The Chinese Bridge carries a footpath over the River Great Ouse in the middle of Godmanchester. It is an ornamental structure in a public park, surrounded by water on three sides and a conservation area on the fourth.
In October 2026 a contractor needed to replace rotten and damaged timber on the bridge and repaint it. Both jobs mean working on the underside and the outer faces of the structure, for a sustained period, with materials and tools to hand — and the bridge itself can’t carry the access while it’s the thing being repaired.
This was FPS’s second visit to this structure.
The access problem
Nothing about this site suited conventional access.
The banks are soft, planted and public — a scaffold base would have meant closing a well-used riverside path and digging into managed ground. The river is shallow and slow but continuously navigable, with moored craft a few metres upstream. And the bridge itself is the thing being worked on, so it could not carry the access.
That leaves the water.
What we supplied
A modular floating work platform, assembled on the river directly beneath the structure:
- Modular pontoon deck sized to the working area
- Full perimeter edge protection — mesh panels on all open sides, fitted as the deck went down rather than afterwards
- A mounted life ring, with throw line, as part of the planned water rescue arrangement
- A flashing navigation marker, so river users could see the platform in poor light
- Mooring to the bank at fixed points, holding the platform steady against the flow
- Fixed access from the quayside wall, so people got on and off at one planned point
Load capacity was assessed for the project rather than taken from a standard figure.
Installing it
The platform went in on the morning of 12 October 2026 with a three-man FPS crew. Deck sections were floated and connected on the water, the edge protection was fitted as the deck grew, and the platform was moored and marked before anyone worked from it.
The whole system came out again on 26 October, leaving the bank and the structure as we found them.
Why it mattered
No excavation. No scaffold base in a public park. No path closure. The riverside stayed open and the bridge stayed accessible to the people who use it every day, while the contractor worked from a stable, protected platform directly beneath the structure.
That is usually the argument for working from the water on a heritage site — not that it is cheaper, but that it leaves nothing behind.
Working over water at a sensitive site?
Call FPS Pontoon Hire on 01253 921352, or Request a Quote. Tell us the structure, the water and the dates.
