On Tue, 15 Sep 2020 09:54:05 -0000 (UTC), Recliner
wrote:

wrote:
On Mon, 14 Sep 2020 20:40:46 +0100
Graham Harrison wrote:
On Mon, 14 Sep 2020 16:02:11 -0000 (UTC), Recliner
wrote:
It must be about time they dismantled the bridge for restoration and
preservation as an exhibit elsewhere (e.g. in a park) and built something
more suitable for 21st century traffic in its place. Attempting to repair
and maintain a structure that is barely fit for purpose is a waste of time
and money.


Yes, that would probably be cheaper and quicker than restoring it to full
service. I wonder if they'd be allowed to build a modern, much stronger,
visually-identical replacement?

If you preserve the original why do you need a visually identical
replacement? Let's stop building faux-old buildings and structures and
build something modern.

Thats what town "planners" thought here in the 50s and 60s and we ended up
with concrete ********s like coventry and birmingham. Meanwhile the germans and
french rebuilt like for like and now plenty of the formally bombed out towns
are tourists attractions.



I agree. The Continental approach of recreating their historic centres has
worked far better than our ugly brutalist concrete and cheap, colourful
cladding on office block slabs.

There's only one faux old bridge on the Thames, that was deliberately built
to look much older than it was: Tower Bridge. And that's the one everyone
admires and wants in their pictures.

The brutalist architecture is generally agreed to be unacceptable. But
we've moved on. Is all modernistic architecture good? No. But that's
not to say there isn't some which has much to recommend it. The real
issue is the constant demand to build on the cheap.