Bridge Over Thames Scrapped
John Hill
2. May 2017
Image: Garden Bridge Trust
In a letter to the Garden Bridge Trust, Mayor of London Sadiq Khan indicated he would pull the necessary financial guarantees for the controversial pedestrian bridge with trees designed by Thomas Heatherwick.
According to The Guardian, “Khan said he had taken the decision because of a continuing shortfall in fundraising for the scheme and the lack of the necessary land use agreements despite three years of talks.”
Previous to Khan being elected mayor, the city pledged £60 million for the bridge, with a gap of at least £70 million per the Guardian article. Combined with the fact the planning permission will expire in December, the Garden Bridge is bound to remain an unbuilt proposal. To happen, the Trust would have to raise the funds to cover what the city was putting into the project, but no new pledges since August 2016 that seems unlikely.
In response to Khan’s letter, Garden Bridge Trust chairman Lord Mervyn Davies said:
The pulling of public funding for the Garden Bridge is the second bit of bad news for Heatherwick this year in regards to landscape projects: A court decision in March effectively pulled the plug on his Pier 55 planned for New York’s Hudson River.We received the Mayor's letter with great regret today. We will study the contents of the letter in detail before responding formally. The Garden Bridge Trust was set up at the request of Transport for London and the Department of Transport to deliver the project which had received public money. We have had enormous support from our funders and are very confident we can raise the remaining funds required. But sadly the Mayor of London has taken a different decision to those in place when the project started.