Could a £1bn fund pay to reopen Hammersmith Bridge to cars?

Times

15 hours ago

It is 1pm on a sweltering summer's day in north Barnes, southwest London. Yet, unusually for the capital, there is not a car in sight.
There are no sirens, no buses and no taxis. In many ways the Castelnau thoroughfare looks like it is stuck in March 2020 when the UK was plunged into the first lockdown and London's usually hectic streets fell silent.
The clue to the calm is on a lamppost. 'Road ahead closed,' the large red sign reads. The road in question — once a vital artery into the city — has been closed since April 2019 when sensors detected 'dangerous micro-fractures' in Hammersmith Bridge. A fix, residents were told, would cost £40 million and take ten years to complete.
Six years later there is little progress to show and the bill is now estimated to be at least £250 million. First cars were banned, then in August 2020 everyone was barred from crossing. Eleven long months later pedestrians and people pushing bikes were permitted. Then in April this year cyclists were once again allowed to pedal over the 138-year-old bridge.
If proper work to repair the bridge started today it would still be at least ten years until it reopened to motorised traffic. Residents have lost hope and Barnes, which sits in a horseshoe bend on the Thames, has become a sort of glorified village.
Hospital appointments and examinations have been missed, shops have gone bust and, anecdotally at least, crime has gone up. Yet there seems little political appetite to restore the bridge's motor traffic.
'It's like we never left lockdown,' Louisa Barnett, who lives in a flat near the south side of the bridge, says. 'Just look, there's not a car in sight. We're in Zone 2 of London but it's more like some far-out suburb. The place has lost its buzz.'
Barnett moved to north Barnes 20 years ago, attracted by its connectivity, and has a deep-rooted hate of the closure. It is understandable. In 2023 when her sister fell ill and subsequently died she was denied the opportunity of being at her bedside because she was sitting in traffic caused by the bridge closure.
'A journey to my sister's house which should have taken 40 minutes became one hour 30 minutes. She died while I was sitting in traffic and all the rest of the family were there. Had the bridge been open, like it should be, I'd have been at her side.'
One of the major issues, residents believe, is that politicians see the area as white, upper middle class and think those living there have nothing better to complain about. Put bluntly, they believe the Labour mayor, Labour government and Liberal Democrat council do not see repairing the grade II* listed iron structure as a vote winner.
But there may be hope on the horizon. Heidi Alexander, the transport secretary, hinted — loosely — that total restoration could be financed through a £1 billion structures fund announced in last month's spending review.
'We need to work through the details of how that structures fund is going to operate,' Alexander told LBC. 'It may be the case that Hammersmith Bridge and repair work there could be funded through that structures fund.'
It is a glimmer of hope but few are convinced. Part of the stalemate is that no one can quite agree on who should pay. The London Borough of Hammersmith & Fulham, the Department for Transport and the mayor's office have been locked in talks for years.
'I don't think it will ever reopen and politicians should come clean and say it,' Julia Watkins, of Hammersmith Bridge SOS, which is campaigning to have it fully restored, said. 'There are a lot of people who think having the bridge open to cyclists is good enough. But it's not. There are 21,500 people living in SW13 and many of them are old. People's GPs are over the bridge, Charing Cross hospital is over there. It can now regularly be a 40-minute drive for what used to be 0.8 miles.'
For Heidi Patton, 66, the reality of the closure is stark. Her husband is 83 and has dementia as well as other health problems. She would regularly drive over the bridge to get to hospital appointments and is fed up with the locals, most of them cyclists, who think the closure is a net-positive.
She said: 'To get to appointments now we have to take the car to Barnes station, which has only just had lifts fitted, and go to Waterloo. There we face a long walk to the Tube. There are a small group of people who think it's wonderful and say 'why doesn't everybody cycle over?' Well, not everybody can cycle. Before there were five bus routes over the bridge. Now there are none.'
The eeriness of Castelnau is hard to ignore. Until 2015, the bridge was used by 22,000 vehicles including 1,800 buses every day. At Michael's Newsagents, Ronnie Packeer, the shopkeeper of 17 years, says it has hugely affected business. Passing traffic has fallen off a cliff and sales are down.
'I used to open at 6am and close at 9.30pm,' he said standing by his shelf of garden fixtures and fittings. 'Now there is no point because there are no buses stopping outside. I now open at about 7am and close at 7pm. There's simply not the demand now.'
The lack of footfall has also made the bridge a hotspot for muggings. 'You hear of one every three days,' Barnett, the managing director of Geronimo Jones jewellery, said. 'When it's dark and no-one is around it's just a playground for gangs. It doesn't feel safe. I'll now wait on the north side at night until a couple come along and walk a few metres behind them.'
A spokeswoman for the Department for Transport said: 'We continue to work closely with Transport for London and the London Borough of Hammersmith and Fulham on the Hammersmith Bridge restoration project — and so far have provided almost £17 million of funding. A £1 billion structures fund was announced as part of the spending review settlement and details of allocation will be announced in due course.'