Three years, one bridge and a lot of wet socks, by Lorna Whitcombe

An original contemporary blog.

At 8.15 this morning, I walked across the Tane footbridge for the first time in three years. It took me ninety seconds. Doris Mallinson, who is eighty-two, waved at me from the far side like royalty. It was a perfectly ordinary walk. Three years ago, we were told nobody would ever make it again.

The footbridge is the only direct way from the Meadows estate to Tanford town centre, where the doctors’ surgery, the secondary school, the library and the nearest supermarket all are. Three winters ago, after a flood, engineers found cracks in its supports and the council fenced it off. The repairs, we were told, would cost £1.8 million, and ‘the money is simply not there’. Without the bridge, the walk to town is two and a half miles along the ring road, with no pavement for the last stretch. For an estate where one household in three has no car, that was not an inconvenience. It was a wall.

Fourteen of us met in the community centre the following week. We were mostly pensioners, plus two sixth-formers and a young mum called Chantelle, whose daughter’s nursery run had grown by over an hour a day. We called ourselves Bridge the Gap. It was a terrible pun, but it was clear.

The council said there was no evidence that people needed the bridge. So we gathered some. For a week, in pairs, we stood at both ends of the detour with clipboards, from seven in the morning until seven at night, and counted every person who walked it. There were 1,960. Their reasons filled two ring binders: GP appointments, school, supermarket shifts, a weekly visit to a husband’s grave in the town cemetery.

The council said our figures were ‘noted’. So we took them to the local paper. The council said there was still no money. So we invited the councillors to walk the detour with us, and when the cabinet member for highways finally agreed, we made sure he did it on a wet Monday in March, behind Chantelle’s pushchair, on the grass verge, while lorries passed close enough to rattle his umbrella.

Meanwhile, we gathered 3,847 signatures and applied to every grant fund we could find. We wrote to the council leader every Friday for a hundred and twelve weeks. Doris wrote all of her letters by hand, in green ink, and signed them ‘Yours, still on the wrong side’.

There were times I thought we had lost. Two grant applications were turned down in the same week. Three of our original fourteen moved away. I remember standing at the fence one evening, looking at the lights of the town across the water, and wondering if I was fighting for something that was never coming back. Then Chantelle texted to ask whether we were still on for Thursday, and of course we were.

Last autumn, the council finally agreed to pay for half of the repairs if we could find the rest. A lottery grant and a local building firm did the job. When I heard the news, I had to sit down on the kitchen floor.

So this is my last post as chair of Bridge the Gap. Thank you to everyone who counted, signed, wrote, walked and refused to go away. The fight is over. The bridge is open. Doris has already asked what we are campaigning for next.

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