Garforth Station Footbridge – Now at BWLR
Overview
Railway station footbridge at Garforth station, in cast and wrought iron, c.1900. The footbridge is in the standard design of the North Eastern Railway. It consists of an elliptical arch in four sections with roundels in the centre of each section. Decorative railings to the steps have crossed bars between iron balusters. The steps return to the east on each side of the bridge, and rise to the road above on the north side. An inner line of metal railings has been added to the steps, with horizontal bars between posts.
This was listed Grade II in 2010 because the architecture of the footbridge is an attractive example of the standard North Eastern Railway design. The footbridge is complete and intact, without alterations.
It arrived at BWLR in July 2023. We dismantled and it is now awaiting restoration and permission to erect on site.
The Railway Heritage Trust has allocated a grant of £25,000 for new footings for the footbridge when it is relocated to the Bredgar & Wormshill Light Railway. They have also indicated a willingness to assist with all timberwork costs in due course.
We are raising money to help with the costs of the main restoration including final dismantling, shotblasting and painting all components as well as installing new H&S measures to the hand rails to meet new legislation.
To donate to assist with this project please click here. Reference should be G-Bridge
4th February 2025 – update. We still do not have planning permission to erect the footbridge or even start the work. Just for context – I am pretty amateur when it comes to matters of planning so we employed a range of consultants to assist us negotiate the legal world of planning. We started work on this in January 2023. It was clear we had to deal with lots of hurdles, some more sensible than others! To make the bridge and the railway sustainable in the long run we included a tearoom extension to the workshop which would be attached to the bridge to provide a viewing area. Information can be found here .
Under the planning rules everyone has to show an “ecological gain” of 10% or more. With small projects like ours that gain is minor to say the least. The cost of proving the gain exists currently stands at over £5,000 and we haven’t done anything to produce the gain yet. Most of the cost is non-productive consultants fees and other work by us and the council. This doesn’t take into account that these “rules” are also putting at risk the saving of a 130 year engineering example that everyone considers is import enough to gain a grade II listing.
I fully understand the need to have these ecological gain rules for large projects like housing estates and the like but when it is a small tearoom and a historically important bridge – this is clearly insane. Wouldn’t it be way more sensible to have an option for people like us to “donate” one or two thousand pounds to the woodland trust, wildlife trust, RSPB or similar charities, where the money would be put to immediate ecological “good use”. The added benefit would be to reduce the overall cost, put money into real ecological work and cut the planning process by some 18 months. This would all make the hard pressed planning departments more effective and the process a whole lot less frustrating to people like us.
Excuse the rant but it really does seem that these rules are total insanity.
Bill Best