Summary

Author: (Marquand, Charles)

Title: Remarks on the different constructions of bridges, and improvements to secure their foundations on the different soils where they are intended to be built. Which hitherto seems to have been a thing not sufficiently consider’d.

Publication: London, the author 1749.

Price: £1,450

Reference: 11504

Full Description

A notably rare pamphlet by Charles Marquand, a civil engineer, in which Marquand sets out his ideas for repairing the infamous “sinking pier” of Westminster Bridge, then endangering the completion of Westminster Bridge to the designs of the Swiss-born engineer Charles Labelye. Although Marquand seems to have been a native of Guernsey, the pamphlet is dated as from “Horse-Ferry, Westminster” 5 May 1749, and he refers in passing to ‘the bridges at Brentford and Chertsey, &.” as evidence for his professional expertise (Colvin notes his employment at Brentford but not his employment at Chertsey), He also records that he had had been sent to Paris to consult leading French experts on laying the foundations of piers, and it is clear from the pamphlet as a whole that he possessed a good deal of practical knowledge about bridge building, although his ideas were subsequently ridiculed by Batty Langley. We have not ourselves previously handled a copy of this title, and we are not ourselves aware of any other copy that has appeared in the book trade during the last thirty years. BAL Cat 2053.