The Iron Bridge Restoration Project documentary created by Fusion Films is now available for our visitors to view. As well as making a great record of the project Fusion Films and local scriptwriter and actor Aidan Magrath have significantly contributed towards the overall match funding of the project by providing their services at greatly reduced cost, or free of charge. We would like to extent our thanks to Fusion and Aidan for their help and support. In due course there will also be a short drama about the characters involved in the building of the bridge in 1813 and we are looking forward to being able to add this for your enjoyment too.

Both drama and documentary will become part of the Iron Bridge Project displays at the Stockport Story Museum in Staircase House and will be included in an education pack to be distributed to local schools.

The documentary is available in two parts (due to their limit of 10 minutes per video) on youtube. These are embedded below:

The documentary is also available for download / viewing in avi or wmv format. The first two files are displayed at 320x240 resolution to keep sizes down to a minimum but as the documentary is 12 minutes long they are still quite large at approximately 60Mb. The third file is a wmv at 720 x 480 resolution but this is nearly 70Mb. We would prefer you to use the smaller versions to keep our bandwidth down but the larger version is worth the extra time it will take to download! We would expect the wmv format to work on most PCs.

If you are still on dial-up modem all these file sizes will be prohibitive and we recommend you don't try it.

The options for viewing are to left-click one of the links below and the file will open in the appropriate software if you have it on your computer. Depending on your broadband speed the software will probably begin to buffer before playing. You may have to click the play button to start or it may start playing automatically after it has buffered enough data. You do not have to wait until the whole file has downloaded but it may stop and start if your download speed cannot keep ahead.

Alternatively, if you right-click one of the links you will be give the option to "save target as..." and then you can download fully to your hard drive before viewing.

Documentary in 320x240 resolution avi format (56.5Mb)

Documentary in 320x240 resolution wmv format (59.3Mb)

Documentary in 720x480 resolution wmv format (69.7Mb)

The wmv file format is for Windows Media Player, which comes as standard with the Windows operating system. If you haven't got the latest version you can download it for free from the Microsoft web site. If you have difficulties viewing the documentary then let us know at and we will try to help but we cannot accept responsibility for any problems you may experience as a result of downloading these files or installing new software on your computer.

Visit our Project Diary for the latest news on the bridge