The Place of the Bridge in The White Review

There are countless reasons why I love TWR, and I am grateful that they wanted to run “The Place of the Bridge,” an essay on brutalism, slavery, feminism, one woman’s perilous fall from one of Britain’s most famous bridges, the development of lead shot (more perilous falls) and three virgin girls buried in the floor of a medieval church. It's about what goes unseen and what we choose to ignore in the civic landscape: Patches of gum in the pavement, politics and the way capital courses all around us and shapes how we experience the city.

You can read more here. It starts here:

Look up. A woman tumbles from the sky, her dress billowing around her like a parachute as she spins. The air caught in her skirt slows her fall, and she wonders what she is doing here as she panics, as she hits the mud on the River Avon, glistening silver in the light at low tide. She lives. 

She is Sarah Ann Henley, of 30 Twinnell Road, Bristol. The year is 1885, and she has quarrelled with her lover. She is one of only four over the next hundred years to fall from Clifton Suspension Bridge and survive. Two of that number are children, who plummet over the side, together, a decade later. Their picture is in a locket Sarah owns when she dies, in 1948.

Clifton Suspension Bridge, Bristol