Newcastle's Alternative High Level Bridge

The Martin brothers were a well-known gaggle of siblings who hailed from the Haydon Bridge area of Northumberland in the late eighteenth century. The most famous of the litter was John, who became a very famous artist. Though brilliant, John was a little eccentric; but that was nothing compared to brother Jonathan, who is best remembered for torching York Minster in 1829.

The sanest of the bunch was Richard, who spent many years in the military; and then there was a sister, Anne, of whom we know virtually nothing – as well as many more brothers and sisters who died in infancy.

However, the oldest of the lot, William, was as equally unbalanced as arsonist Jonathan. Born in Bardon Mill in 1772, he spent a decade in the Northumberland Militia, before becoming an inventor.

Initially, he seemed to have rather a lot of good ideas, winning awards for some of his schemes and patents; but his particular take on the non-existence of gravity and his theories on perpetual motion machines proved (obviously) to be misplaced. As the 1820s and ’30s progressed he became ever more famous for his peculiar pronouncements (his ‘Anti-Newtonian’ campaign being particularly loopy). He presented himself as something of an ‘alternative’ philosopher, proposing all sorts of weird and wonderful items, ideas and concepts, progressively distancing himself from reality in the process.

However, one of his more sensible ideas was for a high-level bridge over the Tyne at Newcastle, put forward many years before Robert Stephenson’s version was actually built – and he even published a pamphlet illustrating the design, and claimed later that Stephenson had stolen his idea. These sparse facts, and the image of the said river crossing as shown above is all that seems to have survived of this remarkable passage of history.

William Martin was once described by a contemporary as “perfectly cracked, but harmless.” He was a genuine, yet brilliant, eccentric, who lived on just the wrong side of madness. He died at his brother John’s house in Chelsea in 1851 – a little over a year after the real High Level Bridge was actually completed. And I must say that the final design does look rather similar to William Martin’s….

[this article is taken from my book Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Fragments of the Past, vol.3. See left-hand column for link to examine the tome on Amazon]