Last Friday I took the train from York to Hull. Onboard I was speaking on the phone to Will Arnold about our Net Zero Structural Design Course. As we rounded a bend this epic site swung into view and I stunned into silence. Spread out before me, skimming the water like a second horizon, the Humber Bridge.

This bridge seems improbably long. How can it be that the vertical load at midspan is supported by those towers when they are so far away? There must be some antigravity involved.

When it opened it was the longest single span bridge in the world, at 1.6km between the towers. Of the other facts I read on the bridge’s Wikipedia page, my favourite is that the towers are 36mm further apart at the top than at the bottom due to the curvature of the earth. I’d like to think I managed to capture that aspect in my rapid-fire photo from the train window.


Humber Bridge from Railway Line by Oliver Broadbent is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.