Bridges On The Tyne

LEMINGTON BRIDGE

This bridge was built in 2001 and is not strictly speaking on the River Tyne but on a by-passed loop of the river known as the Lemington Gut. Formerly the main channel of the Tyne which took a sharp bend around Blaydon Haughs it was cut across by the Tyne Improvement Commission in about 1880 to straighten out the river and shorten it by three quarters of a mile giving deeper water at Blaydon and leaving the Gut as a backwater. There had once been a footbridge on the west side of the Gut from 1916 until the 1950's (see picture below), and a small bridge linking the main road across the Gut, again, no longer part of the Tyne when they existed so not included as former bridges. The new road bridge gives access to the newly created and still developing Newburn Riverside Industrial site and business park.

The bridge is quite an elegant, two-arched structure and at low tide there are large expanses of mudbanks exposed. A footbridge once existed across the old course of the Tyne running east to west, south of Lemington railway station (see photograph below).

 Lemington Bridge Facts


Constructed - 2001
Type - arch, concrete two arches.
Position: half a mile west of Blaydon Bridge.
Grid Ref: NZ 187 644.
 River near Lemington Bridge



© Bridges On The Tyne 2006