Proceedings of the Institution of
Civil Engineers
Structures & Buildings 158
October 2005 Issue SB5
Pages 321–339
Paper 13908
Received 07/07/2004
Accepted 01/03/2005
Tom Swailes
Lecturer, University of
Manchester, UK
Joe Marsh
Senior Lecturer, University of
Manchester, UK
Keywords:
buildings, structure & design/
conservation/history
Development of long-span iron roof structures in Britain
T. Swailes
CEng, MICE, MIStructE
and J. Marsh
MSc
The aim of this paper is to stimulate a wider interest in
the built heritage of industrial Britain amongst civil
engineers. Britain has a greater number and variety of
iron roofs than found anywhere else in the world. From
the tentative iron roofs over the attic workrooms of the
first iron-framed factories, this paper traces the
development of greater spans using arch and truss forms
to meet the needs of a diverse range of building types,
among which the railway station passenger train shed is
most significant. The confused issue of design and
construction responsibilities for some of the great roofs
of the nineteenth century is partially unravelled. The
paper shows how innovations in iron roofing were at first
introduced by a handful of structural ironwork
contractors, further advances being made by a small
group of specialist engineers expert in the analysis,
design and detailing of structural works in iron.
1. EARLY WORKS IN IRON—ADAPTATION AND
INNOVATION
The structural use of iron in Britain dates from Roman times,
when beams of forged wrought iron were used over bathhouse
furnace stoke holes.1 In medieval Britain, lintels of cast iron
were likewise used for their heat resistance in blast furnaces
built for smelting iron. These were specialised structural uses of
an expensive commodity, which gradually became available in
large quantities and at lower cost mainly as a result of two
eighteenth century innovations. First, in 1709, Abraham Darby
I of Coalbrookdale smelted iron using coke as the blast furnace
fuel instead of charcoal. 2 Next, from 1776 onwards, the
Boulton & Watt steam engine with separate condenser was
used to deliver a more powerful air blast to the furnaces.3 By
1779, while the Iron Bridge in Coalbrookdale (Fig. 1) signalled
the structural potential of cast iron, other uses of the material
were already well established. In that year, for example, the
Wilkinson works began the casting of several miles of cast iron
pipes, each about 9 ft long and 12 to 24 inches in diameter, for
supplying Parisians with ‘Monsieur Perrier’s water’. 4 Providing
columns in the early 1770s for the galleried churches of St
Anne and St James in Liverpool5 was a small matter to the
makers and exporters of cast iron pipes, cannon and steam
engine cylinders. Iron rails for mineral railways were possibly
made at Coalbrookdale as early as 1667. 6
The spandrel rings of the Iron Bridge that ‘copied’ the weightrelieving barrel rings of the 140 ft span stone arch Pont-y-tyStructures & Buildings 158 Issue SB5
Fig. 1. The Iron Bridge, Coalbrookdale (1779, 100 ft (30.48 m)
span). With iron spandrel rings
Pridd of 1756 7,8 can be seen in the roof of King’s Cross Station
(Fig. 2).9 During construction of the original laminated timber
arches at King’s Cross in 1850–52, inadequate attention was
paid to the arch abutments, a supporting wall was pushed
outwards and emergency strutting was required to restore
stability. Although the timber roofs at King’s Cross were
eventually replaced with iron, the attic rooms of several midnineteenth century Yorkshire textile mills are still bridged with
laminated timber arches, generally springing from near floor
level. 10 Later it became apparent that Victorian engineers
struggled with the problem of providing adequate abutments to
large iron arch roofs. There was considerable interest in the
analysis of arches and in one key paper both the masonry arch
at Pont-y-ty-Pridd and the roof to St Pancras Station were
used as examples. 11 The great 240 ft span St Pancras arches,
tied beneath rail level, form the longest single-span iron roof
in Britain.
A carpentry influence is apparent in the dovetailed joints of the
Iron Bridge, and it is from the carpentry tradition that trussed
forms of iron roof developed. Blacksmith’s wrought iron had
been used in the joints of the ‘rational’ forms of timber truss
popularised in Italy by the renaissance architect and writer
Palladio and brought to Britain by architects Inigo Jones and
Christopher Wren. 12 The great era of timber framing in Britain
was over by the end of the eighteenth century, with native oak
in structural sizes scarce and imported softwoods used
increasingly for building. The use of timber became restricted
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Swailes • Marsh
321
considerable engineering
challenge, and required a
material stronger than wood.
2. ROOFING THE
FACTORY
The earliest reported iron roof
was, unremarkably, at an
ironworks, but its details are
unknown. A visitor to the
Carron Works in Scotland in
the early 1770s simply noted
in his diary that the drying
room (for drying foundry
sand moulds) had a low
circular cast iron roof and a
floor also of cast iron. 15 The
desire for fire-resistant forms
of construction in late
eighteenth century factories
extended from the walls,
internal framing and floors,
to the roof. 16 A ‘Plan of iron
framing for a roof where there
are two pillars to support
it. . .’ was sent by Charles
Bage to William Strutt,
probably in early 1797, the
year in which Bage’s ironframed flax mill at
Ditherington in Shrewsbury
was completed. Bage used
this form of ‘attic truss’ roof
in a later extension to the
Ditherington Mill (Fig. 3).
Strutt chose a similar
solution for the attic
schoolroom in his Belper
Mill, recorded by the
precocious 18-year old John
Farey Jr in 1809 17 for
Abraham Rees’s vast
Cyclopaedia 18 (Fig. 4).
Fig. 2. King’s Cross Station (1852, two 105 ft roof spans). Detail of original laminated timber arch
Historical
documentary
with iron spandrel rings. (Source: Bancroft,9 detail from Plate 7) (1 foot = 0.3 m)
evidence and the evidence of
a structure itself are quite
often at variance, and it
to the floors and roofs of stone masonry or brickwork
should be noted that the Farey drawing does not match the
buildings. ‘Carpentry manuals’ popularised the new trussed
present day roof details. Hesitancy in providing iron roofs that
roof forms and skilfully crafted oak-pegged carpentry joints
bridged the full width of a building was soon overcome.
were rendered obsolete by the arguably cruder but effective use
According to William Fairbairn, in early nineteenth century
of ironwork. 13 Composite trusses of timber and iron, well
Manchester, ‘during the rapid extension of the cotton
suited to industrialised production methods, remained popular
manufacture’ most mills were covered with over-arching cast
until the early twentieth century. A truss, like a beam or tied
iron roofs (Fig. 5). 19 A splendid surviving example in Beehive
arch, carries a gravity load without exerting any outward
Mill in the Ancoats area of Manchester dates from around 1825
thrust on its supports. Brunel used a timber beam reinforced
(Fig. 6). 20 Philips and Lee’s iron-framed Salford Twist Mill,
with wrought iron plates in a clever balanced cantilever
built in 1802, had cast iron king post trusses of 12 ft 6 inches
arrangement to the 1843 roof at Bristol Temple Meads Station,
span. 21
14
creating the illusion of a medieval hammerbeam roof A 72 ft
span was achieved without visible ties, but for the much
Most early iron structures were of cast iron, but the industrialised
greater spans built over the following 30 years, the design of
production of wrought iron, strong both in tension and
ties and their connections for very large forces presented a
compression, was greatly improved by the introduction of the
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Swailes • Marsh
Fig. 3. Ditherington Flax Mill extension, Shrewsbury (c. 1810).
Attic room to extension
Fig. 4. North Mill, Belper (1803–04). Attic schoolroom: from
’Sections of one of Messrs. Strutt’s COTTON MILLS at
Belper in Derbyshire’. (Source: Rees, 18 detail from Plate XIV)
Fig. 6. Beehive Mill, Manchester (c. 1825). Cast iron arch to
attic room
puddling process, patented by Henry Cort in 1784. By the first
decade of the nineteenth century, with naval blockades
periodically restricting the supply of timber from the Baltic ports,
inventors tried to exploit the structural potential not only of cast
iron, but also of wrought iron in rolled plate and bar forms. The
year 1809 was unusual in that three patents for iron roofs were
registered: by Charles Norton, a Birmingham builder; Thomas
Botfield, a Shropshire ironmaster; and John Cragg, a Liverpool
ironfounder. 22–24 The impact of these inventions, as with so
many, was mostly local and short-lived. The John Rennie papers
in the National Library of Scotland include an 1811 drawing of a
cast iron truss roof designed by Charles Norton for the
Paddington Engine House of the Grand Junction Waterworks
Co. 25 The Botfield roof, of iron plates riveted together, was
praised by a correspondent writing to the editor of the
contemporary periodical Gentleman’s Magazine, but only one
example is known to survive, hidden beneath a conventional roof
covering in Shropshire. 26,27 The iron churches of St. George’s,
Everton and of St. Michael-in-the-Hamlet, Aigburth, are well
known to architectural historians through the involvement in
their design of Cragg’s friend Thomas Rickman, the pioneer
gothic revivalist architect. 28 Another patentee, Thomas Pearsall
of Willsbridge in Somerset, ran a mill for rolling and slitting
wrought iron. 29,30 The failure of a patent wrought iron roof in the
London Docks in 1813 was a factor in Pearsall giving up the
business. While scientific thinking is apparent in some designs
from this period, a little knowledge proved to be a dangerous
thing and no substitute for experience. As John Seaward, an early
member of the Institution of Civil Engineers put it: 31
. . .while we are dismayed with the frequent occurrence of failure of
Iron Roofs, it is extremely rare to hear of any accident happening to
a roof of timber: although the latter are frequently constructed by
ignorant untaught men, while the others are generally the production
of superior education and intelligence.
Fig. 5. Cast iron arch to mill attic room (from c. 1804 in
Manchester). (Source: Fairbairn, 19 p. 205, Fig. 16)
Structures & Buildings 158 Issue SB5
For trusses, it was logical to use expensive wrought iron for the
tension members and cast iron or timber for the struts and
rafters, although there are many exceptions to this rule (Fig.
7). 32 Adjacent to the arched attic room in Beehive Mill (shown
in Fig. 6) is a trussed roof of similar span, with wrought iron
angle struts (Fig. 8). A well-proportioned roof on a building for
the Cromford and High Peak Railway, probably constructed by
Butterley & Co. in the late 1820s, has a timber tie (Fig. 9).
Joseph Glynn designed an all-iron roof for the Butterley
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323
Fig. 9. Cromford & High Peak Railway terminus building roof
(c. 1829)
Hill open-air museum in Coalbrookdale where it houses a
working wrought iron rolling mill.
Fig. 7. Iron roof: Letter Sorters Office, General Post Office,
St. Martins-le-Grand, London (1827). (Source: Davy, 32 p. 273)
Fig. 8. Beehive Mill, Manchester. Trussed iron roof (c. 1825)
Smithery around the same time (Fig. 10). In ironworks
buildings and engineering workshops, reheating furnaces and
forges were a fire hazard and iron framing was quite common.
One of the best surviving early examples, built in 1814 as the
Smithery at the Woolwich Arsenal, is preserved at the Blists
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Structures & Buildings 158 Issue SB5
3. THE SIMPLE TRUSS PERFECTED
William Fairbairn claimed credit for introducing a
particularly efficient iron roof truss in 1827 (Fig. 11). Later
called the Polonceau truss after a French railway engineer,
the form was, as Fairbairn wrote: 19 ‘very generally adopted
. . . for large buildings, railway stations, and other structures
where the span does not exceed 50 feet’. The single-bay
Haymarket Station train shed, now at the Scottish Railway
Museum in Bo’ness, was built with trusses of this kind
around 1843, with struts (marked b in Fig. 11) of cast iron. 33
Equally popular was the wrought iron ‘king and queen rod
truss’, modelled on the 1837 Euston Station roof designed by
Charles Fox, an assistant to Robert Stephenson on the
London and Birmingham Railway. 34–36 Fox had family
connections with the mill-owning Strutts and in early
childhood was a regular visitor to the ‘manufactories in
Derby’ and an enthusiast for all things mechanical. 37 Fox
had been a pupil of John Ericcson, co-designer of the
locomotive ‘Novelty’ that competed against ‘Rocket’ at the
Rainhill trials. 38 In late 1838 Fox left Stephenson’s
employment and Bramah, Fox & Co. was established as a
specialist structural ironwork contractor, becoming Fox,
Henderson & Co. around 1841–42. Their largest roof to the
Euston pattern was of 132 ft span, at Liverpool’s Tithebarn
Street Station (later Exchange Station 39 ), with ‘turned and
fitted’ or ‘precision-engineered’ connections reminiscent of
machinery details (Fig. 12). 40 Fox was not himself an
advocate for the long-span roof, preferring multiple spans of
up to 50 ft, for example as erected by his firm for the
passenger train shed at Manchester’s London Road Station
(now Piccadilly Station) in the early 1840s. 41
Fox’s first partner, John Joseph Bramah, supplied structural
ironwork for alterations to Windsor Castle in 1825 42–44 and
afterwards was a successful contractor for iron bridges and
roofs on numerous railways. 45,46 From Bramah’s Pimlico
Works he produced the ‘magnificent shedding’ at
Birmingham Station in 1838, ‘built on the same plan as that
at the Euston Square terminus but . . .more spacious’. 47
Bramah soon afterwards moved to the Midlands where he
financed several firms. Bramah, Fox & Co., based at the
purpose-built London Works in Smethwick, specialised in
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Fig. 10. Roof over the Smithery at Butterley Iron Works (late 1820s, 40 ft (12.2 m) span). Structural ironwork details, delineated
(i.e. drawn) by Joseph Glynn. (Source: Tarn, 157 detail from plate XLIX)
known Horseley Works, but did not live to see a return on
his outlay. 49 When he died aged only 48 on 13 September
1846, his capital investment in businesses in the West
Midlands was estimated to be over £300 000. 50,51 Bramah’s
most notable roof covers the Houses of Parliament. This
durable but heavy trussed roof makes far more extensive use
of cast iron than its comparatively flimsy train shed
contemporaries. John Weale noted in 1844: 52
The whole of the work is deserving of commendation for the
workman-like and correct manner in which it [is] executed, and
reflects much credit upon Messrs. Bramah and Cochrane, who have
Fig. 11. Roof truss form introduction (c. 1827) claimed by
William Fairbairn. Later called the Polonceau truss. (Source:
Fairbairn, 19 p. 206, Fig. 18)
had the execution under their care. That for the river-front portion of
the building was prepared at their works at Woodside, near Dudley;
and the roof over the House of Peers, &c. at the Horseley Iron Works,
another of their establishments.
wrought iron forge, fabrication and general engineering work
for the railways, while Bramah, Cochrane & Co., established
in 1840, were more concerned with castings and foundry
work. 48 In 1844 Bramah took over and improved the wellStructures & Buildings 158 Issue SB5
4. THE LONG-SPAN PIONEERS
From 1841 a number of large iron-framed engineering
workshops and shipbuilding slip roofs were erected for the
Admiralty in the Royal Dockyards. Most were constructed by
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Swailes • Marsh
325
lengths then welded together,
with difficulty, using a process
devised by Turner. The warm
and humid internal
environment necessary for
conservatory or hothouse
plants affected the Kew Palm
House ironwork to such an
extent that its most recent
restoration involved complete
dismantling, cleaning, repair
and replacement of parts,
prior to repainting and reassembly. 62–64 Glazing bars of
aluminium were used in place
of the corroded originals,
although the use of recycled
rolled wrought iron might be
preferred now.
The success of the railways
led the competing companies
to build larger station
buildings. Richard Turner
used plated deck beams for
the ribs of the long-span
arched trusses to the roof at
.
Liverpool Lime Street Station
Fig. 12. Tithebarn Street Station, Liverpool (1850, 132 ft 8 in. (40 23 m) max. span). (Source:
Dempsey, 40 Plate LXII, Figs. 1 to 9)
(Fig. 13). 65,66 The rib joints
were made with riveted
fishplates. The contemporary
train shed at Newcastle Central Station comprised three tied
Fox, Henderson & Co. (five roofs) and by the London firm
arch spans of about 60 ft, designed, in concept at least, by the
Baker & Son (eleven roofs). 53–57 In the design of such roofs it
architect John Dobson. 67 Thomas Charlton, the engineering
was ‘customary to calculate upon a total weight of 40 lbs per
superficial foot’ 58 (1.92 kN/m2 ). As fully iron-framed
foreman for Hawks, Crawshay & Co. (ironwork contractor for
the Newcastle High Level Bridge) devised a method by which
prefabricated kits of parts, buildings of this kind could be taken
the webs for the riveted wrought iron boiler plate and angle
down and re-erected if needed elsewhere. Most recently, the
arch ribs could be rolled into a segmental shape. 68 Around this
1845 Woolwich Boiler Shop was moved to Chatham. 59 A
notable feature of these sheds was the use of corrugated
time, the forging and forge-welding of wrought iron was
wrought iron cladding on an unprecedented scale. The material
revolutionised by the Nasmyth steam hammer, an
was afterwards used extensively in the many iron buildings
indispensable tool for iron making and working. 69
exported to provide temporary accommodation for hopeful
‘gold rush’ participants in California (1849–50) and Australia
There were arguments about cost, and opinions amongst
(1851–52). 60
engineers differed on the merits of longer spans, but they
While slips were roofed in iron
for the building of wooden
ships under cover, wrought
iron was increasingly being
used for the hulls and framing
of the ships themselves.
Shipbuilding applications of
wrought iron deck beams were
patented in 1844 by Kennedy
& Vernon of Liverpool and
such beams were soon
afterwards used by the Dublin
engineer Richard Turner in the
construction of the Palm
House in London’s Kew
Gardens. 61 Beams for the arch
ribs were rolled in 12 ft
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Structures & Buildings 158 Issue SB5
Fig. 13. Richard Turner’s Liverpool Lime Street Station roof (1850, 150 ft 6 in. (45.87 m) span).
(Source: Dempsey, 40 Plate LXII, Figs. A and C–G)
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certainly gave greater flexibility for track layout changes and
removed the need for intermediate supports. The vulnerability
of cast iron columns to impact damage was demonstrated by
several accidents. At the Bricklayers’ Arms Station in London, a
train shed with three trussed spans of around 50 ft had
collapsed over a length of 400 ft in mid-1850 after the buffers
of a carriage on a turntable fractured a supporting cast iron
column. 70 This ill-fated roof built by Fox, Henderson & Co. had
suffered a partial collapse during construction in 1844. It was
only completed after two undamaged principals were erected
side by side and subjected to test, one of them failing under a
load equivalent to 60 lb/sq. ft (2.87 kN/m2 ). 71,72 William
Denison of the Royal Engineers published a report of the test,
along with another on a pair of Euston-type wrought iron
trusses intended for the Woolwich Dockyard boiler house.
Turner’s Liverpool Lime Street roof was soon exceeded in
span by Fox, Henderson & Co.’s great roof at Birmingham
New Street Station designed by Edward A. Cowper 73 (Fig.
14). Robert Bow assisted with the graphical analysis used to
determine the member forces in the cross-braced ‘bowstring’
trusses 74 (Mr Taylor, a ‘simple mechanic’ with Cochrane &
Co., has been credited with the invention of graphic
statics 75 ). Joseph Phillips devised a moveable temporary
staging that allowed the roof to be constructed above
existing railway lines without interrupting the traffic. 76 The
form of the roof principal was probably developed from a
wrought iron tied arch bridge, also designed by Cowper. 77
This in turn was similar in form to Squire Whipple’s 1841
American patented ‘arch truss’. 78 Giving proper credit to
inventors has long been a difficulty, and there were much
earlier claims on the ‘bowstring bridge’ idea. 79 Regardless of
its parentage, Fox, Henderson & Co. energetically promoted
‘their’ bridge as a safe alternative to Horseley’s trussed cast
iron girders, understandably no longer trusted after the
collapse of Robert Stephenson’s bridge over the River Dee at
Chester in May 1847. 36
the Victoria Lily. The Lily House had ‘ridge and furrow’ roofing
carried by light wrought iron trussed beams of 31 ft 3 in. span
between cast iron columns that served as rainwater
downpipes. 80 William Barlow, Engineer for the Midland
Railway, gave Paxton some help with the preparation of his
outline designs for the Exhibition Building. 81 With
construction well under way, the detailed design by Fox,
Henderson & Co. was criticised for its reliance for lateral
stability on frame action, and diagonal bracing was inserted at
the insistence of the Building Committee. 82 A rebuttal by the
contractors of allegations of a variety of strength and stability
problems took the form of a Society of Arts lecture presented
in the building by Professor Cowper, father of the senior
designer for Fox, Henderson & Co. Professor Cowper’s younger
son Charles later contributed a ‘scientific description’ to one
account of the building, which can be compared with the
official account. 83,84 Meetings at the Institution of Civil
Engineers during January 1851 were taken up with discussions
of a paper on the subject. 85 To allay public concerns about the
strength of the gallery floors, load tests were carried out. The
Civil Engineer and Architect’s Journal was unimpressed, saying
an experiment on the full-scale model gallery ‘for
inapplicability and utter uselessness as a test, surpasses
anything in the annals of engineering jugglery that ever came
under our observation’. 86 The building was never tested by
severe weather during its short life and its safety remains the
subject of academic speculation. 87 The literature on the
building structure forms excellent case-study material for civil
and construction engineering students.
The laminated timber arched transept, a late amendment to the
original design, was improved upon when the Exhibition
Building was taken down and re-erected in modified form as the
Crystal Palace at Sydenham. The lateral thrust that had caused
problems with the timber arches at King’s Cross Station (see Fig.
2) was minimised by using very deep cross-braced iron trusses
in the shape of an arch, but of sufficient flexural stiffness to
render abutments unnecessary. 88 Fox, Henderson & Co.’s best
known surviving work is Brunel’s Grade I listed train shed at
5. THE ARCH BUTTRESSED
Paddington Station, completed in 1854. 89,90 One Victorian
In the context of this paper, the building for the Great
Exhibition of 1851 is of interest for the contemporary
engineer admired the way in which the side spans at Paddington
discussions about its strength and stability. The inspiration for
acted as buttresses to resisting the lateral thrust from the main
the vast glazed timber and iron structure was a small building
span, though twentieth century survey work found the columns
at Chatsworth designed by Joseph Paxton for the cultivation of
out of plumb (they were replaced with steel) and remedial tying
is visible over platform 1. 91
At York Station, where the
1877 train shed built by the
Leeds firm of Butler & Sons is
superficially a copy of that at
Paddington but without the
transepts, space constraints
led to the localised use of cast
iron portal frames in place of
brickwork buttresses (Fig. 15).
At Paddington, a width of 240
ft was covered in three spans
and at York 234 ft in four
spans. As York Station is on
a curve, when it was opened
the four spans proved
Fig. 14. Birmingham New Street Station roof (1854, 212 ft (64.62 m) max. span). Elevation of
inconvenient as the ‘columns
118
principal with added tie. (Source: Dawson )
came in the way, and made it
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327
Walmisley as Resident Engineer. 100 Andrew Handyside & Co.
of the Britannia Foundry in Derby became the leading builder
of long-span iron roofs. Without the in-house ironwork design
and detailing capabilities of Fox, Henderson & Co., specialists
like Ordish were brought in for ‘design and build’ projects by
Handyside’s and other ironwork contractors. 101
Fig. 15. York Station (1877, roof spans of 81 ft (24.68 m), 2 3
55 ft and 43 ft). Cast iron ’buttress frame’ to side span
difficult for the guards to see from one end of the train to the
other, or to observe the signals’. 92
6. THE AISLED IRON HALL—1851 REPRISED
The pattern of arched hall with galleried aisles established by
the building for the Great Exhibition was widely imitated, as
was the idea of the exhibition itself. The Edinburgh contractor
C. D. Young & Co. supplied columns and other cast ironwork
for the Irish Industrial Exhibition in Dublin in 1853, designed
and built the temporary Museum of Art and Science building at
Kensington Gore in 1856 93 and the Manchester Art Treasures
Exhibition building in 1857. 94 The Manchester building, with
an arched hall (span 102 ft) 704 ft in length, was offered for
sale but there were no buyers and it was sold for scrap. In the
post-Crimean War depression the many bankruptcies included
Fox, Henderson & Co., crippled by a £70 000 loss on the Danish
Railways. 95
Of the former staff of Fox, Henderson & Co., it was Rowland
Ordish who made the greatest contribution to the further
development of structural ironwork. He had been involved in
the preparation of drawings successively for buildings for the
Great Exhibition, Birmingham New Street Station roof, and the
Crystal Palace. 96 In Copenhagen with Fox, Henderson & Co. in
mid-1855, probably in connection with their ill-fated Danish
Railways work, he left the firm before it failed and in January
1856 he was chief draughtsman at Somerset House, in the
Director of Works Department of the Admiralty under Colonel
Greene. 97 It is not known if he had any input to the detailing
of Greene’s famous iron-framed boat store at Sheerness,
though interestingly Fox, Henderson & Co. had obtained the
contract for extending an existing boathouse there in mid1856. 98 In March 1858 Ordish became an engineer in private
practice and in the following month patented an improved
suspension bridge. The Albert Bridge over the Thames at
Chelsea is a modified form of the patented bridge designed by
Ordish and built by Andrew Handyside & Co. 99 with Arthur
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Structures & Buildings 158 Issue SB5
As a structural ironwork designer and detailer, Ordish found a
professional home in the Society of Engineers, becoming its
President in 1860. 102 He was in partnership first for a short
period with a Mr Dewdney (probably the same who sailed for
North America in March 1859 and later became LieutenantGovernor of British Columbia 103 ). A more fruitful partnership
was with W. H. Le Feuvre, at offices in London at 18 Great
George Street, where they had the structural ironwork
contractor Charles Young as a next-door neighbour. 104 An
Ordish obituary recorded ‘the number of pupils, foreign as well
as English, who have passed through his office, and the
majority of whom have since made their mark in positions of
trust and importance’. 105 Without formal professional training,
Ordish was an intuitive designer who appreciated the facility in
structural analysis possessed by young German engineers. One
of them, Carl von Wessely, presented a paper to the Society of
Engineers that, in effect, catalogued the iron arch roofs by
Ordish and explained the basis of their design. 88 The resistance
to spread of the arch roof over the Winter Garden at the 1865
Dublin Exhibition, with ironwork by R. & J. Rankin of
Liverpool, depended on flying buttresses and rigidly framed
side bays without diagonal bracing (Fig. 16). 106, 107 The
building was taken down and re-erected in enlarged and
modified form in London near Battersea Park in 1884, to the
designs of Bell, Miller & Bell. 108 Derby Market Hall, completed
in 1866, but with side galleries and remedial tying added since,
Fig. 16. Dublin Exhibition Building Winter Palace (1865, 50 ft 6
in. (15.39 m) main roof span). (Source: Humber, 107 detail
from Plate 24)
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Swailes • Marsh
the elaborate calculations for seven weeks. 113 Defending the
design of the building against a critic, am Ende explained what
might otherwise be a puzzling feature: ‘the reason why the
engineers did not place the abutment frame under the springing
of the arch is that this space was wanted for the visitors to the
hall’. 114 As a result of an analytical investigation of column
moments due to frame action and unequal or ‘pattern’ loading
on the gallery girders, the columns were detailed as pin-ended.
Fig. 17. Market Hall, Derby (1866, 86 ft 6 in. (26.36 m) main
roof span)
is an excellent surviving example of the work of the Ordish
and Le Feuvre partnership (Fig. 17). 109
The last of the great iron arched halls, and the most
sophisticated in structural engineering terms, is Olympia (170 ft
span), completed in 1888 as the second National Agricultural
Hall (Fig. 18). 110 The ironwork contractors were Andrew
Handyside & Co., as they had been in 1862 for the Agricultural
Hall in Islington, now the Business Design Centre. 111 As joint
engineers, former Ordish assistants Arthur Walmisley and Max
am Ende published separate accounts of aspects of the building
design. 112 Stresses in the statically indeterminate roof arch and
braced side bays were determined using the principle of work,
with am Ende’s assistant engineer Mr L. Mertens labouring over
7. VARIATIONS ON A BOWSTRING THEME
Resurgence in station roof building came in the early 1860s as
the fortunes of railway companies revived and lines were
extended into central London. For the long-span roofs at Cannon
Street 115 (190 ft span) and Charing Cross (166 ft span), John
Hawkshaw, the Engineer for the South Eastern Railway, followed
the Birmingham New Street bowstring truss pattern. 116 Joseph
Phillips acted again in the role he had played for Fox, Henderson
& Co. at Birmingham, taking charge of site erection works for the
ironwork contractors Cochrane & Co. On high masonry walls,
these roofs were not regarded as things of beauty and by 1903
were considered a maintenance liability. 111 On 5 December 1905,
with a repair and maintenance gang at work on the Charing Cross
roof, a principal tie failed and six people were killed in the
resultant progressive collapse. 117 The tie had failed at a scarf
weld between the plain round bar and a threaded end (Fig. 19).
Following a painstaking examination of the bar, William
Kirkaldy concluded that the failure of the 412 in. diameter bar had
been the result of an internal manufacturing flaw that could not
have been detected by surface examination. This disturbing
finding led to the speedy replacement of the Charing Cross roof
with a simple construction of ridge and furrow roof on trusses
and to the installation of additional ties to several other station
roofs, including that at Birmingham New Street. 118
Fig. 18. Olympia, Kensington, London (1886, 190 ft (57.91 m) main roof span). (Source: Walmisley, 110 details combined from Plates
65 and 66)
Structures & Buildings 158 Issue SB5
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329
Fig. 19. Charing Cross Station (1864, 166 ft (50.60 m) span). Details of tie bar defects found after collapse. (Source: Pringle 117 )
Manchester Piccadilly Station has a fine surviving train shed
roof of the bowstring truss type, the two easternmost spans of
which (95 ft each) were completed in 1866 by R. & J. Rankin
(Fig. 20). A partial collapse of the roof during construction is of
particular interest for background information given about its
design and construction in the report of Captain Tyler, the
Inspector for the Board of Trade. At the planning stage, the
engineers for the two railway companies who shared use of the
station disagreed on the number of spans. Sacré, for the
Manchester, Sheffield & Lincolnshire Railway Company,
preferred a single span and Baker, for the London & North
Western Railway, preferred a double span. The matter was
referred to a third engineer, Thomas Harrison, whose
preference of two spans was adopted, with agreement that a
fourth engineer, William Dempsey, should be instructed to
prepare the quantities and drawings for the work. A fifth
engineer, Lewis Moorsom, 119 was involved in some aspects of
the station remodelling but denied any involvement in the
design of roof. Dempsey had over 25 years’ structural ironwork
experience: he had spent ten years with Fox, Henderson & Co.,
four years with Bramah Cochrane & Co., two with Robert
Stephenson on the Britannia Bridge and the remainder as an
independent consulting engineer. 120 Erection of the roof was
not supervised by any of these engineers, but by local
architects Mills and Murgatroyd, already involved on site in
connection with other works.
At Liverpool Lime Street, the Darlaston Iron and Roofing
Company replaced Richard Turner’s pioneering roof with two
warren-braced bowstring spans (Fig. 21). The designs of the
first of these great roofs at least was to the approval of
William Baker, Engineer for the London and North Western
Railway, but some research is needed to determine who
worked out the roof details, given Baker’s known efficiency at
delegating design work. 121 The principal ties or bottom chords
to each span comprise multiple eye-bars or links, one of
which ‘with an amended form of weld’ was tested for Baker
by David Kirkaldy in 1870 (Fig. 22). 122 Precision instrumented
testing was in its infancy and Kirkaldy as its leading exponent
provided a means for experimental verification of design
details that had not previously been available. At the time this
was not universally appreciated and in a letter accompanying
the report of the test results for the links, Kirkaldy felt moved
to write that for four years he had been ‘subjected to a great
deal of annoyance, persecution, and pecuniary loss from the
330
Structures & Buildings 158 Issue SB5
Fig. 20. Manchester Piccadilly Station (1866, two spans at 94 ft
3 in. (28.72 m), c. 1881 two shorter spans added)
Fig. 21. Liverpool Lime Street Station (c. 1875, 195 ft (59.44 m)
max. span)
ignoble and underhand proceedings of ‘‘the Steel Committee’’,
alias a ‘‘Committee of Civil Engineers’’, alias ‘‘Messrs. Barlow,
Berkley, and Galton’’. . .’ To the later span at Liverpool Lime
Street there are four eye-bars per tie, rather than the heavier
pair of tie bars apparent to the earlier roof. The drawing for
the 1875 roof specifies steel pins and ‘each link of tie bars to
be forged solid, without welds’ (Fig. 23). 110 One architectural
critic described the Lime Street Station roof as being too low
to be impressive and compared it unfavourably with St.
Pancras Station train shed, but this is an opinion that few
engineers would share. 5
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Fig. 22. Liverpool Lime Street Station (c. 1867, 215 ft (66.53 m) max. span). Tie bar link test details. (Source: Kirkaldy 122 )
A simple rationalisation of a braced roof framework is
consistent with the thinking of a modern day engineer, using
truss analysis to determine which members are in tension and
which are in compression. Sometimes this is too simplistic as
prestressed tension members were used in iron roofs to a
significant extent. Keyed and cottered connections provided a
means for tightening tension members to brace roof
frameworks although control of the prestressing force was
intuitive and not always successful. 123 In the Broad Street
Station roof built in the mid-1860s by Andrew Handyside &
Co, each principal resembled a queen-post truss but was, as
Arthur Walmisley explained, ‘designed to act as a tied arch
braced with tension rods’. Another tension-braced bowstring
roof fabricated in Britain and apparently erected in Brazil by
local labour was recorded in a remarkable early set of
construction progress photographs (Figs. 24 and 25). 124 The
photographer was commissioned by Charles Vignoles, who as
engineer for numerous concurrent railway projects never set
foot in Brazil but appointed his son Hutton as Resident
Engineer. 125
Structures & Buildings 158 Issue SB5
The roof in Brazil collapsed during construction due to causes
unknown, but the failure of a superficially similar and
incomplete roof at Huddersfield Station in 1885 was
undoubtedly due to a complete lack of wind or stability
bracing. 126 From the 1840s onwards, a large number of
detailed drawings of structural ironwork for roofs were
published. Just one year before the Huddersfield roof collapse,
a reviewer of Arthur Walmisley’s book Iron Roofs wrote:
‘design as to type may be here found ready to hand, and the
only work left to one called upon to build a roof is judicious
modification of any of the roofs, here illustrated, to suit
circumstances’. 127 Of Broad Street Station roof, probably the
prototype for the Huddersfield roof, Walmisley noted ‘the
whole roof is well secured by wind-ties, which the construction
here adopted renders especially necessary. . .’ At Huddersfield,
although the roof principals were more ‘rational’ than those at
Broad Street Station in terms of the arrangement of
compression and tension internal bracing members, an
engineer acting for one of the accident victims found the struts
to be seriously undersized and the ties oversized. 128 As a lesson
on the risks of the careless use of standard designs, the case
remains relevant today.
8. THE ARCH TIED
John Fowler introduced an alternative tied arch arrangement
for the two-bay roof for the London, Chatham and Dover
Railway at Victoria Station, erected in 1861 by Horseley & Co.
(129 ft span). 129 The tie is raised up towards the braced arch rib
by inclined suspension rods (Fig. 26). Fowler’s assistant on this
and many other major works was William Wilson, another
former Fox, Henderson & Co. man. 130 Howard & Ravenhill’s
patent tie bars (with bar and eyes rolled in one piece, without
welds) were specified for a similar roof built in 1869 at
Aberdeen (102 ft span), but since replaced. 131 In 1873 Fowler
used the same form again at Liverpool Central Station (160 ft
span), but with a circular steel tie of 3 in. diameter—not
‘mild’ steel, given the specified breaking stress of 46 tons/in. 2
(711 N/mm2 ). 99 The largest roof to this pattern, at Glasgow’s
Queen Street Station (170 ft span), completed around 1880 and
recently refurbished, has a steel tie of 314 in. diameter, with
forged ends, and 134 in. diameter steel suspension rods
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331
Fig. 23. Liverpool Lime Street Station (c. 1875, 195 ft (59.44 m) max. span). (Source: Walmisley, 110 detail from Plate 37)
Fig. 24. Bahia Station, Brazil (c. 1862). Roof during
construction. (Source: Vignoles 124 )
(Fig. 27). 110 The 38 m span trusses to the 1878 roof at Bristol
Temple Meads Station have a braced curved rib with
Polonceau-type bracing beneath. In the 1980s, non-destructive
testing of the Bristol Temple Meads roof gave little information
on the condition of the 89 mm wrought iron tie bars with
332
Structures & Buildings 158 Issue SB5
Fig. 25. Bahia Station, Brazil. Debris from the collapse of the
roof. (Source: Vignoles 124 )
scarf-welded ends. A length of tie was removed and tested to
destruction, and additional temporary ties were installed as a
safety precaution to support the weight of a scaffold slung
beneath the roof for repairs and painting. 132 In reporting the
refurbishment work, the magazine New Civil Engineer
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Fig. 28. St. Pancras Station, London (1866, 240 ft (73.15 m)
span). (Source: Spon and Byrne, 149 p. 2809)
Fig. 26. Victoria Station, London (1862, one 129 ft (39.31 m)
roof span, one 127 ft (38.71 m)). Arch rib and wrought iron
tie bar details
Fig. 27. Queen Street Station, Glasgow (1878, 170 ft (51.81 m)
span). Arch rib and steel tie bar details. (Source: Walmisley, 110
detail from Plate 45)
unfortunately described the architect Matthew Digby Wyatt as
the designer of the roof. In fact, the civil engineer Francis Fox,
a former assistant to Brunel, designed the roof to the ‘gothic’
profile required by the architect, and supervised its
construction. 133
Britain’s longest single-span iron roof is at the Midland
Railway’s St. Pancras Station (span 240 ft), opened in 1868.
Here the open webbed arch rib springs from ground level and
is tied across within the floor. In January 1866 the journal
Engineering produced a drawing by Ordish and Le Feuvre, with
William Barlow’s permission, of the still-evolving design (Fig.
Structures & Buildings 158 Issue SB5
28). 134 While Barlow as engineer for the railway company had
overall design responsibility, he publicly acknowledged that
Ordish refined the design and worked out the details for the
ironwork fabricated and erected by Butterley & Co. 135, 136 It will
be apparent by now that piecing together individual
contributions to a design is difficult, particularly with someone
like Ordish, an apparently introverted figure who worked out of
the limelight on many projects, sometimes for an architect or a
structural ironwork contractor. In 1876–77, Andrew Handyside
& Co. built two nearly identical arched roofs on similar
principles to St. Pancras, one in Glasgow and the other in
Manchester. According to his obituary in Engineering, Ordish
was involved in the design of Glasgow’s St Enoch’s Square
Station (198 ft span), 97 but he gets no mention in a paper on
the project by Charles Hogg, the Resident Engineer. 137 Hogg
describes John Fowler and James Blair as the engineers, with
William Crouch taking over after the death of Blair in mid1876. Some details of the roof were recorded for posterity prior
to its demolition in 1973 to make way for a shopping centre. 33
The design of Central Station in Manchester (span 210 ft), 99
now the Greater Manchester Exhibition Centre (Fig. 29), has
been attributed both to John Fowler 138 and to the Engineer to
the Cheshire Lines Committee, Lewis Moorsom, who almost
certainly supervised its construction. 110
9. A DOME FOR THE ARCHITECT?
The design of a train shed was the responsibility of the
Engineer for the railway company, albeit as a supervisor of
others carrying out the detailed work. Architectural input was
often confined to a hotel building fronting or alongside the
train shed. In contrast, iron domes were usually on top of
architect-designed buildings and although various parties
might help with the structural details, the architect would
generally give little publicity to design contributions by others.
Several examples prove this point. The 140 ft diameter domed
British Museum Reading Room was conceived by the principal
librarian Anthony Panizzi, and completed in 1857 by the
builders Baker and Fielder to the detailed design of the
architect Sidney Smirke. 139 No engineer’s name is associated
with the roof, although some contemporary accounts mention
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333
erection the key design requirements, architects were either
engaged to add decoration or left to criticise from the sidelines.
John Grover, a former Fox, Henderson & Co. employee, assisted
Captain Francis Fowke of the Royal Engineers, both an
architect and engineer, with the detailed design of the
buildings for the International Exhibition of 1862, staged a
year later than planned because of political uncertainty in
Europe. 141 The buildings included two domes of 163 ft
diameter. 142 Again, the problem of roof spread was not
properly appreciated prior to construction, and it proved
necessary to call in Ordish as a structural ironwork specialist to
design bracing to stabilise the distorted iron-framed domes
prior to their completion. 143
Fig. 29. Manchester Central Station, now GMEX (1878, 210 ft
(64 m) span). Wrought iron arch rib details
‘the assistance of Mr Fielder’. The Leeds Corn Exchange has a
spectacular oval domed roof (major axis span about 127 ft),
with ironwork by Butler & Co., but no engineer’s name is
associated with the design of the roof alongside that of the
architect. The 139 ft diameter dome formed with latticed
wrought iron ribs at the Royal Devonshire Hospital in Buxton
(completed in 1880) is regarded as one of the chief works of
the architect Robert Rippon Duke. 140 However, circumstantial
evidence points to the involvement of others in its design,
including a reference to
Buxton Sanatorium in just
one of the several obituary
notices for Rowland Ordish.
The structural ironwork
contractors for the Buxton
dome were R. & J. Rankin of
Liverpool, and it seems quite
possible that they were
renewing a working
relationship with Ordish that
had begun at the 1865
Dublin Exhibition, or earlier.
The 1851 Exhibition had
established a precedent for
the engineer-led design and
management of construction
for large-scale temporary
buildings. With economy and
prefabrication for rapidity of
334
Structures & Buildings 158 Issue SB5
Being ‘from the same stable’ as the earlier exhibition buildings,
the engineering aspects of the Royal Albert Hall are better
known today than is the case with most public buildings.
Francis Fowke died after establishing the design concept for the
building, to be succeeded by Colonel Henry Scott, another
architect–engineer, who took the work through to completion in
1871. 144 Scott was guided by a committee of advice that
included the leading engineers John Hawkshaw and John
Fowler. The wrought iron roof, an oval on plan (span 219 ft on
the longer axis), was fabricated by the Fairbairn Engineering
Company in Manchester, and is superficially a threedimensional version of the bowstring truss roofs formerly at
Cannon Street and Charing Cross Stations (Fig. 30). In fact, the
structural action is more complex. The feet of the ribs sit in cast
iron shoes fixed to a perimeter ring beam, with arching action
brought into play by a system of wedges fitted after erection of
the ironwork but prior to the covering of the roof (Fig. 31). In
1903 Ewing Matheson wrote that ‘the problem of the roof made
a tour round Westminster’, before finding its solution in the
hands of Ordish ‘with the co-operation of Max am Ende’. 111
Matheson failed to mention John Grover, whose name appears
as designer alongside Ordish in contemporary accounts of the
roof, as well as against amendments to some of the original
drawings still in the possession of the Royal Albert Hall.
Britain lagged behind Europe in the later engineering
development of domed roofs, having perhaps led the way with
Fig. 30. The Royal Albert Hall (1871, ellipse on plan, 219 ft 4 in. 3 187 ft 1 in. (66.85 m 3 57 m)).
Wrought iron roof framework. (Source: Spon and Byrne, 149 p. 2797)
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Fig. 31. The Royal Albert Hall. Rib foot and cast iron shoe
details
bridging trusses were used for the 1879 roof Glasgow Central
Station (210 ft span): 110 ‘Cunningham, Blyth and Westland
being always reluctant to experiment with arches of large
span’. 153 The principal trusses sat beneath the valleys in the
manner of ‘Paxton’ roofing (Fig. 32). An interesting
contemporary variation was used in the expansion of Carlisle’s
Citadel Station (155 ft span), like Glasgow Central Station
planned by the engineer B. Hall Blyth and built by the Glasgow
firm established by William Arrol in 1868. At Carlisle the
bridging trusses sit beneath the ridges, with the valleys slung
between by balanced cantilever trusses (Fig. 33). The roofed
area at Carlisle is now much reduced and at Glasgow Central
Station only a small part of the original iron roof remains after
successive enlargement and remodelling campaigns that ended
in 1890, under George Graham, and in 1906, under Donald
Matheson, his successor. 154
the design of early domed conservatories. 145 In his 1866 ICE
Presidential address, John Fowler had unfavourably compared
the theoretical education of British civil engineers to that of
their French and German counterparts. 146 Certainly the latter
were proficient in their use of structural analysis and this led to
stylistic differences between British and continental structures.
This can be illustrated by examination of late 1860s roof
designs for gasholders. The wrought iron ‘Schwedler’ dome of
144 ft diameter for a gasholder in Berlin is a clear application
of more advanced structural engineering thinking than Thomas
Kirkham’s more traditional solution based upon radial trusses
for a 228 ft diameter gasholder at the Fulham gasworks. 147, 148
Fowler and his contemporaries believed that British engineers
still led the way in practical matters. One large and innovative
continental roof by a British engineer is very much an example
of design driven by construction practicalities rather than by a
desire for ‘structural optimisation’ or minimum weight. For the
1873 Vienna Exhibition, the civil engineer and shipbuilder
John Scott Russell provided a huge inverted cone roof of
riveted wrought iron plates. 149, 150 The rim of the cone, 344 ft
in diameter, was stiffened with a wrought iron box girder and
supported on 80 ft tall cast iron columns.
11. THE END OF THE IRON AGE
From the late 1880s there was a very rapid shift in the leading
industrial nations to the use of mild steel for building purposes
instead of wrought iron. Although the adoption of mild steel
for structural purposes involved a great shift in technology on
the part of the producers, for the designers and fabricators it
was ‘business as usual’. Early long spans in structural steel
included the main hall of the Mines and Mining Building for
10. THE PARALLEL CHORD TRUSS—ECONOMY
PREVAILS
From the early 1860s, parallel chord trusses of the kind
patented by James Warren in 1848 were shipped overseas in
large quantities as prefabricated kits of parts for wrought iron
bridges. 79 This new bridge-building technology provided an
alternative to the arch for long-span roofs. A second Horsley &
Co. roof at Victoria Station, built in 1861 for the London,
Brighton and South Coast Railway but since replaced, bridged
the platforms with deep wrought iron trusses of about 125 ft
span, supporting simple trusses at right angles of around 50 ft
span. 151 At £17 per 100 sq. ft (‘£17 per square’, to use the
abbreviation of the time), Robert Jacomb-Hood’s roof was twothirds of the cost of John Fowler’s adjacent tied arch spans for
the London, Chatham & Dover Railway.
Fig. 32. Glasgow Central Station under construction (1882,
213 ft 6 in. (65 m) roof span). (Source: Walmisley, 110 Plate 7)
Robert Jacomb Hood wrote in 1858 that ‘the greatest advance
in station-works during the last few years has been the roofing
over, in one span, of the lines and platforms’. 152 He and a
number of other railway engineers were not seduced by the
attractions of the arch and adopted parallel chord trusses for
long-span roofs from the outset. The longest span wrought iron
Structures & Buildings 158 Issue SB5
Fig. 33. Carlisle Citadel Station (c1876, 154ft 6in (47 m) span)
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335
the 1892 Chicago International Exposition (230 ft span). 155 The
further development of long-span roof forms from this time
took place outside Britain, particularly with the construction of
new and larger railway stations in Germany and the United
States. As the American architectural historian Carroll Meeks
put it, ‘elephantiasis took over every aspect of railroading,
including the terminals’. 156
18.
19.
12. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The authors are grateful for help and advice provided at the
Institution of Civil Engineers by the Head Librarian Mike
Chrimes and the Archivist Carol Morgan. The notation [JGJ]
against references below indicates those found through the
John James card index in the ICE Archives. Dr Ron Fitzgerald
of Structural Perspectives Ltd and Lawrance Hurst of Hurst,
Peirce & Malcolm have provided useful information on ironframed domes. The authors have gained access to several
interesting roof spaces by taking part in visits organised by the
Institution of Structural Engineers History Study Group and by
the Newcomen Society.
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