The Garden Bridge project, loved by Joanna Lumley and no-one else, has been roundly criticised by Dame Margaret Hodge in a report for the Mayor of London. In her review, Hodge says it would be ‘better for the taxpayer to accept the financial loss of cancelling the project’, a perspective that the Garden Bridge Trust have today condemned, calling it ‘very one-sided’. With £40 million already spent and an estimated £200 million required to complete the project, now seems a good time for City Hall to debate Hodge’s findings. But beyond the question of cash, we should also be interrogating whether the traditions of the city are being undermined by this prospective white elephant.
The great infrastructure projects of London’s history have always combined aesthetic grandeur with genuine utility. Take for example Joseph Bazalgette’s sewage system, built in the 1860s following the chaos of the ‘Great Stink’.
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