Reading Festival bridge
bridge in United Kingdom built for the final weekend in August most years and removed shortly afterwards.
The Reading Festival bridge is a temporary footbridge over the River Thames near Reading, Berkshire. First built in 2008, the bridge is installed annually for the Reading Festival to allow access to the main festival site from camping and parking on the north side of the river. Use of the bridge is restricted to festival attendees.
It has permanent footings and was first erected for Reading Festival goers of 2008 for £1 million. The intention was that the deck and approaches would be dismantled and stored for most of the year, being re-erected for future festivals. It replaced a ferry service, which caused complaints over excessive queues.
The bridge crosses the river from the western end of the main site, in the Borough of Reading which is 200 m (660 ft) east of Scours Lane. The northern end of the bridge lies in the Oxfordshire civil parish of Mapledurham, on land leased from the Mapledurham Estate. Like the main festival site, the northern camp site and car park is pasture for most of the year.
For 2009, a wider bridge with improved aesthetics was built with little disruption to river traffic.
“Reading Festival bridge” enters the record as bridge in United Kingdom built for the final weekend in August most years and removed shortly afterwards. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Reading, Festival and bridge can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“Reading Festival bridge” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Reading, Festival and bridge provides the most credible route into that argument.
The strongest evidence will usually combine a dated visual record with documents produced by the authority responsible for the place. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 3, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7300506. Authority coordinates are 51.467, -1.012. 1 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2008 and 2009.
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This entry incorporates text from “Reading Festival bridge” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.