A new masterpiece to match past triumphs
Beautiful bridge a stunning reminder of Scotland’s glorious engineering history
SCOTLAND’S leading historian Sir Tom Devine believes the Queensferry Crossing represents a bridge between our trailblazing engineering past and the future.
Here he shares his thoughts on the significance of the spectacular new £1.35 billion structure …
“This is an important milestone in Scotland’s engineering and technological history.
“It seems to me a beautiful construction and, unlike the other Forth Road Bridge, it will sit very well with the old Victorian rail bridge.
“You could say that both of these bridges together demonstrate the history of Scottish engineering and the ambition to produce not simply important developments in transport infrastructure but also one which sends out a message to visitors about the significance of the Scottish nation.
“Scotland has an extraordinary heritage.
“The great innovative families of the 19th Century were the Telfords for roads, lighthouse builders the Stevensons, and Sir William Arrol, whose bridges you would find throughout the British Empire.
“Scotland was the place to go for advanced engineering technology and the current bridge is a metaphor for two things.
“It reflects again the nation’s capacity to build beautiful things but a negative is that the design and most of the materials did not come from Scotland.
“The bridge does showcase our capacity for technical and aesthetic excellence but it is also a physical metaphor for the decline of Scottish heavy industry, which imploded in the 1970s and ’80s.”