The Garden Bridge was the definition of a folly

Dry your eyes, Joanna Lumley, and try to move on. For the Garden Bridge was doomed from the start. Sure, it had all the hallmarks of an absolutely fabulous idea dreamt up by Patsy and friends in the early hours of Sunday morning after a humdinger of an evening on cocktails and Bolly. But by mid afternoon its shortcomings should have been uncomfortably apparent and the whole fuzzy-headed wheeze quietly forgotten. The mystery is that it’s taken so long – although even now, with the death-knell sounded, the bridge’s giddy supporters are petulant when confronted by unbelievers daring to suggest that, as a purely practical proposition, the idea stinks.

Let us for a moment set Joanna’s vision of loveliness to one side and look at what would have been the everyday reality of this ill thought-through project. First, the Garden Bridge was never a bridge at all. It was a private park that would have been inaccessible to cyclists at all times and locked shut at night.