William Tierney Clark

Who was William Tierney Clark?

William Tierney Clark FRS was an English civil engineer particularly associated with the design and construction of bridges. He was among the earliest designers of suspension bridges.

Born in Bristol, he was initially apprenticed to a local millwright and – guided by noted engineers Thomas Telford and John Rennie – he progressed to practice as a consulting civil engineer, moving to London where, from 1811, he was also engineer to the West Middlesex Waterworks Company.

He designed the first suspension bridge to span the River Thames in London: Hammersmith Bridge, opened in 1827. He also designed the Marlow Bridge, a suspension bridge across the Thames in Marlow, Buckinghamshire and Norfolk Bridge, a suspension bridge over the River Adur in Shoreham-by-Sea, West Sussex.

Internationally, he is revered for his design of the Széchenyi Chain Bridge across the Danube in Budapest, Hungary, for which Marlow Bridge was a nearly identical, but smaller prototype. The first bridge linking Buda and Pest, it was designed by Tierney Clark in 1839, with construction supervised locally by Scotsman Adam Clark. It opened in 1849.