I filmed the Swing Bridge in fog on the Tyne on an iPhone, and if I’m honest, the phone struggled. The left-hand side of the shot has noticeably less definition than the right, the fog and low light pushing the camera past what it can really handle cleanly. I wish I’d had one of my Panasonic GH6s with me that morning, paired with the Voigtländer 10.5mm f/0.95, wide enough to hold both bridges in one frame and fast enough to cope with the fog-filled light. I didn’t, so this is what exists instead: a slightly grainy shot of a beautiful thing.

I still chose to keep it and put it out. Most of the time with these clips, I’d rather have something rough than nothing at all. A better camera would have held that left side more cleanly, but it wasn’t with me that morning, and the fog wasn’t going to wait while I went to get one.

The Swing Bridge, Newcastle

The Swing Bridge has a good claim to being the most interesting one on the Tyne. Designed by Sir W.G. Armstrong and completed in 1876, it replaced an earlier bridge on the same site that blocked larger ships from reaching Armstrong’s works further upriver at Elswick. The central span is 281 feet long, weighs around 1,450 tons, and rotates a full 360 degrees on hydraulic power, originally steam-driven and electrified in 1959. In its busiest year, 1924, it swung open around 6,000 times.

One of the more remarkable ships to pass through it was the Hatsuse, a battleship built for the Imperial Japanese Navy at a shipyard further up the Tyne, which swung open specially for her as she headed downriver in 1899. There’s a well-known photograph of that moment, the Swing Bridge open, the battleship easing through, which appears in Bruce Bernard’s Century (Phaidon, 1999), one of my favourite photography books.

The bridge last swung for river traffic in 2019, and in 2026 it will mark its 150th anniversary, with new interpretation boards planned for both banks and an exhibition at the Discovery Museum.

None of that history was on my mind when I filmed this. I was just standing on the quayside in the cold, watching the fog soften the High Level Bridge into something almost ghostlike behind it, and trying to hold a shaky phone steady enough to get something worth keeping.

These clips are part of an ongoing series I shoot while walking through Newcastle and Gateshead. You can see more on my Newcastle & Gateshead Landscapes Instagram, or in my wider Landscape & Environment work.