Benjamin Baker: Bridging the World

In the mid Nineteenth Century the small country town of Frome in Somerset was full of the noise, bustle and fumes of Victorian metal works. Into these surroundings was born the visionary, global engineer Benjamin Baker.

Baker was responsible for some of the most audacious structures of the time. He designed the Forth Rail Bridge (for which he was knighted by Queen Victoria); the Aswan Dam; the metal cylinder that brought Cleopatra’s Needle back from Alexandria to London, the cut-and-cover tunneling system for the London Underground and the Hudson Tunnel Shield and second phase between New York and New Jersey

This June and July, thanks to Heritage Lottery funding, and support from the Happold Trust, the Institution of Structural Engineers and the Institution of Civil Engineers, Benjamin Baker will be celebrated back in his home town with the first ever exhibition exploring his work. The exhbition includes images of Baker’s most famous achievement, the mile long Forth Rail Bridge under construction. At the time the longest bridge in the world, these little known photographs show an industrial masterpiece - the first ever steel bridge - in the making from 1883 to it’s completion in 1890.

These were taken by his assistant Evelyn George Carey, and printed from the original 12 by 15 inch glass negatives held in the National Archives of Scotland. His pictures will be shown in the galleries of Frome’s Rook Lane Chapel alongside rarely seen vintage prints, on loan from Getty Images, of two of Baker’s other remarkable projects, the transportation of Cleopatra’s Needle and the construction of the Aswan Dam