26 recently discovered that sometimes there are just not enough bridges in the world to go round. That was certainly case when 26 put out the call for writers to participate in Stuart Delves’ 26 Bridges project as part of this year’s Bloomsbury Festival. The idea was to assign randomly to a writer one of the 26 bridges that cross the Thames in London. When many more than 26 writers responded in a few hours it seemed 26 had struck a chord. Next day and by the time 26 writers in New Zealand received the invitation to take part, the project was already oversubscribed. And the Kiwis weren’t the only ones to miss out.
Fortunately, John Simmons had an idea that meant we could extend the project to meet the enormous interest shown. And that’s how the 26 Twinned Bridges project came into being.
Bearing in mind that not all twins are identical, the project set out to explore what writing might come about when a writer from the northern hemisphere chooses a bridge – and was then paired with a writer from the southern hemisphere. Would the words create bridges across the world through this pairing?
Invitations to take part in the 26 Twinned Bridges project went out and that led to thirteen UK writers and thirteen from Aotearoa New Zealand being randomly paired. Each wrote a 100-word centena about a bridge that called to them. Together, each pair then crafted a further 260 words. The result: bridges not only described, but words did indeed build bridges across the world. Not to mention an A to Z of haiku about bridges, and original art.
The first 26 Twinned Bridges project work launched on December 1st and every day after that until 13th December. Then at 7pm on 15 December (UK time) there was a Zoom reading and celebration of the work.
We think it all deserves a much longer life than it’s had so far. See if you agree. If you haven’t seen the work yet it’s all there for your delectation. To give you an idea of the fantastic range of work that the project produced, you could start by reading the Substack Notes that were posted about each pair of bridges first.
– Paul White