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Like Clement and Le Frenais or Waterhouse and Hall, Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant have written a big-hearted movie about working-class lads from the sticks who want to get off with girls and get on with their lives, but feel a gravitational, detumescent pull of loyalty, to each other and to their boring, boring hometown. And they've got a sinking feeling that this sinking feeling is the natural order of things, however big their dreams. Coming down in the world at last, like a punchline to a lugubrious gag, is the way it has to be.

It's a film which is at once dated and backdated: the British kitchen-sink genre this superficially resembles conjures up the monochrome image of the late 1950s and early 60s. But Gervais and Merchant have chosen the 70s as their period – just a moment or two later in historical terms, but autobiographically relevant and thanks to its evergreen eligibility for knowing irony and familiarity, the decade seems also comfortably contemporary. And a world of class, and jumping class barriers, offers an obvious narrative structure that a 2010 setting doesn't.

There's something else, too. This also looks weirdly like a US coming-of-age movie about three American teens skilfully transplanted to a Brit setting. One of the characters has a trendy looking hat which makes him look as if he lives in Brooklyn. I simply don't believe a supposedly uncool British bloke from Reading would wear this without having it wrenched from his head by his mates and flushed down the toilet, but it's a hat I can believe an uncool Reading bloke would think that Americans would wear but would never dare try himself. The movie starts with a quaintly extravagant "fight" in a pub which looks more like a Hollywood bar brawl.

The scene is an district of Reading called Cemetery Junction, and short of it being called Despair Central or Cancer Terminus, it couldn't be more redolent of dead-endness. As the three best mates, Gervais and Merchant have found three striking-looking relative unknowns. Jack Doolan is Snork, the lardy nerd in the implausible hat who works as an announcer for British Rail. Tom Hughes (who played Chaz Jankel in the Ian Dury biopic Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll) is Bruce, an angry bloke from a broken home who works in a factory and likes a punch-up. But the shy, aspirational one – traditionally a transformed autobiographical version of the author in this kind of story – is Christian Cooke, as Freddie, the ambitious lad who has got a white-collar job in an insurance company. He looks like Gael Garcia Bernal's more attractive younger brother.

Like Rodney Bewes's Bob in The Likely Lads, he's the one who wants to break into the middle classes and, like the hero of Kingsley Amis's Lucky Jim, he finds that the girl of his dreams, Julie (Felicity Jones), is engaged to a stuffed-shirt nincompoop who outranks him socially. This is smoothie Mike (Matthew Goode) who wants to suck up to his father-in-law and boss of the insurance firm, Mr Kendrick, played by Ralph Fiennes. With this weaselly role, Fiennes is letting his inner Leonard Rossiter that little bit more out of the closet. Julie's artistic ambitions in photography – like Dawn's dreams of being an illustrator in The Office – are crassly unappreciated by her fiance.

Ricky Gervais himself has a small role as Freddie's dad. When he's on, the film is properly Funny. When he's not, it's Funny/Heartwarming or just Heartwarming. This isn't to say that the three young leads don't get good lines: Bruce has some Gervaisesque material about what constitutes a proper "anecdote", but it's as if this essentially lumpen bloke has been briefly, supernaturally possessed by the ghost of a sophisticated comedy writer. The Heartwarming story slips along perfectly successfully, and I liked the hopeful "escape" ending — a welcome corrective, incidentally, to the miserable and culpable defeatism that finishes off Billy Liar.

But there is also something puzzling and regressive about Cemetery Junction. Gervais and Merchant made a great television classic in The Office which, with miraculous subtlety and realism, tackled the realities of work as it is really experienced by real people right now. The "work" in this film is rather sketchily presented: vaguely lathing or sanding (or something) in a factory, or doing BR station announcements or flogging life insurance. This is work as it is imagined in When the Whistle Blows, the cheesy fictional sitcom in Gervais's TV series Extras – but enlarged to glossy, emotionally supercharged feature length.

The 70s setting is careful and affectionate (great to see the Sony Trinitron KV1300UB telly, an eccentric 70s design madeleine that nerd-connoisseurs will prefer to the Spacehopper) but this is a gentle, sentimentalised 70s, without the menace or real depression evoked by Life on Mars or the Red Riding films. It even has a golden-hearted copper who gets tough with people in p

The Bronx, New York City, New York, United States of America

The Washington Bridge, the next major extant bridge constructed in New York City after the Brooklyn Bridge, is a monument in the history of nineteenth-century American engineering. A steel and cast- and wrought-iron arch bridge with arched masonry approaches, the Washington Bridge was constructed over the Harlem River in 1886-1889 to connect the Washington Heights section of Manhattan with the Bronx. It has long been considered one of the nation's finest nineteenth-century steel arch bridges, perhaps second only to the famous Eads Bridge in St. Louis of 1867-74 .

History of the Project

After the Civil War, as the development of upper Manhattan proceeded, plans were begun for a crossing over the Harlem River to the Bronx, In 1868 the Board of Commissioners of Central Park (then responsible for the layout of new streets in upper Manhattan) considered the question of a new bridge in connection with the development of Washington Heights when Andrew Haswell Green, executive officer of the Board, suggested in a report that a bridge be built north of the High Bridge Aqueduct (Completed in 1848 by engineer John B. Jervis, High Bridge is a designated New York City Landmark.)

In 1869 the New York State Legislature authorized a survey of bridge locations along the Harlem River, and an act of May 19, 1870, mandated the newly created Department of Public Parks to locate and build a bridge. Following a delay of several years, the New York State Supreme Court appointed commissioners in February 1876,to supervise the assemblage of land for the new bridge.

A site was chosen 1500 feet north of High Bridge and land was acquired on both sides of the river.

After another delay of several years, four alternate bridge designs including suspension, iron cantilever, and masonry arch types were proposed in February 1881, by William Jarvis McAlpine, chief engineer of the Department of Public Parks. In 1883 the department requested further design submissions and several were received, for cantilever and metal arch bridges.

But since the only action in fifteen years was land acquisition, political pressure was applied (particularly by Andrew H. Green) for the transfer of bridge construction authority to a different body. On June 11, 1885, the Legislature created the Harlem River Bridge Commission (Chapter 487, Laws of 1885), and three new commissioners were appointed on July 21, 1885. William J. McAlpine was named chief engineer to the commissioners on September 29, 1885.

McAlpine (1812-1890) was one of the country's leading engineers, involved during his long career with a great variety of difficult engineering projects in the United States, Canada, and around the world. Raised in upstate New York, he was a student of engineer John B, Jervis. Projects on which he worked included numerous railroads and canals in New York State and elsewhere, the waterworks of Brooklyn, Albany, and Chicago, the U.S. Navy Yard dry dock in Brooklyn, and the Third Avenue Bridge and Riverside Park and Drive in New York City. In 1852 he was elected State Engineer of New York, and served as State Railroad Commissioner from 1855 to 1857.

In 1865 he was chairman of the commission of engineers appointed to examine plans for the St. Louis Bridge. He served as third president of the American Society of Civil Engineers from 1868 to 1869.

The Iron and Steel Arch Bridge

Interest in the use of iron and steel for American bridges had increased greatly in the last third of the nineteenth century. The arch bridge was the second oldest form, after the suspension bridge, in which iron was used exclusively for structural members. The first iron arch bridge was constructed by-Darby and Wilkinson in 1775-1781 over the River Severn at Coalbrookdale, England.

The first American iron arch bridge, completed in 1839 by Richard Delafield, carried the National Road over Dunlap's Creek at Brownsville, Pennsylvania. The second American iron arch bridge was the Pennsylvania Avenue Bridge-Aqueduct over Rock Creek in Washington, D.C., built by Gen. Montgomery C. Miegs in 1858.

But the use of the iron arch for bridges in the United States was rare until after the Civil War, when foundries were finally able to cast elements on a large enough scale. Carl Condit asserts that, "When the arch of iron and steel finally began to compete successfully with other forms, it did so because the builders frequently chose it on aesthetic rather than functional grounds."

With the triple-span Eads Bridge crossing the Mississippi River at St. Louis, designed by James B. Eads and built in 1867-1874, the use of steel was introduced into American bridge construction. The Eads Bridge is generally considered the greatest of the nineteenth-century American metal arch bridges.

The Design Competition

Deciding that the new Harlem River Bridge should stand as a monument that could be compared with the recently completed Brookl