Why are there holes in this bridge?
A look back to the times when things were expensive and people were cheap, and how it all relates to the price of bread.
In my introduction to this Substack, I posed the question: Why do the arches of this railway bridge have their own little arches?
Just to give you a bit of background - these arches are part of Carlisle Bridge, which carries the West Coast Main Line over the River Lune in Lancaster. It was built in the 1840s and both the big and little arches can be seen in this lovely sketch from the Illustrated London News of the time:
I stumbled across the sub-arches while walking the dog, and decided to investigate their purpose using the time-honoured research method1 of ‘asking the local Facebook group’. I got a bit of stick for being, and I quote, “a bridge-spotter”, but lots of people were genuinely interested. Nobody seemed to actually know the answer, but there were plenty of guesses:
To improve structural strength;
To save on masonry;
To allow pipes to pass through;
For flood defences;
To lessen wind gusts around the base (my guess);
To move from one arch to another at a time when they were closed off and used for storage;
As an ‘attractive feature’ - apparently “when you look along them you could be looking through a Roman Colonnade”.
All of these suggestions seemed plausible to me, although you can judge the merits of the latter from this photograph:
I had almost given up on finding the answer, when an eagle-eyed Lancastrian pointed me to the site of an actual expert who discusses railway structures of various types. The owner, Gregory Beecroft, is a chartered surveyor who has worked on railway property for decades and has given evidence in a professional capacity to the Scottish Parliament, so is a reliable source.
And the answer, it appears, is that these small arches were built to save money!
This is Beecroft’s explanation for such arches:
When the railways were built the cost of materials was higher relative to labour than is now the case. Therefore, it could be worthwhile taking longer to build a more complicated structure if fewer bricks were used, whereas speed of construction is usually a critical factor in the cost and practicability of modern structures.
Isn’t that incredible? Look at the detail that has gone into creating those arches - their design, the way the stones have been shaped, the difficulties inherent in their physical construction. It must have made the entire endeavour significantly more complicated and time-consuming, but I calculate that the material saved constituted only around 8% of the total volume of the bridge structure2. I find it quite astonishing that the related increase in cost of the human elements was low enough at the time to make this worthwhile.
But then this was the era when people were cheap and things were expensive. A family of modest means, for example one where the head of the household was a business clerk, would have treasured the crockery they were given for a wedding present, and religiously darned and mended their linen, but would have employed a live-in maid to cook and clean. Now we love to shop and are constantly having to declutter our possessions, but most of us would never dream of having a servant. (Although there are those who argue that We all have servants now, comprising Uber drivers and Deliveroo couriers.)
A good way of quantifying the relative costs of ‘people’ and ‘things’ over time is to compare wages with the price of bread - a commodity which pretty much everybody bought then and buys now. In his 1879 Dictionary of London, Dickens records that a maid’s wages varied between £10 and £25 annually. In the same year, the price of a 4lb loaf was around 7d (that's 7 old pence3). A household which bought two of these huge loaves a day would spend £21 a year - the same as they spent on their maid. By contrast, if I was to buy 8lb of Asda's own-brand bread a day, I would spend around £2,300 a year. That's only enough to hire a maid at the National Living Wage of £10.42/hour for around six weeks.
Another way of comparing wages and bread is to ask how many pounds of bread a worker could or can afford to buy each day with their total income. In 1912, according to this site, a delivery courier could buy around 34lb of bread per day with their wage; I calculate that the same courier in 2023, earning the NLW and working the UK average of around 37 hours a week, could buy more than 100lb of bread each day.
This is great news! We can afford three times as much food as 100 years ago, meaning that UK residents are now much less likely to starve or suffer from severe malnutrition. Of course what ails us now is something different - the cost of accommodation. So how many pounds of bread could you buy with your daily rent both now and in the past?
A good source of information about the lives of ordinary people in Edwardian times is Round About A Pound A Week, published in 1913 by Maud Pember Reeves. Reeves notes that a reasonably healthy option for a London family at the time was to rent three rooms for 9s/week. Let’s equate this to a modern two-bedroom flat, for which the average London rent in 2021 was about £1,800/month. So how much bread could you buy for your daily rental expenditure in both eras?
In 1912 your rent would buy 12lb of bread.
In 2021 your rent would buy 110lb of bread!
Your rent literally costs you nearly ten times as much ‘bread’ now as 100 years ago.
I think this ‘bread standard’ is a great way to illustrate how the relative costs of wages, food and accommodation have changed. Of course what it doesn’t show is that housing standards, while they can be pretty bad now, were often truly awful in the London slums of previous eras - dark, damp, full of mice and bugs and with no running water. Still, it’s an interesting comparison.
So to summarise: compared to Victorian/Edwardian times, we can now afford a lot more food, but what we gain in bread we lose in rent. And we are a lot less likely to build complex arches-within-arches in order to save on bricks. Which to my mind is a loss, as investigating them has provided me with a window into the past.
Just in case my employer is reading, I don’t do this in my professional life.
I calculated this by taking physical measurements around the base of the structure. I forced a small child to accompany me on this outing so that I could pretend it was for a school project.
A note for readers who may be unfamiliar with British ‘Old Money’: 12d, or 12 old pence, made up a shilling, and there were 20 shillings to a pound. When the currency was decimalised in 1971, a shilling was swapped for 5p, or new pence.
When I was about 8 in 1952 we could buy a bag of chips for 3d or 4d a bag that means the cheapest were 80 bags of chips to the £ so if rent now was say £150 per week that would be 1200 bags a week in 1952 or about 60 bags (portions) of chips now… just saying