Tag: Osborne

London’s garden bridge: the end of the road?



  • But Transport for London (TfL) and the Garden Bridge Trust have carried on regardless, egged on by powerful Bullingdon backers, mayor Boris Johnson and chancellor George Osborne.
  • The president of the Metropolitan Public Gardens Association has described it as a “vanity project of a windswept garden on an unneeded bridge”, while leading bridge engineers have called it a “private garden platform pretending to be a bridge”.
  • The National Audit Office has been ordered to examine the “rationale” behind George Osborne’s pledge of £30m of Treasury funding for the bridge.
  • Their correspondence over funding the bridge was recently uncovered by the Architects’ Journal, in which Osborne spelled out his £30m grant and urged Johnson to “do the same”.
  • Opponents have objected to the £60m of public funding and the £3.5m annual maintenance costs, to the restricted access for bikes and to the murky procurement process, which saw Thomas Heatherwick appointed ahead of other experienced bridge designers.


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£22m Worcestershire Parkway gets green light Ι Construction Enquirer



  • Members of Worcestershire County Council’s Planning and Regulatory Committee have rubber stamped the plans to build Worcestershire Parkway, near Junction 7 of the M5 for Worcester.
  • Contractor Osborne has got the green light to start work on a new £22m rail station in Worcestershire.
  • Osborne will build a single platform on the Cotswold Line and two platforms on the Birmingham to Bristol Line.
  • Under the plans, the proposed station in Norton would include up to 500 car parking spaces, with provision for people with disabilities, bus stops and a taxi rank.
  • Work on the station, which will link the Cotswolds and Birmingham to Bristol lines, is being paid for by both the county council and the Worcestershire Local Enterprise Partnership.


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