It's hard to believe that the Ha'penny Bridge was neglected for so long. Though the the cast-iron structure with its characteristic elliptical arch had become Dublin's most recognisable symbol, it was left to degenerate for decades before the authorities finally decided to rescue it from the ramshackle realm.
Some of the bridge's railings were missing, others had their ends eaten away by rust, bits and pieces had fallen into the River Liffey, sections of it were strapped with scaffolding, its deck was covered in Tarmac sheets that slid over the granite steps and the whole structure was bathed in a hideous blue light.
"Its condition was shameful, and you can quote me on that," says Tim Brick, the deputy city engineer. "It was very alarming in one respect - we had a structural assessment which told us that the railings failed modern safety standards by a factor of six." In other words, they were six times less safe than they should have been.
But the most photographed bridge in Dublin had lasted for nearly two centuries, since it was officially opened in May 1816, a year after the Battle of Waterloo. Built at the instigation of John Beresford, who already had the Custom House to his credit, it was free for the first 10 days and then everyone had to pay a ha'penny to use it.
At one stage, until the early 1950s, it was even festooned with painted timber hoardings advertising the likes of Holloway's Pills. But after the IRA deprived Dublin of Nelson's Pillar in 1966, the Ha'penny Bridge became the city's symbol and was featured prominently as a prop in every film or television crew's sojourn in the city.
Dublin Corporation knew that the bridge had to be restored. Its first plan would have involved replicating the cast-iron railings in more structurally stable wrought iron. This would hardly have been authentic, so the City Council insisted that the best conservation advice should be obtained before anything was done.
"We also had criticisms from An Taisce and the Heritage Council that we were typical road engineers going at it like bull in china shop'" says Brick. "So we took on board Paul Arnold [a leading conservation architect] and he asked how far had we pushed our investigations into what could be salvaged and what couldn't."
Patsy Gorman, the corporation's project engineer, beavered away with Arnold, looking at a whole range of options. The fact that Richard Turner's curvilinear range in the National Botanic Gardens had been authentically restored, re-using the original ironwork, was a powerful pointer towards salvaging as much as possible.
The biggest problem with the old railings was that the individual bars had no strength in themselves, posing the danger that they could have given way in a crush. This was solved by a proposal to anchor every single one of them - some 700 in all - to the bridge arches, thereby "mobilising their strength", as Brick puts it.
"It took months of study before the pair of them \Arnold and Gorman came up with this solution. They were burning the midnight oil here, wrestling with the problem. It was a nightmare exercise because there were issues of time, of public safety and budget involved because the corporation was going to have to pay for it."
After it had been demonstrated that their solution would work, the decision was made to salvage as much as possible of the cast-iron from Coalbrookedale, in Shropshire, a hothouse of the industrial revolution.
It was the right thing to do, even though cast-iron may contain melted-down pots, pans "and whatever was available".
Last April, after Irishenco was given the main contract, the railings of the Ha'penny Bridge were dismantled and dispatched to Harland and Wolff in Belfast. There, using skills that made an indelible impression on everyone involved in the project, they were stripped down and re-set in jigs replicating the bridge's elliptical arches.
"We managed to salvage 98 per cent of the railings. For the bars that needed to be replaced, we had to agree a technique for casting them so that they were almost indistinguishable from the original ones," Brick explains. "So instead of having a perfect factory finish, they would have slightly worn, even pitted surfaces."
The deck was originally timber slats, "like a bar of soap in wet weather", and both its camber and surface had been changed in the 1950s. This made for a more gradual slope to the raised steps at each end and provided a less slippery surface - even if it was no more than a rough carpet of aggregate embedded in Tarmac.
As restored, the bridge's camber ingeniously manages to match its profile.
A series of Venetian-style shallow steps - their risers edged in "slightly pink" granite, as Paul Arnold describes them - are slotted into the slender stringer beam. And the surface of the new metal deck is covered by a skid-resistant expoxy resin.
The Ha'penny Bridge had a tendency to sway under the rhythm of people walking, though nothing nearly as dramatic as London's wobbly Millennium Bridge. It also had, and still has, a bit of a bounce, though not quite as noticeable as the frisson of crossing the Bailey bridge beside it, which Shirley Temple Bar so wants to preserve.
Strengthened to reduce the swaying, it has also been made more vivid. The off-white colour is as close to the original as possible, as revealed by stripping off layer upon layer of paint, and also corresponds with a decree by George III that the new iron bridges in his kingdom should be painted white to assist riverine navigation.
But there is one seriously contentious aspect of this restoration of the Ha'penny Bridge - the decision to flank its approaches with chunky, almost elephantine, granite walls rather than see-through cast-iron. The fact that these are splayed, enclosing flights of curved stone steps, gives it an uncalled-for sense of grandeur.
Let's face it - the Ha'penny Bridge was never grand in that sense. It was a fine, functional bridge, yes, but not a grand one. Now, the sweep of its approaches is redolent of those staircases on which Busby Berkeley used to drape his dancers. The cast-iron span of the bridge seems to be sandwiched by over-blown masonry.
Everybody would accept that something had to be done with the "forebays" of the bridge, for safety reasons. As Brick puts it, the movement of pedestrians had a "punching effect", disgorging them onto narrow footpaths on either side, just inches away from the traffic.Indeed, there had even been fatalities.
So the platforms that housed the tollbooths until the bridge was freed in 1919 had to be re-made to provide usable "holding areas", such as those on the Millennium Bridge just upstream. This could have been done by re-using the cast-iron railings, as shown by a perspective view in Brick's office which he is not keen to release.
"There's been enough argy-bargy about this," he says, referring any further discussion on it to Paul Arnold. The conservation architect, who advised on the splendid restoration of City Hall, recommended the solution that has been adopted and strongly defends it as being true to the concept of an arched bridge contained by pylons. He sees the new walls as granite "bookends", rising out of the bridge's abutments and referring back to the masonry toll booths that once stood at either end.
"We had hoped to make them taller, but for reasons of safety we were told that people coming down from the bridge should be able to see the traffic," he says.
He also defends the decision to make the walls thicker than the quay walls "because these are bridge ends and had to be heavier". As in Busby Berkeley, the bridge had been "worked on in a variety of ways, with corsets and stays, over the decades. But this wasn't noticeable because the make-up of grey paint was applied evenly".
Arnold rarely makes a wrong call in dealing with complex conservation issues but, on this occasion, he has done so. Replacing the cast-iron railings that once extended to the quaysides with chunky walls has not only introduced an element of faux grandeur, but robbed the bridge of some of its integrity and transparency.
Derry-born James McGregor, Harland and Wolff's foreman, has no such reservations. Though the job of restoring the Ha'penny Bridge was "much more difficult than building ships", he takes great pride in this high-profile project. "When I stand back on the quays and look at what we've done, there's great job satisfaction in it," he admits.
Brick wholeheartedly agrees. Though the £2 million project had "driven us all demented", it was a rare opportunity to give something back to Dublin. "With 30,000 pedestrians a day using the bridge, that works out at 10 million a year, and there are few things you could do in your life that will commode so many people," he says.
Most Dubliners will appreciate the gesture. But there are some so lacking in civic spirit, or so devoted to mindless vandalism - like the unknown intruder who recklessly drove Mowlem's crane into the Liffey last month - that one may expect the gleaming white bridge to be scarred fairly soon by graffiti, litter and even vomit.
Meanwhile, Shirley Temple Bar might take some comfort from the fact that the Bailey bridge next door will be retained at least until the end of the January sales. And those with reservations about the architectural treatment can rest assured that the spare cast-iron is in storage should it be required to replace the grandiose granite walls.
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