A single crossing reconnected two halves of a town.
At half past seven on a weekday morning, the footbridge at Ardle is already busy. Schoolchildren in green jumpers cross from the east bank towards the academy; a man pushes a bicycle loaded with crates of vegetables in the opposite direction; two women with pushchairs stop halfway to look at a heron standing in the shallows. The bridge is a simple thing – a steel span of 64 metres, painted dark grey, with timber decking and a handrail worn smooth by four years of hands. It has done more for the town than any scheme in living memory.
For most of the last century, Ardle was a town split in two. The old market square, the church, the library and most of the shops sat on the west bank. The east bank held the housing estates built after the war, the secondary school, and the industrial units that replaced the mills. The only crossing was the road bridge at the southern edge of town, a mile and a half from the centre, which meant that a ten-minute walk as the crow flies became a forty-minute trudge along a busy road.
A town facing away from itself
The consequences accumulated over decades. Families on the east bank did their shopping at the retail park off the bypass rather than in the town centre. Pupils from the west bank were driven to school, clogging the road bridge twice a day. The market square lost its butcher, then its bank, then its greengrocer. Surveys carried out by the town council a decade ago found that a third of east-bank residents had not visited the west-bank library in the previous year, and many described the other side of the river as “a different place”.
The footbridge was first proposed in the 1970s and rejected on cost. It resurfaced every few years in council minutes and was rejected again each time. It finally came about through an unusual combination: a regional active-travel grant, a contribution from the developer of a new housing scheme, and a crowdfunding campaign that raised £180,000 from residents in eight months. The total cost was a little under £3 million.
“People kept asking why we wanted a bridge when we had so many other problems. Our answer was that the bridge was how we would solve the other problems. Nobody quite believed us until it opened.”
Those are the words of Glenys Pardoe, a former primary headteacher who chaired the campaign group and still lives within sight of the east-bank landing. She remembers the opening morning chiefly for the queue: more than 2,000 people waited to cross in the first hour, many of them simply walking over, turning round and walking back.
What changed on both banks
Four years on, the effects are visible. Footfall counters installed on the bridge record an average of 5,600 crossings a day, rising above 8,000 on market Saturdays. The market square has three new food stalls and a reopened greengrocer, and the number of empty shop units on the high street has fallen from fourteen to five. The library reports that its membership among east-bank postcodes has more than doubled, and it now runs homework clubs that draw pupils straight from the academy across the river.
Traffic on the road bridge at school times has fallen by about a fifth, according to the highway authority, and the academy has removed two of its staff car parking bays to make room for bicycle racks. The changes have not all been welcomed: some residents on the west bank complain of teenagers gathering on the bridge in the evenings, and the council has installed extra lighting and a CCTV camera after a handful of incidents.
The most striking change is harder to measure. People who once described the other side of the river as another place now talk about the town as one. A café opened two years ago on the east-bank landing, run by a couple who previously had a stall in the market square, and it now serves as an informal meeting point for both halves of the town. Its owners say they chose the location because they wanted to be at the point where people met.
A model for elsewhere?
Ardle’s experience has attracted interest from other river towns in the region, and the regional transport authority has commissioned a study of similar crossings at four sites, including two on the canal in Calder. Supporters caution that a bridge is not a cure in itself; Ardle’s worked partly because it linked places people already wanted to reach, and because the town invested in the market square at the same time.
Still, as evening falls and the lights along the handrail come on, the bridge remains busy. A grandfather walks a small dog across from the estate towards the chip shop; a group of teenagers sit on the steps, sharing headphones. Few of them remember the town before the crossing existed, and that, perhaps, is the measure of how completely it has changed.
