St Mary's Island was originally part of the Chatham Dockyard in Kent, but has since been cut off by the construction of three large basins. In 1994 mixed residential development was planned for the island creating the need for a link between island and mainland.

Arup was responsible for the civil and structural engineering of the Chatham lifting bridge which carries two lanes of traffic to St Mary's Island, and was opened in 1996. The bridge has an all steel orthotopic trough deck which is opened by two hydraulic rams, leaving a clear waterway 12 metres wide enabling boats to pass. The piers and the side spans are in reinforced concrete and have smooth gently curved surfaces, which help to emphasise the clean flowing form of the whole bridge.

Chris Wilkinson Architects won the closed competition for the design of Hulme Bridge, a gateway to the city of Manchester. The bridge is of simple structural form but is two-directional; its single 25m high steel box section arch crosses from the northwest corner of the cutting.

The arch is wide and shallow at the crown and deeper and narrower at the spingings. A 50m long composite bridge deck, carrying the two-lane Stretford Road, is suspended from the arch by ranked spiral steel cables which radiate from each side of the arch, on alternative sides. The rigid deck absorbs all the torsional forces generated by a bridge design which exudes power not by real mass but by the virtual mass of suspension cables which appear to travellers to e interlocking and overlapping.

The steel decking was assembled in the central reservation of Princess Road, that the bridge spans, and was craned into position in three 17m x 17m sections during a weekend possession. The bridge arch was prefabricated in six sections for transportation to site and site welding to form ‘halves’. It was installed into its final position by a tandem lift during an additional possession of Princess Road