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by Peter Lee
It is sad to reflect that one of the few Victorian man made structures to grace the Nuneaton townscape is a railway bridge - Coton Arches. This magnificent edifice with its impressive wide central arch is a tribute to the ingenuity of our nineteenth century ancestors.
Historical evidence seems to point to the fact that this is the second bridge on the site. The first one was thought to be a lofty iron bridge over a narrow cross roads gap in the embankment. It would have been taken down in the early 1860's when a similar bridge at Bedworth collapsed and Spon End arches in Coventry fell down due to poor workmanship in 1857.
One of the men who worked on the bridge was Thomas Smith who went on to build Nuneaton Grammar School and St. Mary's Abbey Church, the Chase and various other public buildings throughout the town . Another was a youthful, George Wykes the Chilvers Coton builder, bricks were made locally in Chilvers Coton and did not have to travel very far to site. The quality of the construction work was such that for many years the bridge never had to be re-pointed. The bricks were delivered 350 at a time by horse and cart. The new bridge with its lofty arches and spacious construction would have been a great improvement on its predecessor built when the Coventry-Nuneaton line opened in 1850.
Over the years improvements were made to accommodate pedestrians and road traffic. In the early days it probably did not matter so much if the people passing under it wandered into the road. Traffic was very light and horse and cart traffic did not travel very quickly. However, by the turn of the century, Nuneaton and Chilvers Coton was growing at a rapid rate and as a result the volume of road traffic increased so that it was wise to segregate foot traffic from that in the roadway. In 1897 a footpath was built on either side of the roadway.
Then in 1911 a second arch was opened out to facilitate traffic going into Bridge Street, Chilvers Coton.
Another feature of the bridge was that in the side arches various sheds were built on ground leased from the railway companies. Whitehalls who ran workmen’s buses to the Coventry engineering factories occupied one of these. Another was Woods the garage. They had for many years a petrol pump, which allowed passing vehicles to fuel right at the side of the road. Not that it held up traffic much as there was not a great deal of motor traffic up until the War. This petrol pump was one of the old fashioned types with a boom that swung out, which was later replaced by a more modern one.
Woods had a small precision engineering business too, also in Coton Road.
In the early 1970's most of this jumble of sheds together with many of the houses in Coton Road were cleared away, the site was opened up for a large island so that a dual carriageway could be built into the town centre.
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