From Darbys's Coalbrookdale to Dickens' Coketown

(Apologies. Did not have my battery charged for my digital camera so took pictures with a regular camera. I have "borrowed" a couple of pictures from Ashley's site--she does have a great photographer's eye.) The first picture is on the Ironbridge of Ironbridge Gorge, the first bridge made out of iron as one would expect. Abraham Darby began casting it in 1779 and that is the date on the central piece around which the students are gathered. Darby almost went broke as the bridge was a marvel and everyone visited it, but they went back to making bridges out of wood and brick, until a flood towards the end of the century washed out all bridges on the River Severn, except this one.

Even with the success of Ironbridge, the Darbys and their successors soon had to shift from making large practical items to focusing on the ornamental and the decorative. Of course, some of the decorative pieces, like the great gates to the Great Exhibition (Crystal Palace) of 1851 or the iron lamp posts for London, were massive or massive projects. Still, by the mid-19th century, the Darbys sought to market themselves as cast iron artists (and some of the pieces shown in the museums at Ironbridge make iron look like a rare mineral). One of the reasons for the change is that Coalbrookdale and the other places where there were blast furnaces (like Blists Hill) were started because it was a great place to use the river and the canal system to bring in materials (iron ore, coke made from coal, and limestone for the catalyst) from a short distance away. The picture to the right shows a rail bridge crossing the river. The railways were important for the area (iron rails and steam engine boilers were made here and nearby) and also were the undoing of the area (it was too costly to build many railroads in an area cut by rivers, valleys, and canals). One of the reasons that Ironbridge is a World Heritage Site is that there was no modernization after the mid-19th century and much of the place remains as it was during the first Industrial Revolution (or is that Evolution?).

Note: the UNESCO World Heritage List includes 26 sites in the United Kingdom (probably the highest number in any one country), including: Ironbridge Gorge (1986), Stonehenge, Avebury and Associated Sites (1986), City of Bath (1987), Westminster Palace, Westminster Abbey and Saint Margaret's Church (1987), Tower of London (1988), Maritime Greenwich (1997), all of which we have seen or will see (well Tower in passing). If you add Tintern Abbey (as it is very similar to Studley Royal Park including the Ruins of Fountains Abbey, 1986), and the various places many of you have seen or will see--Old and New Towns of Edinburgh (1995), Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew (2003), Liverpool, Maritime Mercantile City (2004)--we can say we did a fair portion of the list!