12 UK concrete bridges since 1940

This chapter on concrete bridges since 1940, concentrates particularly on the early postwar period and deals with more recent bridges briefly and mainly from an evolutionary point of view. A paper on prestressed highway bridges in the UK, published in the Proceedings of the Institution of Civil Engineers in 1989,¹ deals more fully with the more recent bridges as do some of the other references appended to the chapter. As well as the paper referred to above, an indispensible reference is the book Modern British Bridges² which contains brief descriptions, often with drawings and photographs, of many bridges built or under construction between the end of the war and 1964.

• Introduction

• Concrete bridges after the war

• Early prestressed bridges in Britain — the 1940s and 1950s

• Early prestressed railway bridges

• Railway bridges after 1960

• Larger bridges — 1954 onwards

• Smaller bridges since 1957

• Precast bridges and standard beams

• Estuarial crossings

• Ancillary items

• Structural analysis

• Problems with prestressed bridges

• The changing character of bridges

• Postscript

• Acknowledgements

• References