By Simon Hinde
From the terrace of Somerset House in about 1750 Canaletto painted two views of the Thames, one looking East towards the City, one west towards Westminster. You can see St Paul’s in one direction and Westminster Abbey in the other but in the two paintings there is only one bridge: Westminster, then newly built.
Now in the same stretch there are no fewer than seven: Westminster, Hungerford, Waterloo, the Millennium footbridge, Blackfriars, Southwark and London. Soon there will probably be another: the Garden Bridge, planned for a site between Waterloo and Blackfriars and the subject of some controversy.
Just above the Somerset House terrace on which Cana- letto painted are the offices of the Garden Bridge Trust, whose job it is to bring bridge number eight into being.
Unusually for a major public works project — which normally emerge through proposals, feasibility studies, committees, reports, more committees, more reports — the Garden Bridge has a rather glamorous back story, at the centre of which is a celebrity with a mission.
It was Joanna Lumley, actress, national treasure and friend of the Gurkhas, who, round about the turn of the Millennium conceived that what London needed was a garden bridge at its heart. She discussed it with Sir Terence Conran who introduced her to Thomas Heath- erwick, the designer now known for the new London Routemaster bus and the 2012 Olympic cauldron, who Conran believes is ‘the new Leonardo da Vinci’.
Lumley set about finding a suitable location for what was then intended as a tribute to Princess Diana. The bridge, she decided, had to be central. Built upriver, it would be a curio: in the centre of town it would be a grand gesture, “a tiara on the head of our fabulous city”.
In the end, a fountain in Kensington Gardens was chosen as the Diana memorial but a decade or so later, Boris Johnson became Mayor of London and shortly after his election, Lumley was in touch. According to a letter released following a Freedom of Information request by the Architect’s Journal, she offered him ‘a thousand congratulations’ (‘our cheers and shouts reached the rafters, soared above the Shard’) before proposing that she and Heatherwick should meet him to discuss the Garden Bridge.
Lumley is an old family friend of the Johnsons. Boris’s mother, the artist Charlotte Wahl Johnson, painted her portrait in the early 1970s. In a BBC interview, asked how she has managed to take the bridge proposal so far, Lumley replied: “I’ve known Boris since he was four, so he’s largely quite amenable.”
After this letter, the process moved rapidly. Transport for London (TfL) decided there was scope for a “new footbridge in central London connecting the South Bank with the Temple area”. Three firms of architects were invited to submit proposals and Heatherwick’s design was chosen. Lumley was named in Heather- wick’s bid as an ‘associate’. She is now a trustee of the Garden Bridge Trust, whose executive director is Bee Emmott – formerly head of special projects at Heatherwick Studios.
Critics of the Garden Bridge complain that the process has been all too cosy, a kind of stitch-up among a group of in uential friends but when I meet Emmott at the Trust’s Somerset House o ces she is at pains to insist that all the proper procedures had been followed. “This went to a standard tender and Heatherwick won and there has been an audit that shows that the process was conducted correctly”.
Lumley’s pitch was for a bridge that would ‘set hearts racing and calm troubled minds. It will enchant every- one who uses it.’ Emmott’s is far more practical. After a brief nod to a ‘magical garden in the centre of London’, it’s all facts and figures designed to demonstrate the need for a pedestrian link in the centre of London, reducing congestion around Waterloo station and revitalising the north bank of the Thames. It’s a pragmatic vision that leaves some unconvinced.
Opposition is led by Thames Central Open Spaces (TCOS), whose representative Wai-King Cheung meets me on the south bank of the Thames, near a slightly scrubby patch of grass that is earmarked for the base of the Garden Bridge. TCOS was founded by a group of local residents angered at what they feel has been a lack of consultation. “It was undemocratic. They didn’t consult the residents. They barely consulted London with a consultation process that was on the TfL website only, a few adverts in newspapers”. TCOS claim to have around 50 active members, and around 13,000 people have signed their petition.
Cheung lists a series of objections to the bridge. First, that it will wreck views across the river, particularly of St Paul’s. It will bring crowds flocking to a part of the river that is already busy. TCOS fear that the extra visitors drawn by the bridge will make the area unbearable. They also point out that the bridge will take away existing open space and involve cutting down several mature trees.
Then there are questions about the cost and the use of public money. TfL had originally promised £30 million towards the bridge but in November this was cut to £10 million, with the other £20 million being converted to a loan (a ‘sham loan’, according to TCOS). TfL is also acting as the final guarantor of the annual running costs of the bridge. If the Garden Bridge Trust can’t come up with £3.5 million a year, the money will come from the public purse. Is this a good use of taxpayers’ money in a time of austerity, asks TCOS.
As well, there are a host of quite technical questions about the process, underpinned by a feeling that this whole project has been railroaded through without any real regard for the wishes of local residents or the interests of the wider public.
The Trust acknowledges that some views will be affected but Bee Emmott says the planting of trees on the bridge has been planned to protect views of St Paul’s.
“Additionally — and this is subjective — we feel this will create new views of London and will allow you to see views that at the moment can’t be seen at all.”
She acknowledges that the Bridge will draw people to the area but insists that they have plans in place to manage the flow of visitors.
Emmott defends the use of public funds as essential to encourage private donors. “Without the public money, I don’t think we would have got as far as we have. We’ve been set up to build, maintain and operate the bridge so the intention is never to draw down on that [£3.5 million a year] guarantee.”
In the history of large building projects in major cities there have always been objectors: the artists who decried the Eiffel Tower as ‘a truly tragic street lamp’ and a ‘hole-riddled suppository’; the contemporaries of Wren who found St Paul’s impossibly vulgar; the architecture critic who found Tower Bridge ‘childish and ugly’. Maybe time and changing taste will put TCOS on the wrong side of history.
However, Cheung bristles when I suggest that she might be just another narrow-minded nimby. “That is a lazy accusation. People wouldn’t complain unless there was a bloody good reason to complain. I wouldn’t object to a garden on a bridge in a place where it was needed but this is so ill-conceived and poorly thought out. But it has to be here, according to Heatherwick, to exploit the best views of London and the fact that he says that out loud just shows how deluded he is. He clearly thinks that his bridge is going to be the centrepiece of London — well, we can’t believe the arrogance.”
Bridges and gardens are different categories of thing. A bridge is functional: its job is to get people from one place to another as e ciently as possible. You don’t, on the whole, visit a bridge. A garden, on the other hand, is an attraction: people come to visit it and then linger. We’re used to gardens and parks being private or semi-public spaces, gated, governed by regulations (‘Stay o the grass’, ‘No barbecues’). But bridges, like roads, we expect to be public thoroughfares.
The Garden Bridge, however, will be different. Unlike other Thames bridges, it is to be private land and visitors will be supervised by staff who have the power to take names and addresses, confiscate and destroy prohibited items, which include kites and musical instruments. All exercise will be banned, apart from jogging. Visitors will be prohibited from releasing balloons, scattering ashes or taking part in gatherings of any kind. People on the bridge will be scrutinised by CCTV cameras and tracked by their mobile phone signals (for crowd control purposes only, says the Trust). The Trust has the right to close the bridge on twelve days a year to hire it out for private events. Attended by whom? At the moment, the trust cannot say and Emmott smiles at the suggestion that it will be parties of MPs and puce- faced bankers, knocking back champagne and braying at the proles on the river bank. The Trust is canny enough to avoid that sort of PR disaster.
However, the Garden Bridge feels like part of a stealthy process of privatisation of swathes of London, under the guise of development and regeneration. Parts of the capital that you would assume were public turn out to be owned by property companies which allow us access on their terms.
The Granary Square development at King’s Cross, one of the largest open urban spaces in Europe, is privately owned, as is the huge new development at Nine Elms. The South Bank of the Thames is pockmarked with unexpected patches of private ownership, where you might be curtly told to get off your bike by a tabard-wearing representative of a property company. You’d never know it but the wide riverside path outside City Hall, that thousands of people stroll along every day, is actually private land, subject to a large number of restrictions.
Private ownership of the bridge is an unusual arrangement, admits Bee Emmott but, she implies, this is a technical issue that people shouldn’t really worry about: “There is a blurring between what’s private and what’s public but it’s how it’s operated that’s important.”
After our meeting the Trust mails me with some further thoughts: “We’re not just another developer buying up land in the middle of London from local authority and using it for commercial gain. The Garden Bridge is the opposite of land privatisation, we’re creating this brand new space specifically for public use 365 days a year. We’re also a charity with deep links in the community.”
To most of us, most of the time, it probably doesn’t make much difference whether a bridge, square or street is public or private. We go about our business, not knowing if we’re on private land or public.
There are times when it does matter, though, as when a photographer was ordered out of Granary Square because he didn’t have a permit; or when Occupy protestors were forbidden from entering privately-owned Paternoster Square in the City of London. It is at least anomalous that you could lead a protest march over Waterloo or Westminster bridges but not over the Garden Bridge.
The regulations on what we may not do on the Bridge, in Granary Square, Nine Elms and other ‘privately-owned, publicly-accessible spaces’ are, in the end, restrictions on our liberty, laid down and enforced not by accountable public officials but by private organisations that none of us voted for.
These spaces, and the rules that govern them seem designed for a passive, compliant populace that works, shops, commutes and amuses itself only in ways that meet with o cial approval. It’s a vision of a dull, enforced civic calm that is a million miles away from the anarchic energy that should animate a city like London.
However you dress it up, the Garden Bridge is a private structure in a public place, built with private money (and a generous public subsidy) at the behest of an actress who managed to persuade her friend the Mayor to situate it in the most prominent location in London. It will run by a private body which sets its own rules and has a kind of private police force to enforce them and its upkeep will be funded by private parties, closed to the majority of us. If we don’t like it, all we can do is stay away. Welcome to Private London.
Images courtesy of Arup and Heatherwick Studio
Sorry, but it’s even worse than you suggest.
Firstly, at £175m it is astronomically costly – compared to £40m for a footbridge and cyclebridge at Nine Elms, or £22m for the Millennium Bridge.
Secondly, the funding is primarily public: the construction costs – £60m from TfL and the Treasury for construction costs, and up to £3.5m per year running costs for the 125 year lifetime of the project, which amounts to around £150m capitalised. So around £210m will come from the public purse out of the total lifecycle costs of £325m.
In other words it’s a private bridge, built and run at great expense largely out of public money, on public land (the South Bank, North Bank, and the river itself).
Thirdly, contrary to Bee Emmott’s nonsense, TfL’s Head of Audit Clive Walker has admitted that the procurement was neither fair nor transparent – and that was before we knew about Boris’ secret meeting in San Francisco to meet Heatherwick before the phoney ‘competition’, and before we found out that the sole officer responsible for the scoring which resulted in Heatherwick’s appointment has been offered a job with Heatherwick’s engineering partners on the job, Arup (Arup have the £8.5m contract, and sub-contract Heatherwick as designer).
But the most depressing problem is the way in which some of the greatest views in the country are being hijacked by this crooked vanity bling. Contrary to Ms Emmott, it is a subjective matter as to whether views of St Paul’s will be wrecked, it is an objective fact that from the South Bank the view of St Paul’s will be obliterated, hidden behind the empty swank of the copper cladding of the undergubbings of the garden bridge.
But don’t worry, it’s increasingly likely it won’t happen – not least because the Garden Bridge Trust have raised no private funds in the past 18 months, or at least they are claiming to have raised £85m, which was the same amount as they claimed to have raised in 2014… And it’s no wonder, who would want to be associated with this unpleasant heist?
Correction: it is NOT a subjective matter as to whether views of St Paul’s will be wrecked, it is an objective fact that from the South Bank the view of St Paul’s will be obliterated