From Concept to Completion: Delivering the Britannia Mills Active Travel Bridge It’s officially open, and the new Britannia Mills Active Travel Bridge is already making a real difference in Long Eaton! Crossing the Erewash Canal to connect Canal Street directly to the town centre, the new bridge halves the old trek between canal crossings overnight. Beyond making local trips far easier, it plays a key role in the wider Erewash Town Deal regeneration effort, opening up simple active travel routes for residents in the 100+ new affordable homes at the former lace mill. Of course, building complex infrastructure over a live canal isn’t something you just deliver overnight. It takes months of extensive planning, coordination, and an end-to-end approach to get it right. Phase 1: Design How do you make sure a bridge design translates seamlessly from the drawing board to complex site conditions? By bringing engineering and constructability together right from day one. Through our in-house design services, our structural engineers work alongside our fabrication and site teams during the earliest stages. This internal collaborative interface ensures we map out access limitations, lifting constraints, and structural interfaces before any nuts and bolts are put in place. Additionally, designing with manufacturing and transport in mind eliminates costly mid-project revisions and keeps the brief strictly on track. Phase 2: Manufacturing Fabricating heavy steelwork offsite gives us full control over quality and timelines. By carrying out production inside a controlled workshop environment, we ensure high-precision execution without weather delays or site variables getting in the way. For Britannia Mills, offsite manufacturing offered huge practical benefits Superior quality control: Every weld and coating was inspected in our facility to guarantee full structural compliance before release. Minimised site impact: Assembling the structure offsite protected the delicate canal ecology and significantly reduced noise for nearby residents. Smarter logistics: Components were built, trial-fitted, and prepared specifically for direct transport to site. Our civil engineering and construction capabilities mean offsite fabrication feeds directly into streamlined site programmes. Phase 3: Installation Transporting a fully fabricated steel bridge through local streets and lowering it over a live canal requires meticulous planning. Our delivery and installation team worked in close coordination with project partner Stepnell, local authorities, and site management to execute the lift. Crane positions, ground bearing pressures, and waterway clearances were carefully mapped out well in advance. As a result of strategic planning between our site installation team and design team, the physical installation went smoothly, ensuring we kept public disruption to an absolute minimum. Concept to Completion When design, manufacturing, and installation are handled under a single umbrella, projects simply run better. Our Concept to Completion model removes the friction, markups, and risk-passing typical of heavily outsourced supply chains. You get total continuity, direct communication, and a single point of accountability throughout the whole lifecycle of the build right from the point of order. Delivering Infrastructure, Our Way The Britannia Mills bridge shows what’s possible when a project is delivered through a joined-up approach. Delivered alongside Stepnell, Erewash Borough Council, the Canal & River Trust, the Environment Agency, Futures Housing, DeSimone Consulting Engineers, and Gagarin Studio, it stands as a prime example of successful, collaborative infrastructure. Want to see how an award-winning partner can de-risk your next project? Learn more about our Concept to Completion model or get in touch with our team today to discuss your brief. Next Article