Lockmeadow Footbridge, Maidstone, UK

The Lockmeadow Bridge crosses a bend of the River Medway in the centre of Maidstone, Kent. The bridge is adjacent to the Archbishop's Palace in a historically and archaeologically important area of the town. The curved deck structure is an assembly of interlocking longitudinal aluminium extrusions stressed together transversely in a laminated arrangement. This paper concentrates on the evolution and realisation of the deck system. The project shows the effectiveness of aluminium as a structural material for bridges, and the logic of using large section extrusions as the principal structural component.