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Boys Hall Bridge: The Little Bridge I Didn't Know I Was Photographing

Ashford, Kent — 10 April 2000

 

 

 

 

On 10 April 2000, I was flying over Ashford photographing one of the biggest engineering projects Kent had seen for generations.

The Channel Tunnel Rail Link was under construction.

Today we know it as High Speed 1, the railway that carries Eurostar and Southeastern's high-speed trains between London and the Channel Tunnel. Back then, however, large parts of the route looked more like somebody had taken a particularly enthusiastic JCB to the Kent countryside.

There were enormous holes.

There were cranes.

There were temporary roads, piling rigs, mountains of chalk and enough yellow machinery to keep a five-year-old occupied for several weeks.

Naturally, that's what I was photographing.

But more than a quarter of a century later, I came across one of those photographs again.

And this time I noticed something else.

A little brick bridge.

 

The Bridge in the middle of all the chaos

Look carefully at my photograph.

Running across the upper part of the picture is a perfectly ordinary road. It crosses the existing Ashford to Folkestone railway on a small brick arch bridge.

That's Boys Hall Bridge, carrying Boys Hall Road towards Sevington.

And on 10 April 2000 it was living on borrowed time.

All around it, construction of the Channel Tunnel Rail Link was underway. Huge foundations were being formed on either side of the existing railway. Piles had been driven into the ground. A large crawler crane sat alongside the tracks and the landscape had been stripped back to bare chalk.

Yet there, right in the middle of it all, was the old bridge.

Still open.

Still doing the job it had done for generations.

And eventually it would disappear.

The CTRL legislation specifically provided for the diversion of Boys Hall Road and Canterbury Road and the construction of a new bridge in place of the existing one, spanning both the conventional railway and the new high-speed line.

Twenty-six years later, it's strangely not the enormous engineering project that fascinates me most.

It's that little bridge.

Because you can't photograph it now.

 

So who was Boy?

This is where an innocent photograph can become dangerous.

You start by wondering what happened to an old bridge and three cups of tea later you've somehow arrived in medieval Kent.

The name Boys Hall turns out to be considerably older than the railway.

The history centres on Sevington and an ancient moated site known simply as The Moat.

Research published by the Kent Archaeological Society traces the manor back as far as the reign of Henry III in the 13th century, when it was associated with Sir John of Sevington.

Over the centuries the estate passed through several prominent Kent families, including the Barrys, before eventually coming into the possession of the Boys family.

And that gives us our name.

In the early 17th century, Thomas Boys dismantled the old house at Sevington and reused material from it to build a new residence at nearby Willesborough.

That house became Boys Hall.

Remarkably, Boys Hall still exists. It is Grade II listed, and Historic England dates it to the early 17th century. It is now serving as a Manor House and Restaurant with accommodation.

So the name on the modern road sign isn't some invention dreamed up by a developer trying to make a new housing estate sound posh.

It has been hanging around Ashford for centuries.

 

Then the Railway arrived

For hundreds of years this was essentially a rural landscape.

Then Victorian Britain discovered railways.

The South Eastern Railway pushed its line eastwards from Ashford towards Folkestone in the early 1840s, cutting through this ancient landscape on its way towards the coast.

Eventually Boys Hall Road needed to cross it.

Hence our little brick bridge.

I haven't yet discovered exactly when the bridge in my photograph was constructed, and I'm not going to invent a date simply because it would make the story tidier. That's one of the things I still want to research.

But the railway beneath it belonged to a transport revolution that transformed Ashford.

The town grew around the railway.

The railway works became one of Ashford's major employers.

Terraces, roads and businesses followed.

And the little rural settlement that had existed around Sevington increasingly found itself on the edge of an expanding town.

Then, roughly 160 years after the Victorian railway arrived, another railway came along.

And this one required rather more room.

 

Britain decides it needs a fast one

The Channel Tunnel opened in 1994, but initially Britain's international trains had to make their way towards London using the existing rail network.

France had its high-speed lines.

Britain had... Kent.

Eventually the decision was made to construct a dedicated high-speed railway between the Channel Tunnel and London.

The Channel Tunnel Rail Link Act received Royal Assent in 1996, authorising an enormous civil-engineering project across Kent and into London.

Ashford was right in the middle of it.

And around Boys Hall Road, the engineers faced an interesting problem.

They already had a working railway.

They already had a road crossing it.

Now they wanted to put another railway through.

And preferably without stopping everybody else from going about their business.

 

 

10 April 2000

Which brings us back to my photograph.

This is why I love old aerial photographs.

At first glance it's a picture of a building site.

Look more closely and it's actually a picture of change.

The existing railway is still operating.

The old Boys Hall Bridge is still carrying the road.

Construction workers are building the infrastructure that will eventually replace what had existed there before.

There are piles being sunk, foundations under construction and new structures beginning to emerge.

The old and the new are quite literally sitting beside one another.

I doubt anybody driving across Boys Hall Bridge on 10 April 2000 gave much thought to the fact that somebody was circling overhead taking photographs.

And I certainly wasn't sitting in the aircraft thinking:

"I'd better get a photograph of that charming little brick bridge before they knock the bugger down."

I was photographing the CTRL.

The bridge just happened to be there.

And that's precisely why the photograph matters to me now.

 

Then it was gone

As construction progressed, the road layout was changed and a new bridge was built capable of crossing the enlarged railway corridor.

The little brick bridge's job was finished.

What had probably seemed an entirely unremarkable piece of Ashford infrastructure disappeared beneath one of the largest transport projects undertaken in modern Britain.

And life carried on.

That's what happens to places.

Very few people photograph the ordinary things because they're ordinary.

Nobody thinks much about the bridge they drive across every morning, the corner shop, the pub, the row of houses or the old factory at the end of the road.

Then somebody knocks it down.

Twenty years pass.

And suddenly everybody wants a photograph of it.

 

And Boys Hall isn't finished yet

There's another wonderful twist to this particular corner of Ashford.

The medieval landscape that gave Boys Hall its name has survived remarkably close to all this modern infrastructure. Archaeological work associated with the CTRL revealed just how long people had been occupying and using this part of Kent.

So within a relatively small area we have traces of ancient occupation, a medieval manor, a 17th-century house, a Victorian railway, a 20th-century road bridge and Britain's first purpose-built high-speed railway.

All layered on top of one another.

And sitting in my archive is a photograph capturing the moment when two of those layers changed places.

 

The Photographs we nearly forget

I've spent nearly thirty years photographing Kent and southern England from the ground and from the air.

At the time, many of the pictures were simply commercial photographs.

A road scheme.

A railway project.

A new housing development.

A factory.

A field that somebody was about to build on.

You photograph it, catalogue it and move on to the next job.

But time does something rather wonderful to photography.

It changes the subject.

On 10 April 2000, my subject was the construction of the Channel Tunnel Rail Link.

In 2026, I'm looking at exactly the same negative.

And my subject has become a little brick bridge.

Perhaps that's the real value of an archive.

Sometimes you don't know what you've photographed until it's gone.

 

 

Photograph: Boys Hall Bridge and Channel Tunnel Rail Link construction, Ashford, Kent, 10 April 2000. © Simon Burchett.

I have many more aerial photographs showing the construction of the Channel Tunnel Rail Link through Ashford and across Kent. I'll be digging through the archive and telling some of those stories here — including one enormous railway construction yard that almost completely vanished when its job was done.

 

Simon Burchett
Photographer, writer and occasional finder of things he photographed 26 years ago without realising they'd become history.