Tag: South Bank

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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Should Britain’s ‘worst building’ be demolished?



  • That view of 20 Fenchurch Street that brought you to tears is the exact opposite of what he wanted.
  • Either 20 Fenchurch Street is there as long as it endures, or we do something about it.
  • After a day in Paris at Frank Gehry’s exhilarating fish-like, wave-like I found myself on the South Bank almost weeping at the view of 20 Fenchurch Street.
  • I still find it very hard to accept that Centre Point, a building that once personified hit-and-run property development, should now be a listed building.
  • Or even Sant’Elia, although buildings like 20 Fenchurch Street do seem to exploit modern engineering to create futurist dreams that would be a lot better left on paper.


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