A 'Ludicrously Ugly' Bridge Is Exhibit a That Britain Has Lost Its Mojo

A 'Ludicrously Ugly' Bridge Is Exhibit a That Britain Has Lost Its Mojo(wsj.com)

7 points by nextos 6 hours ago | 10 comments

They had to down tools because they found roman ruins or something and consult archeology to proceed.

Whats interesting is that this bridge build effectively partitioned the city. You had to drive to the city limits to the ring road, drive around the edge to access that area. The local council found this agreeable, and they rolled out an entire traffic policy, which also reached international attention, that effectively splits the city into sectors, forcing drivers to drive around the crust to get into their destination slice.

mikestew 3 hours ago |

"Man, architecture nerds, amirite? Let's click and see how...OMG!" Yeah, that is ridiculously ugly for what it is. Like someone went out of their way.

Joker_vD 2 hours ago | |

A regular remainder that brutalism, despite what many people think, was originally invented in the UK.

silverFork 6 hours ago |

wow "a quarter of a billion dollars" for that.

My guess is that with modular precast forms, it would be something $500k max!

Somebody pocketed some big amount of cash, I would guess.

ajb 2 hours ago | |

It's " a major element of a £237m scheme to upgrade Oxford rail station". Most likely it is more expensive than it should be, but not to that extent

silverFork 58 minutes ago | | |

$237 million to upgrade a rail station.. The number is up there but at least it is not the cost of the bridge; that explains it to me to some degree; must have been some structural issues; something must have caved in; water problem; who knows.

ben_w 6 hours ago | |

Not impossible, but they did have to deal with gas leaks and a WW2 grenade, and this is a rail bridge on an actively used line.

Still, there's an undeniable sense of "why is this more expensive to replace than it was to build in the first place?" with a lot of infrastructure in the modern world.

silverFork 5 hours ago | | |

Some firms prebuild bridges and slide them in. 20-30% more expensive apparently but a lot faster. Lets say $2M by quading it. Gas line is a nothinger, they would need to shut it down and reconnect it anyways. Grenade removal, they do it in war zones and it is not that expensive in my opinion.

dofm 2 hours ago |

Going to go out on a limb and say, without reading the article and based just on the domain name and the headline, that the story is not going to be as simple as that, and the WSJ, not exactly a stellar publication at the best of times, is merely furthering the typical American business cultural loathing of the UK, or regulations, or some other nonsense.