Forget London’s ramshackle Garden Bridge: bring on Nine Elms-to-Pimlico instead

I can’t work up much indignation at the collapse of London’s Garden Bridge project, which has been strangled by the refusal of mayor Sadiq Khan to guarantee its continuing operational and maintenance costs — assuming its trustees, led by former banker and minister Lord Davies of Abersoch, would have succeeded in raising the £150 million of private capital required to build the bridge and plant its 270 trees in the first place. Promoted by Joanna Lumley and Sadiq’s predecessor Boris Johnson, this was a beautiful but whimsical idea, placed in an overcrowded stretch of the Thames and based on a ramshackle business plan. In a more confident economic climate it might have gone ahead and given us pleasure — but it has been done for by a combination of funding uncertainty and a London Labour conspiracy (Dame Margaret Hodge in the thick of it) to demolish every vestige of Boris’s reputation.