Bridge-building

 Another Bridge

 

 

 

This is today's sketch. It shows the preparations for a new bridge at the end of our street. This is a historic bridge site.

 

There are in fact three bridges visible.

 

From the 1870s until 1907, the railway line ran across this gap over the Te Henui River. See the painting on the right, taken from "Taranaki's First Railway" by Brian Scanlan (2007 Edition). You are looking in the opposite direction.

 

But back to my sketch! To the right of the digger bucket, in the murk under the modern bridge, you can just see the old abutments of the railway bridge.

 

Then there is the modern dual-carriageway road bridge, adapted to carry the new State Highway 3 north out of New Plymouth in the 1980s.

 

In front of the bridge are the two pylons being installed to carry the extra dual-carriageway section to bring City-bound traffic as part of the fourlaning of this part of the highway, due to be finished next year. In the top righthand corner you can just see the tips of two cranes working on the foundations for the abutments on the eastern bank, in cleared ground which was previously part of the Girls High School.

 

To the left, well out of the picture, is the old cemetery, and the bottom of Lemon Street. Our house is half a kilometre to the west.

 

Earlier in the week I sketched the "new" railway line (1907) where it crosses the river at the beach.

 

And another day I stopped on the way home from the beach and sketched this old house on the corner of Brown Street and Gill Street.

 

Brown Street is named for Charles Brown, who lived nearby for a few months in 1841, before dying and being buried behind the Cathedral on the slopes of Marsland Hill.

 

He was a friend and "nursemaid" of John Keats, and later moved to Plymouth, where he became a friend of Tom Woolcombe, Secretary of the Plymouth Institution and of the Plymouth Company, which organised the settlement here. Charles Brown's son, also Charles, was first Superintendent of the Provincial Council.

 

Gill Street is named for Tom Gill, the former mayor of Plymouth, who was a member of the Plymouth Company Board with Woolcombe.

 

On Tuesday morning last week I climbed Marsland Hill again after breakfast and did this view to the west.

 

 

We have resumed our meetings of the Sketching Group for U3A.

 

Last week I did this view from the balcony of the Espresso Café overlooking the Huatoki Plaza and the Huatoki Stream. In the background you can see the parking building of Centre City Shopping Centre.

 

The building to the right is the Women's Rest Room, which is so historic it can't be moved away to open up the area.