Naming
The Floating Bridge was technically called the Woolston ferry during its 141 years of operation.
Floating bridge is an affectionate description of the technology rather than the name of the crossing itself. The term was first used by the engineer James Meadows Rendel, who had previously implemented a similar design of chain ferry at Torpoint and at Dartmouth in Cornwall. The same technology was applied to create the Gosport Ferry in 1840
No variant of the ferry took the form of a pontoon bridge spanning the whole width of the crossing, to which the term Floating Bridge is more widely applied and thought of today.
Nevertheless, the term Floating Bridge has been commonly used in Southampton and it is still in use today, more than 30 years after the Woolston ferry was taken out of service. The terminology was immortalised in the 1956 painting entitled "The Floating Bridge" by L. S. Lowry.
This use of the term Floating Bridge has also been applied to the Cowes Floating Bridge, which still provides a similar service in a similar situation just a few miles away, on the River Medina in Cowes on the Isle of Wight.
Read more about this topic: Woolston Floating Bridge
Famous quotes containing the word naming:
“See, see where Christ’s blood streams in the firmament!
One drop would save my soul—half a drop! ah, my Christ!—
Ah, rend not my heart for naming of my Christ!—
Yet will I call on him!—O, spare me, Lucifer!—
Where is it now? ‘T is gone; and see where God
Stretcheth out his arm, and bends his ireful brows!—
Mountains and hills, come, come and fall on me,
And hide me from the heavy wrath of God!”
—Christopher Marlowe (1564–1593)
“Husband,
who am I to reject the naming of foods
in a time of famine?”
—Anne Sexton (1928–1974)
“The night is itself sleep
And what goes on in it, the naming of the wind,
Our notes to each other, always repeated, always the same.”
—John Ashbery (b. 1927)