Thomas Telford

• 1. Introduction

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  Thomas Telford was born on the 9th of August 1757 on a hill farm called Glendinning, three miles east of Eskdalemuir Kirk in the rural parish of Westerkirk, Dumfriesshire. His father, a shepherd named John Telford, died shortly after Thomas arrived in the world. The boy grew up in poverty, raised by his mother Janet Jackson. By the time he died on the 2nd of September 1834 at his home on Abingdon Street in London, he had built the longest suspension bridge of his era, carved hundreds of miles of road through the Scottish Highlands, and earned a nickname that stopped people in their tracks: the Colossus of Roads. How does a shepherd's orphan from a remote Scottish farm become the man who shapes an entire nation's infrastructure? And what drove someone who was first celebrated as a poet to spend his life hauling iron and stone across mountains and rivers?

• 2. Stone, Patrons, and a Collapsing Church

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  At fourteen, Telford was apprenticed to a stonemason in the area around Langholm, and some of his earliest handiwork can still be found on the bridge crossing the River Esk there. He moved through Edinburgh and then, in 1782, to London, where he met architects Robert Adam and Sir William Chambers and worked on additions to Somerset House. Two years after arriving in the capital, he found employment at Portsmouth dockyard, steadily teaching himself the arts of specification, design, and construction management. The decisive break came in 1787, when his wealthy patron William Pulteney helped him secure the post of Surveyor of Public Works in Shropshire. There, he renovated Shrewsbury Castle, oversaw the prison, and designed churches. His local reputation was sealed in 1788, when he was called in about a leaking roof at St Chad's Church in Shrewsbury. He warned the building was in imminent danger of collapse. Three days later, it fell. He had not been appointed architect for its replacement, but the episode showed how precise his structural instincts already were.

• 3. Iron and the Shropshire Bridges

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  In 1790, Telford designed Montford Bridge to carry the London-Holyhead road over the River Severn. It was the first of roughly forty bridges he would build in Shropshire. His bridge at Buildwas was the first iron bridge he constructed. Studying Abraham Darby's celebrated bridge at Ironbridge nearby, Telford concluded it was badly over-engineered and that many of its castings were flawed. His own design at Buildwas covered a span thirty feet wider while using only half the weight of iron. He was also among the first engineers to test his materials thoroughly before breaking ground, a habit he carried throughout his career. When winter floods swept away the bridge at Bewdley in Worcestershire in 1795, Telford designed its replacement. The same floods took out the bridge at Tenbury on the River Teme, a crossing shared between Worcestershire and Shropshire, and Telford took responsibility for the repair of its northern, Shropshire end. The bridge still bears a bend at the point where the two counties meet.

• 4. Aqueducts and Canals

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  Telford's reputation in Shropshire earned him the commission in 1793 to manage the design and construction of the Ellesmere Canal, a waterway intended to connect the ironworks and collieries of Wrexham through the town of Ellesmere and on to the River Mersey via Chester. The centrepiece of this work was the Pontcysyllte Aqueduct crossing the River Dee in the Vale of Llangollen. Telford built it from cast-iron troughs fixed in masonry, and it extends for over a thousand feet at a height of 126 feet above the valley floor, resting on nineteen arches each spanning 45 feet. Because nobody had attempted cast iron at this scale before, Telford had to invent his own solutions. He used boiling sugar and lead as a sealant on the iron joints. Canal engineer William Jessop oversaw the broader project but left the detailed execution to Telford. The aqueduct was designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2009. Before Pontcysyllte was finished, Telford had already built the cast-iron Longdon-on-Tern Aqueduct on the Shrewsbury Canal, after taking over from the original engineer Josiah Clowes, who died in 1795. Longdon-on-Tern pre-dated Pontcysyllte and was substantially larger than the first cast-iron aqueduct built by Benjamin Outram on the Derby Canal just months earlier. The Ellesmere Canal itself was abandoned incomplete in 1805 when it failed to generate enough revenue to fund the connecting sections to Chester and Shrewsbury.

• 5. Reshaping Scotland

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  William Pulteney's influence reached its furthest extent in 1801, when Telford devised a master plan to transform communications across the Scottish Highlands. The scheme eventually stretched across roughly twenty years of work. It encompassed the Caledonian Canal running along the Great Glen, a redesign of sections of the Crinan Canal, around 920 miles of new roads, over a thousand bridges including the Craigellachie Bridge, harbour improvements at Aberdeen, Dundee, Peterhead, Wick, Portmahomack, and Banff, and 32 new churches. In the Scottish Lowlands he also built 184 miles of new roads and bridges that ranged from a 112-foot stone arch across the Dee at Tongueland in Kirkcudbright, completed between 1805 and 1806, to the 129-foot-tall Cartland Crags bridge near Lanark in 1822. An Act of Parliament in 1823 later funded up to forty churches and manses in communities across the Highlands with no existing place of worship. Telford designed a standard T-shaped church plan and two manse designs, one single-storey and one two-storey, each priced at £750 and adaptable to local materials, with a cap of £1,500 per site. Of the 43 churches originally planned, 32 were built, and the last was completed in 1830.

• 6. The Road to Holyhead

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  The task that earned Telford his punning nickname was the rebuilding of the London to Holyhead road, completed in his later years with the help of his ten-year assistant John MacNeill. Much of this route survives today as the A5 trunk road. Between London and Shrewsbury the work was largely improvement; beyond Shrewsbury, especially past Llangollen, it meant building a highway from nothing. One stretch, between Capel Curig and Bethesda in the Ogwen Valley, required Telford to strike out on a different alignment from the road the Romans had laid during their occupation of the area. On Anglesey, a new embankment crossed the Stanley Sands toward Holyhead. The greatest obstacle was the Menai Strait. Telford's answer, the Menai Suspension Bridge, took from 1819 to 1826 to build and spanned 580 feet, making it the longest suspension bridge of its time. Instead of modern cable systems, Telford used individually linked iron eye bars, each 9.5 feet long. A second suspension bridge at Conwy opened the same year. Telford also worked on a road across the Isle of Arran, named the String road, crossing bleak terrain to link the island's east and west coasts without the long coastal detour. His improvements to the Glasgow to Carlisle road, later part of the A74, were later described as a model for future engineers. The punning nickname itself came from his friend Robert Southey, the poet who would eventually become Poet Laureate and who later wrote Telford's biography.

• 7. Late Works and a Man of Letters

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  Telford's final decade saw St Katharine Docks rise near Tower Bridge in London between 1824 and 1828, a project on which he collaborated with architect Philip Hardwick. He built the second Harecastle Tunnel on the Trent and Mersey Canal in 1827. Work began on the Birmingham and Liverpool Junction Canal in May 1826, though Telford died before it was finished in January 1835. In 1829 Galton Bridge became, at the time of its construction, the longest single span in the world. Whitstable harbour in Kent followed in 1832, built in connection with the Canterbury and Whitstable Railway and featuring an unusual tidal reservoir designed to flush out accumulated mud. In 1820, Telford was appointed the first President of the Institution of Civil Engineers, a post he held until his death. What is less widely remembered is that Telford had published poetry between 1779 and 1784, and that, as George Turnbull recorded, his earliest public distinction was as a poet, not an engineer. He reprinted a poem called Eskdale in Shrewsbury at around the age of thirty. His will left bequests to Southey, to the poet Thomas Campbell who lived from 1777 to 1844, and to the publishers of the Edinburgh Encyclopaedia, to which Telford had contributed articles on architecture, bridge-building, and canal-making. Telford died on the 2nd of September 1834 at five in the afternoon, with only Turnbull and his old servant James Handscombe present. He was buried in the nave of Westminster Abbey on the 10th of September, and in his will he left legacies to the two local libraries at Westerkirk and Langholm, the communities where his life had begun.