The £150m repair of Hammersmith Bridge, closed since 2019, is mired in squabbling – and it’s just one of many across the UK that need work
Toby Gordon-Smith can see the district of Hammersmith from his flat. In normal times it takes him a few minutes to get there in his wheelchair. His cannabidiol products business is there, with the accessible tube station that he needs to get to the rest of London. The station is the reason why he moved to the area, but now it might as well be in another city. For he lives in Barnes, on the south side of the River Thames, opposite Hammersmith, and the bridge that connected them is closed for safety reasons – to vehicles since April 2019, and to pedestrians, cyclists and wheelchair users since last August. Although it is nearly two years since the first closure, there is still no clear plan for fixing the bridge.
There are thousands of stories like Gordon-Smith’s. For children in Barnes who go to schools in Hammersmith, what was once a 15-minute walk is now a tortuous three-mile journey along a towpath regularly flooded by the tide, up flights of steps on to a railway bridge (which makes cycling difficult) and through an ill-lit park with high rates of crime. Or they can take a long bus ride, which means getting up at 6am, if you’re going to beat the rush-hour traffic. The area’s main hospital, Charing Cross, is on the north side of the river, so those of its staff who live to the south, and patients needing such things as chemotherapy, now have to make gruelling journeys of an hour or more each way. Ambulances face potentially lethal delays.
