New concept to me- thanks for sharing these details. Any civic or community space here would surely shine too, great views and connection between boroughs.
The City of London bridges: Tower, London, Southwark, Millennium and Blackfriars, are well endowed through the City Bridge Foundation https://www.citybridgefoundation.org.uk/about, an organisation with a long and interesting history which uses its considerable surplus to fund charities.
I've now read this through twice and I'm afraid that not only can I not remotely support the concept I also have to argue strongly against it.
1] The Thames Valley through London is not just a waterway, it's an airway as well as an ecology transit route that dramatically influences and alters the entire London environment and its wider ecology.
Just as building it in the first place did, so removing the old London bridge altered London's climate. Building new street bridges will almost certainly do the same.
Not least because putting a dam to airflow [the street-bridge] through the centre will impact soil temperatures which are already critically high and in grave need of reduction [see TfL subsoil heating issues amongst others].
There will be other environmental impacts, including changes to Thames water temperatures affecting the local fauna and flora. It would not be entirely unexpected if we once again saw the Thames freezing over in bad winters, or contrarily, water temeperatures rising unacceptably to impact all life forms in teh Thames..
But we can't know all that without first doing really really thorough environmental analysis and detailed modelling of all of the environmental impacts - not just at the waterway zone but right out to the further edges of the North and South downs.
Such analysis and modelling would cost monies: who's to pay for that, and _why_ should they pay for it? We've already wasted millions on the idiotic Garden Bridge.
2] London has a gross surfeit of floor space. It doesn't need more. It certainly doesn't need more high-priced rich spaces. What London needs is to figure out how to use what floor spaces it already has in a sensible efficient cost-effective manner to actually solve the needs of Londoners.
3] The assertion is made that London needs more bridges: and that's all it is. An assertion. Without evidence. Opinion without evidence is mostly worthless. So another case of analysis and data capture and modelling is required and that will once again cost more money to carry out: who is to pay for that and why _should_ they pay for it?
4] London already has far too many tourists. Whilst the revenues it attracts are almost certainly welcome by retailers and the service industries we really don't need yet another attraction.
Those of us who actually live and work in inner London would find our lives imeasurably improved if the numbers of tourists were actively cut by circa 50%, not increased by yet another attraction designed to capture the floating visitor's pounds.
On balance I find this to be another piece of polemic not all that much different to the original Garden Bridge concept. "Oh, we're different to the Garden Bridge, we won't waste your monies!, Honest Guv!"
It's an appeal based on emotion, not on any serious environmental or architectural merit and certainly not worthy of support. I'm disappointed.
Thanks for reading and responding at such length. However, almost every claim you make here lacks a factual basis.
More broadly, the position you set out, that London has too much floorspace, too many visitors and too many river crossings, is a degrowth and managed decline mindset. That mindset is immiserating us, our children, and future generations.
Consider the young Londoners priced out of their own city, the families in overcrowded housing, the workers stranded by a closed bridge. Britain has spent decades letting environmental and amenity objections override the basic needs of a growing city.
On floorspace: London is one of the most supply-constrained property markets in the developed world. The forthcoming London Plan target is 88,000 homes a year. In 2024/25 the city built 28,576. The latest projections put 2025 starts at roughly 5,000. “Surfeit” is not a description anyone working in housing would recognise.
On evidence for crossing demand: east London had no fixed road crossing between Tower Bridge and Dartford until TfL spent £2.2bn opening the Silvertown Tunnel in April 2025. Hammersmith Bridge has been restricted to traffic since 2019, Albert Bridge too now. The Nine Elms-Pimlico and Rotherhithe-Canary Wharf proposals exist because the gaps are well-documented in TfL’s own studies. The case is not an assertion.
On tourism: a mixed-use bridge carrying flats and workspace may well draw visitors, but it is not itself a visitor attraction. It is housing and offices that happen to span the river. The Garden Bridge failed because it had no productive use and no revenue. That is the comparison the piece is built to refute, not one it falls into.
And on who pays for the modelling: that is the whole point of the financing argument. A bridge with buildings on it generates rents, and those rents pay for the design work, the build, and the maintenance in perpetuity. The developer pays. That is the mechanism.
On the environmental claims: the TfL subsoil heating issue has nothing to do with surface infrastructure. It is waste heat from train braking that has built up in the deep London clay around the tube tunnels, with no surface component whatever. The airflow point is similar in shape: the Thames at central London is hundreds of metres wide, and a deck a few metres thick is not a barrier to wind with twenty other crossings already in place.
Old London Bridge did affect the river, but the effect was on water flow, not air. Its 19 closely-spaced arches and heavy timber pier bulwarks occupied most of the river’s cross-section, holding the water upstream back into slow, shallow conditions and trapping ice in winter. Once the bridge was demolished in 1831-32, the Thames lost that weir-like effect and has not frozen across since. A modern bridge with widely-spaced piers does the opposite.
"More broadly, the position you set out, that London has too much floorspace, too many visitors and too many river crossings, is a degrowth and managed decline mindset. That mindset is immiserating us, our children, and future generations."
"Consider the young Londoners priced out of their own city, the families in overcrowded housing, the workers stranded by a closed bridge. Britain has spent decades letting environmental and amenity objections override the basic needs of a growing city."
That's precisely who I am considering.
"On floorspace: London is one of the most supply-constrained property markets in the developed world."
No it isn't. We have some 20 *million* square feet of unused commercial and industrial spaces and some 38,000 unused residential properties. We don't need more floorspace. we need to make use of what we already have. You've compared chalk and cheese and sought to evade the point I made.
"The forthcoming London Plan target is 88,000 homes a year. In 2024/25 the city built 28,576. The latest projections put 2025 starts at roughly 5,000. “Surfeit” is not a description anyone working in housing would recognise"
a] that's an idiotic plan inside an idiotic legal and economic framework. As for the anyone in housing comment: I'm a public health engineer. I spent decades doing housing-related work. I AM making the claim that there's a surfeit of floorspace.. That London plan will never ever achieve its goals, just like almost all housing plans since 1976.
"On evidence for crossing demand: east London had no fixed road crossing between Tower Bridge and Dartford until TfL spent £2.2bn opening the Silvertown Tunnel in April 2025. Hammersmith Bridge has been closed or restricted to motor traffic since 2019. The Nine Elms-Pimlico and Rotherhithe-Canary Wharf proposals exist because the gaps are well-documented in TfL’s own studies. The case is not an assertion."
b] Again, you're moving goalposts. I didn't say that east London doesn't need a crossing. Nor did I say no more crossings were required. I said that a street-bridge wasn't required. Just as I previously said to you that Hammersmith Bridge would be better off torn down and replaced by a modern replica that actually worked AS a bridge and not as a dolls-house system with no real traffic movements.
"On tourism: a mixed-use bridge carrying flats and workspace may well draw visitors, but it is not itself a visitor attraction. It is housing and offices that happen to span the river. The Garden Bridge failed because it had no productive use and no revenue. That is the comparison the piece is built to refute, not one it falls into."
And that's precisely why it isnt needed.
"And on who pays for the modelling: that is the whole point of the financing argument. A bridge with buildings on it generates rents, and those rents pay for the design work, the build, and the maintenance in perpetuity. The developer pays. That is the mechanism."
Yeah; and who pays up front? Ah, the developers you say? Well that in turn raises subsequent rents to cover the expenditures and further inflates the already catastrophically inflated London property market. The one that drives small traders out of business. The one that encourages the further homogenisation of London streets with chains of coffee bars and designer fasdhion outlets.
Not to mention the enormous challenge of getting two Local Authorities and City Hall to agree on all the building control and the costs of mintring and measuring and testing involved.
"On the environmental claims: the TfL subsoil heating issue has nothing to do with surface infrastructure. It is waste heat from train braking that has built up in the deep London clay around the tube tunnels, with no surface component whatever. The airflow point is similar in shape: the Thames at central London is hundreds of metres wide, and a deck a few metres thick is not a barrier to wind with twenty other crossings already in place."
It has EVERYTHING to do with it. The origin of the heat is irrelevant, though you're correct that most of it in inner London is from TfL lines.
Bridges are well known to alter airflow and dramatically affect local environemnts and ecologies. They destroy some micro-climates and create others. There's decades of intense environmental engineering studies to back this up. That's precisely why deep analysis and very great modelling is required before even considering a plan for a bridge. And that exercise costs money: money the public will be asked to subsidise. You're talking from assumptions, not from knowledge.
"Old London Bridge did affect the river, but the effect was on water flow, not air."
Wrong! It affected both. Please go away and look this up.
Just on this point as it's amusingly overconfident: "Wrong! It affected both. Please go away and look this up."
Most accounts of the freezing discuss only the hydrological effect, and it's widely accepted as a sufficient explanation. I think you're confused: yes, air temperatures are the master driver of a river freezing, and yes, bridges alter airflow, but wind's effect on freezing goes in both directions (air temperature vs roughening the water). This is rather trivial physics!
In any case, bridges do affect local environments and ecologies — you've rather messily tried to slip airflow into that same sentence, but the bridge impact comes through sediment, shading, runoff and so on, the obvious things! Unless I am very much mistaken, the airflow case you are pushing is a fringe theory arising either from misunderstanding or eccentricity. Happy to read something you send as you seem confident it is a mainstream position, but my search gave very little evidence of it.
Now, wind modelling is of course an important part of bridge construction but it's done because of wind's impact on the bridge and its structural integrity, not for fear of starving everything downwind of oxygen(!) as you seem to be gesturing at.
It's a shame really, I personally think we managed rather a long time as a civilisation without consulting any 'public health engineer' before building a bridge, but assuming this is a valuable enterprise, it's striking that you've failed to make the far more interesting environmental case based on the obvious noise and waste implications of a street bridge. Missed opportunity!
Yes, you’re also right about the noise issue. But I was concentrating on the more obvious issues.
Were I writing a full paper on this then it would necessarily be included as a point. Along with road traffic analysis, population densitities and many many other things.
Beyond that; since the formation of the London County Council in 1889 we’ve always included Public Health Engineeering assessments in the evaluation of major structure proposals such as bridges embankments flyovers and other major road works. We already did that before the LCC existed, but it was not done on a city-wide basis. So perhaps in future you’d try and keep things a little more civil and not try such poor attempts at backhanded insults.
Oh yes indeed. Not arguing that, but the specific comment I was replying to was to the effect that bridges do not affect air movement and play no part in altering the local environment.
There’s decades of work showing precisely the opposite: that bridges change air movement and DO have significant impact on the local environment.
Where the old London Bridge is concerned: we don’t have the data, but knowing the data from other bridges, some of which were of similar designs to the old bridge, we can make some reasoned assumptions about the impact of blocked airflows on the local environment, Whilst the narrowed waterways caused by its close piering would undoubtedly have the major effect airflow does always play a part too. So we can be fairly confident that blocked airflow played a part in the local environment alongside the wider mini ice-age that London experienced in the 18th and early 19th centuries.
It’s basic fluid dynamics combined with environmental sciences and a few other sciences. Go and look it up for yourself. There’s over 70 years of data on bridge dynamics and airflows as well as the data on the environmental impacts of altered airflow, ever since the Takoma Narrows Bridge Disaster in 1940.
There is work showing that bridges change air movement, and there is work showing bridges impact the local environment. To the best of my knowledge, there is no work showing that the local environment is impacted because of air movement — I did ask for some and I will ask again, but I fear it isn’t forthcoming for a reason!
I fear you may be correct in your conclusion - I was moderately sure I’d read some such work but age and infirmity means that now I look again I’m inclined to believe that I’m wrong - though the fluid dynamics and atmospheric particle retention research work done in Germany in recent years may well contradict that. I don’t have the time to research any more deeply right now.
My wider point was that the impacts of such a bridge in London have not been properly or effectively studied and such work has to be done before proceeding to make any decisions about construction. In particular, we would need to study the differences between a conventional bridge and a street bridge to determine exactly how a street bridge benefits or adversely affects local environment.
Which leaves us with the same question: who pays for those studies and why should they pay for it.
If the developers are expected to pay then that cost will inevitably be passed to tenants, raising their costs and thus also causing yet more inflationary pressures in both the immediately local [to the bridge] and wider communities of London; thus further inflating housing prices and causing more problems for locals seeking to live in London.
If the public is to be asked to pay then again, why?
I repeat there is zero need for a street bridge and it’s a dubious means of funding bridge construction. We dont need more floorspace in London. We currently waste or underuse far too much of the floorspace we already have.
What we need is for London to actually build more North South connections that actually work. HS3 or something similar to it might be a good start. Sorting out the idiotic London Bridge to Blackfriars portion of Thameslink might be a good start. Rebuilding Hammersmith Bridge properly using modern methods and materials [even if it still looks exactly the same] would be a good start.
New concept to me- thanks for sharing these details. Any civic or community space here would surely shine too, great views and connection between boroughs.
Agreed. Thanks for taking the time to read and share your thoughts
The City of London bridges: Tower, London, Southwark, Millennium and Blackfriars, are well endowed through the City Bridge Foundation https://www.citybridgefoundation.org.uk/about, an organisation with a long and interesting history which uses its considerable surplus to fund charities.
Sadly only a minor portion of that funding now goes on bridge-related charitable activities
I've now read this through twice and I'm afraid that not only can I not remotely support the concept I also have to argue strongly against it.
1] The Thames Valley through London is not just a waterway, it's an airway as well as an ecology transit route that dramatically influences and alters the entire London environment and its wider ecology.
Just as building it in the first place did, so removing the old London bridge altered London's climate. Building new street bridges will almost certainly do the same.
Not least because putting a dam to airflow [the street-bridge] through the centre will impact soil temperatures which are already critically high and in grave need of reduction [see TfL subsoil heating issues amongst others].
There will be other environmental impacts, including changes to Thames water temperatures affecting the local fauna and flora. It would not be entirely unexpected if we once again saw the Thames freezing over in bad winters, or contrarily, water temeperatures rising unacceptably to impact all life forms in teh Thames..
But we can't know all that without first doing really really thorough environmental analysis and detailed modelling of all of the environmental impacts - not just at the waterway zone but right out to the further edges of the North and South downs.
Such analysis and modelling would cost monies: who's to pay for that, and _why_ should they pay for it? We've already wasted millions on the idiotic Garden Bridge.
2] London has a gross surfeit of floor space. It doesn't need more. It certainly doesn't need more high-priced rich spaces. What London needs is to figure out how to use what floor spaces it already has in a sensible efficient cost-effective manner to actually solve the needs of Londoners.
3] The assertion is made that London needs more bridges: and that's all it is. An assertion. Without evidence. Opinion without evidence is mostly worthless. So another case of analysis and data capture and modelling is required and that will once again cost more money to carry out: who is to pay for that and why _should_ they pay for it?
4] London already has far too many tourists. Whilst the revenues it attracts are almost certainly welcome by retailers and the service industries we really don't need yet another attraction.
Those of us who actually live and work in inner London would find our lives imeasurably improved if the numbers of tourists were actively cut by circa 50%, not increased by yet another attraction designed to capture the floating visitor's pounds.
On balance I find this to be another piece of polemic not all that much different to the original Garden Bridge concept. "Oh, we're different to the Garden Bridge, we won't waste your monies!, Honest Guv!"
It's an appeal based on emotion, not on any serious environmental or architectural merit and certainly not worthy of support. I'm disappointed.
1/10 for effort.
0/10 for sense and sensibility.
Must try harder.
Thanks for reading and responding at such length. However, almost every claim you make here lacks a factual basis.
More broadly, the position you set out, that London has too much floorspace, too many visitors and too many river crossings, is a degrowth and managed decline mindset. That mindset is immiserating us, our children, and future generations.
Consider the young Londoners priced out of their own city, the families in overcrowded housing, the workers stranded by a closed bridge. Britain has spent decades letting environmental and amenity objections override the basic needs of a growing city.
On floorspace: London is one of the most supply-constrained property markets in the developed world. The forthcoming London Plan target is 88,000 homes a year. In 2024/25 the city built 28,576. The latest projections put 2025 starts at roughly 5,000. “Surfeit” is not a description anyone working in housing would recognise.
On evidence for crossing demand: east London had no fixed road crossing between Tower Bridge and Dartford until TfL spent £2.2bn opening the Silvertown Tunnel in April 2025. Hammersmith Bridge has been restricted to traffic since 2019, Albert Bridge too now. The Nine Elms-Pimlico and Rotherhithe-Canary Wharf proposals exist because the gaps are well-documented in TfL’s own studies. The case is not an assertion.
On tourism: a mixed-use bridge carrying flats and workspace may well draw visitors, but it is not itself a visitor attraction. It is housing and offices that happen to span the river. The Garden Bridge failed because it had no productive use and no revenue. That is the comparison the piece is built to refute, not one it falls into.
And on who pays for the modelling: that is the whole point of the financing argument. A bridge with buildings on it generates rents, and those rents pay for the design work, the build, and the maintenance in perpetuity. The developer pays. That is the mechanism.
On the environmental claims: the TfL subsoil heating issue has nothing to do with surface infrastructure. It is waste heat from train braking that has built up in the deep London clay around the tube tunnels, with no surface component whatever. The airflow point is similar in shape: the Thames at central London is hundreds of metres wide, and a deck a few metres thick is not a barrier to wind with twenty other crossings already in place.
Old London Bridge did affect the river, but the effect was on water flow, not air. Its 19 closely-spaced arches and heavy timber pier bulwarks occupied most of the river’s cross-section, holding the water upstream back into slow, shallow conditions and trapping ice in winter. Once the bridge was demolished in 1831-32, the Thames lost that weir-like effect and has not frozen across since. A modern bridge with widely-spaced piers does the opposite.
"More broadly, the position you set out, that London has too much floorspace, too many visitors and too many river crossings, is a degrowth and managed decline mindset. That mindset is immiserating us, our children, and future generations."
"Consider the young Londoners priced out of their own city, the families in overcrowded housing, the workers stranded by a closed bridge. Britain has spent decades letting environmental and amenity objections override the basic needs of a growing city."
That's precisely who I am considering.
"On floorspace: London is one of the most supply-constrained property markets in the developed world."
No it isn't. We have some 20 *million* square feet of unused commercial and industrial spaces and some 38,000 unused residential properties. We don't need more floorspace. we need to make use of what we already have. You've compared chalk and cheese and sought to evade the point I made.
"The forthcoming London Plan target is 88,000 homes a year. In 2024/25 the city built 28,576. The latest projections put 2025 starts at roughly 5,000. “Surfeit” is not a description anyone working in housing would recognise"
a] that's an idiotic plan inside an idiotic legal and economic framework. As for the anyone in housing comment: I'm a public health engineer. I spent decades doing housing-related work. I AM making the claim that there's a surfeit of floorspace.. That London plan will never ever achieve its goals, just like almost all housing plans since 1976.
"On evidence for crossing demand: east London had no fixed road crossing between Tower Bridge and Dartford until TfL spent £2.2bn opening the Silvertown Tunnel in April 2025. Hammersmith Bridge has been closed or restricted to motor traffic since 2019. The Nine Elms-Pimlico and Rotherhithe-Canary Wharf proposals exist because the gaps are well-documented in TfL’s own studies. The case is not an assertion."
b] Again, you're moving goalposts. I didn't say that east London doesn't need a crossing. Nor did I say no more crossings were required. I said that a street-bridge wasn't required. Just as I previously said to you that Hammersmith Bridge would be better off torn down and replaced by a modern replica that actually worked AS a bridge and not as a dolls-house system with no real traffic movements.
"On tourism: a mixed-use bridge carrying flats and workspace may well draw visitors, but it is not itself a visitor attraction. It is housing and offices that happen to span the river. The Garden Bridge failed because it had no productive use and no revenue. That is the comparison the piece is built to refute, not one it falls into."
And that's precisely why it isnt needed.
"And on who pays for the modelling: that is the whole point of the financing argument. A bridge with buildings on it generates rents, and those rents pay for the design work, the build, and the maintenance in perpetuity. The developer pays. That is the mechanism."
Yeah; and who pays up front? Ah, the developers you say? Well that in turn raises subsequent rents to cover the expenditures and further inflates the already catastrophically inflated London property market. The one that drives small traders out of business. The one that encourages the further homogenisation of London streets with chains of coffee bars and designer fasdhion outlets.
Not to mention the enormous challenge of getting two Local Authorities and City Hall to agree on all the building control and the costs of mintring and measuring and testing involved.
"On the environmental claims: the TfL subsoil heating issue has nothing to do with surface infrastructure. It is waste heat from train braking that has built up in the deep London clay around the tube tunnels, with no surface component whatever. The airflow point is similar in shape: the Thames at central London is hundreds of metres wide, and a deck a few metres thick is not a barrier to wind with twenty other crossings already in place."
It has EVERYTHING to do with it. The origin of the heat is irrelevant, though you're correct that most of it in inner London is from TfL lines.
Bridges are well known to alter airflow and dramatically affect local environemnts and ecologies. They destroy some micro-climates and create others. There's decades of intense environmental engineering studies to back this up. That's precisely why deep analysis and very great modelling is required before even considering a plan for a bridge. And that exercise costs money: money the public will be asked to subsidise. You're talking from assumptions, not from knowledge.
"Old London Bridge did affect the river, but the effect was on water flow, not air."
Wrong! It affected both. Please go away and look this up.
Just on this point as it's amusingly overconfident: "Wrong! It affected both. Please go away and look this up."
Most accounts of the freezing discuss only the hydrological effect, and it's widely accepted as a sufficient explanation. I think you're confused: yes, air temperatures are the master driver of a river freezing, and yes, bridges alter airflow, but wind's effect on freezing goes in both directions (air temperature vs roughening the water). This is rather trivial physics!
In any case, bridges do affect local environments and ecologies — you've rather messily tried to slip airflow into that same sentence, but the bridge impact comes through sediment, shading, runoff and so on, the obvious things! Unless I am very much mistaken, the airflow case you are pushing is a fringe theory arising either from misunderstanding or eccentricity. Happy to read something you send as you seem confident it is a mainstream position, but my search gave very little evidence of it.
Now, wind modelling is of course an important part of bridge construction but it's done because of wind's impact on the bridge and its structural integrity, not for fear of starving everything downwind of oxygen(!) as you seem to be gesturing at.
It's a shame really, I personally think we managed rather a long time as a civilisation without consulting any 'public health engineer' before building a bridge, but assuming this is a valuable enterprise, it's striking that you've failed to make the far more interesting environmental case based on the obvious noise and waste implications of a street bridge. Missed opportunity!
Yes, you’re also right about the noise issue. But I was concentrating on the more obvious issues.
Were I writing a full paper on this then it would necessarily be included as a point. Along with road traffic analysis, population densitities and many many other things.
Beyond that; since the formation of the London County Council in 1889 we’ve always included Public Health Engineeering assessments in the evaluation of major structure proposals such as bridges embankments flyovers and other major road works. We already did that before the LCC existed, but it was not done on a city-wide basis. So perhaps in future you’d try and keep things a little more civil and not try such poor attempts at backhanded insults.
Oh yes indeed. Not arguing that, but the specific comment I was replying to was to the effect that bridges do not affect air movement and play no part in altering the local environment.
There’s decades of work showing precisely the opposite: that bridges change air movement and DO have significant impact on the local environment.
Where the old London Bridge is concerned: we don’t have the data, but knowing the data from other bridges, some of which were of similar designs to the old bridge, we can make some reasoned assumptions about the impact of blocked airflows on the local environment, Whilst the narrowed waterways caused by its close piering would undoubtedly have the major effect airflow does always play a part too. So we can be fairly confident that blocked airflow played a part in the local environment alongside the wider mini ice-age that London experienced in the 18th and early 19th centuries.
It’s basic fluid dynamics combined with environmental sciences and a few other sciences. Go and look it up for yourself. There’s over 70 years of data on bridge dynamics and airflows as well as the data on the environmental impacts of altered airflow, ever since the Takoma Narrows Bridge Disaster in 1940.
So no. I’m not wrong.
There is work showing that bridges change air movement, and there is work showing bridges impact the local environment. To the best of my knowledge, there is no work showing that the local environment is impacted because of air movement — I did ask for some and I will ask again, but I fear it isn’t forthcoming for a reason!
I fear you may be correct in your conclusion - I was moderately sure I’d read some such work but age and infirmity means that now I look again I’m inclined to believe that I’m wrong - though the fluid dynamics and atmospheric particle retention research work done in Germany in recent years may well contradict that. I don’t have the time to research any more deeply right now.
My wider point was that the impacts of such a bridge in London have not been properly or effectively studied and such work has to be done before proceeding to make any decisions about construction. In particular, we would need to study the differences between a conventional bridge and a street bridge to determine exactly how a street bridge benefits or adversely affects local environment.
Which leaves us with the same question: who pays for those studies and why should they pay for it.
If the developers are expected to pay then that cost will inevitably be passed to tenants, raising their costs and thus also causing yet more inflationary pressures in both the immediately local [to the bridge] and wider communities of London; thus further inflating housing prices and causing more problems for locals seeking to live in London.
If the public is to be asked to pay then again, why?
I repeat there is zero need for a street bridge and it’s a dubious means of funding bridge construction. We dont need more floorspace in London. We currently waste or underuse far too much of the floorspace we already have.
What we need is for London to actually build more North South connections that actually work. HS3 or something similar to it might be a good start. Sorting out the idiotic London Bridge to Blackfriars portion of Thameslink might be a good start. Rebuilding Hammersmith Bridge properly using modern methods and materials [even if it still looks exactly the same] would be a good start.
This is not a good start.