Passerelle Saint Georges de Lyon

This guide to the Passerelle Saint Georges in Lyon follows the businessman Leon Florian Wedrychowski, who won a sixty-year concession in 1853 to build this footbridge over the Saone and charge every pedestrian who crossed it. It traces why residents paid the toll rather than walk to the nearest free crossing. Look up at the two iron towers holding the cables, shaped like weavers' shuttles, a nod to the silk workers who once crowded this riverbank before their trade moved uphill to Croix-Rousse.