investigation ahead of more flood work located the first pier and the abutment of the fifteenth century bridge, along with quay walls, the remains of several eighteenth century buildings and a timber structure in the river bed dated to around 1600 and interpreted as a jetty.
Telford’s bridge, meanwhile, is Grade I listed and still doing the job it was built for. It spent much of 2023 to 2025 reduced to one lane while the permanent flood defences went in at Beales Corner, which caused a good deal of local grief and a certain amount of grudging admiration for a structure that has now outlasted every bridge before it.