Pont d'Aquitaine

This guide to the Pont d'Aquitaine in Bordeaux starts with an abandoned start: pylons driven into the Garonne mud in 1911 for a hanging ferry that never came, left standing for some forty years after the First World War stopped the work. It follows Jacques Chaban Delmas, the city's mayor turned national roads minister, reviving the project in 1954, and the engineers who then had to sink new foundations into a riverbed that never stops shifting with the tide. Listen for how much of the design answers to that unruly river rather than to the people crossing it.