The cars and buses are not coming back to Hammersmith Bridge.
A report [pdf] going to Hammersmith and Fulham Council’s Cabinet on Monday recommends giving up on reopening the bridge to traffic for good. After seven years and £54m spent, the council says there is ‘no financial option’ to fix it properly. It will instead ask the Government for a cheaper £128m repair that keeps the crossing open to cyclists, walkers and boats, and shut to everything else.
This is the moment the long saga stops being about when the bridge reopens and becomes the fact that it will not. The three bodies that could have fixed it, the council that owns the bridge, the Mayor who runs its buses, and the Government that holds the money, are now all run by Labour. It’s made no difference.
For Putney, it makes the traffic permanent. The borough’s £1m junction at Putney Bridge was rebuilt on the assumption that Hammersmith Bridge would carry traffic again by 2026. That assumption is now dead.
Why the proper fix is off
Fixing the bridge so cars and buses can use it again would cost around £300m, and the council says it cannot find its share. The Government has told it to bid for the smaller job instead, the report stating that ‘the DfT has confirmed its preference for this phased repair bid’. A deadline of March 2030 to spend any money rules out the full restoration in any case, and the plan to do it properly is, in the council’s own words, parked, with ‘no indication’ it will be revived ‘as a route to full restoration at this time’.
So the £128m bid is for survival, not reopening. It would shore up the worst of the structure and keep the bridge safe for walking, cycling and river traffic. It would not restore the six bus routes that have been cut, and it would not let a single car cross. A fourth Commons debate in April produced no new money. This is where seven years of delay has arrived.
Putney pays for a dead promise
The cost to Putney is already built into its roads. Wandsworth’s own paper records that the £1m junction was modelled on the bridge reopening by 2026, which was ‘what was agreed with TfL’. We set out the full evidence for that in April, after first reporting how approved plans went wrong. With the bridge now written off for traffic, the premise behind the junction has collapsed.
The damage shows in the buses. Putney’s services run 41% worse than the rest of Wandsworth, and the broken junction is the reason. The cause matters here. Traffic across the five western Thames bridges has actually fallen, down nearly a quarter since the closure. Putney is not jammed because more cars are coming. It is jammed because the junction was built for a bridge that is not reopening.
The council has not said what it will do about that. With full reopening abandoned, it has given no indication whether it will redesign the junction for a crossing that is permanently shut, or leave in place a layout built for a promise that no longer holds.
Everyone who could have acted
The bridge’s owner is Labour, returned in May with 38 seats to the Conservatives’ 12. The Mayor who runs Transport for London is Labour. The Government writing the cheques is Labour. For five years the blame fell on the Conservatives. Labour now holds every lever, and the answer is still no.
The response from those in charge has been a chorus of disappointment. Putney’s Labour MP, Fleur Anderson, said she was ‘deeply disappointed’ the council had ‘opted’ for the £128m plan ‘rather than advocating for the full £300 million needed to restore the bridge for buses and other vehicles’.
The report says there was no option to advocate for. In February, Anderson had told constituents there was ‘real momentum now’, with ‘key funding decisions expected in the coming weeks’, as we reported; the letter behind that optimism promised only that a stalled taskforce would be reconvened. Richmond Park’s Liberal Democrat MP, Sarah Olney, had already described the process as five versions of the same letter, ‘each promising action without delivering it’.
Wandsworth’s new Conservative administration is disappointed too. Cllr Dan Hamilton, the council’s transport lead, called the update ‘deeply disappointing’ and said Wandsworth would ‘continue to champion its full reopening to vehicles’. Under the previous Labour administration, though, as we revealed under FOI, Wandsworth stood at a Putney rally in January 2025 demanding ‘urgent and decisive action to fund the repairs’, then told the taskforce three days later that it had ‘no money’ to help pay, with around £194m sitting in reserves. Both parties have offered the same thing: words, not cash.
The money is not easy to find. Nobody can conjure £300m, the three-way split that left Hammersmith and Fulham covering a third was imposed by the previous government and never made to work, and the council’s only route to its share, a toll on drivers crossing the bridge, dies with the cheaper fix. Some do not want the traffic back at all: the London Cycling Campaign argues that even if London could afford to reopen the bridge to cars, it should not.
What happens next
The Cabinet meets at 7pm on Monday 6 July to sign the plan off, with the meeting streamed on the council’s YouTube channel. Nothing is settled even then. The Government’s answer on the £128m is not expected until the autumn, and the award could land ‘well below’ the amount asked for. Keeping the bridge safe and open to walkers and cyclists alone costs around £1.5m a year, which the council has not budgeted, and without more the report warns it could ‘fully close again on safety grounds’.
The bill so far is disputed. The council says it is still owed £22.9m by the Government and TfL; the Government says publicly it has provided £17m, a figure the council’s own report does not match, putting it at £13.03m. Wandsworth residents who want to press the point can find their ward councillors at democracy.wandsworth.gov.uk.
Hammersmith Bridge opened in 1887 and is Grade II* listed. It closed to motor vehicles in April 2019 after cracks were found in its cast-iron pedestals, and briefly to everyone in 2020, before reopening to walkers and cyclists. The report’s authors expect a backlash. It braces for ‘adverse press coverage’, notes that the dissatisfaction ‘comes from outside the borough’, and recommends a communications plan be ready to deploy. Seven years on, with £54m spent and the road still shut, the people in charge are ‘disappointed’.
Ask the Chinese for money Khan and Johnson have done deals to ruin London which the Chinese own now! They could build one next week it would only take a couple of months to build!
This is a very important turning point. Either we keep clinging to the past or we can use this moment to make long overdue changes to help people move around Putney and South West London at a lower cost in pollution, noise, accidents and children’s independence and hwalrh. The money was never ever there to fully repair Hammersmith bridge for motor traffic. A lot of people already use the bridge every day, and pods would enable those with limited mobility to connect. The bridge was never designed to carry that level of heavy traffic. This decision closes the door on actions that would have been extremely costly and would not have solved the traffic problems in Putney in any case. The recent heat wave is (yet another) reminder that we are not prepared for the current climate, and Putney High Street is a daily reminder that traffic is damaging our local economy and community. We have wasted too much time already on a proposal that was never going to work. Putney News – time now to open up a discussion on the future of our town centre and community? We all need to make small changes – walk and cycle more, drive less for short journeys. We need to engage with our local and national government leaders on what we expect them to do to make this safer and easier for everyone.
Consider the wasted £700,000,000 of taxpayers money squandered on the Rwandann Migration and Economic Development Partnership, all to deport 4 migrants……
The unrecoverable billions spent on inappropriate and often unfit for purpose PPE via the “Fast Lanes”, and the “business loans” to nonexistent business’s.
Money that could have fixed the picturesque Hammersmith Bridge without making a dent in the overall sums.
I feel for Ms Anderson, things were implied by her colleagues.
She, and we have been let down badly.
I am writing to you as a local stakeholder deeply concerned by the ongoing financial and logistical gridlock surrounding Hammersmith Bridge. While I appreciate the council’s recent downscaled £128 million bid for a phased pedestrian-only restoration, settling for a permanent ban on vehicular transit is a massive blow to our local economy, emergency services, and neighbouring boroughs. If traditional engineering and funding models have failed us, we must look toward next-generation technology to break the deadlock. By leveraging advanced data modelling, modern material science, and decentralised finance, I urge the council to consider three highly viable, technology-driven solutions to reopen the crossing safely and affordably:
1. The Carbon-Fiber “Exoskeleton” Hybrid. Instead of spending hundreds of millions to painstakingly reinforce the existing Victorian cast iron from within, we should explore a “bridge inside a bridge” design. Using AI-driven topology optimisation, engineers can design an ultra-lightweight, modular carbon-fibre and steel roadway. This structure would be threaded directly through or suspended beneath the current frame. The historic Grade II* facade would remain visually untouched, but 100% of the mechanical traffic load would be shifted to this independent, high-strength exoskeleton. This cuts the cost of heritage restoration while safely restoring vehicular access.
2. An Autonomous Electric Pod Transit Network. If the bridge absolutely cannot support the weight of traditional modern cars, we should change how people cross rather than abandoning vehicles entirely. We could convert the bridge deck into a dedicated corridor for lightweight, autonomous electric pods-similar to the transit system operating at Heathrow Airport. Commuters would arrive at transport hubs on either side of the river and step into automated, 4-person micro-vehicles. An automated scheduling network would perfectly manage pod spacing, ensuring that the structural weight limit of the bridge is never breached at any given second. This restores rapid, weather-protected transit across the river without requiring a £300 million heavy engineering overhaul.
3. A Decentralised “Phased Token” Dynamic Toll System. The primary barrier to repair is a political standoff over funding. We can bypass this gridlock through a localised, decentralised crowdfunding model managed by digital smart contracts. The council could issue “Hammersmith Transit Tokens” to local residents and businesses, allowing drivers to pre-fund upcoming repair milestones in exchange for guaranteed, discounted future crossing rights. Once open, an AI traffic management system would run a dynamic tolling network. Tolls would automatically adjust based on real-time air quality data in Barnes and Hammersmith, charging higher rates for high-emission vehicles and generating a self-sustaining revenue stream to pay off construction partners. The current £300 million estimate tells us that treating this strictly as a 19th-century restoration project is a dead end. I urge the council to partner with leading tech universities and forward-thinking structural engineering firms to simulate these options. Let us turn the Hammersmith Bridge crisis into a global showcase for smart-city innovation. Thank you for your time, foresight, and continued dedication to our community. I look forward to hearing your thoughts on how we can progress these concepts.
The exoskeleton is an interesting and innovative solution. How come officialdom doesn’t think like this?
With morbid timing in relation to this story I have just returned from Putney High Street where the infamous 14 service to Putney Heath were all being terminated in the High Street and no sign of any 93 or 39 buses – so no transport up Putney Hill leaving lots of elderly people with shopping stranded at the bus stop. I was told that the 14 buses were being terminated in the High Street so as not to disrupt the schedule. In situations like this maybe the schedule should be more flexible. I left the bus stop at the High Street and got a 37 from the high street crossroads in order to complete my journey up the hill. When I put a complaint in to TFL just now the operator said the buses were unable to make their way up Putney Hill due to excessive congestion. I told him that when I boarded the 37 I had no issue with journeying up Putney Hill to the completion of the journey at the Green Man. It seems that buses were being terminated in Putney High Street for no apparent reason.
Absolutely furious to hear that. Putney and its residents are left to themselves. A previous article regarding the investment made by the council shows how Putney was totally forgotten. With that news it seems obvious that the residents and all stakeholders need to make this a national case and hopefully a new government in Westminster would be able to sort out this mess. Problem was never the money it’s the political will to solve this gridlock. Once again this case prove how inefficient local government could be here in great Britain while around the world this would have been solved in less than one year. If not solved probably that I would consider moving out despite loving living here.
I remember in the early 1980’s there was an experiment with a one-way system on Putney High street. I was one-way northwards to the bridge and southward traffic had to turn left into Putney Bridge Road, then right into Oxford Road. At the top of Oxford Road traffic would turn left or right, or carry out a dog’s leg turn up Carlton Drive.
It was a failure. We had much more heavy vehicles on the road then and no CCTV technology to regulate the trafiic lights, etc.
Maybe we should revisit it now. More then 45 years later. I’m sure we could do a better job.
Too many cars, too much driving, too many people not willing to admit this and work with those that have wanted to resolve it for years.
Either Putney’s politicians are being wilfully disingenuous, or they have very short memories. But just cast your mind back to early 2019, before the bridge was closed to cars. Was there less congestion on Putney High Street and Putney Bridge? Of course there wasn’t! In fact, there is now less traffic on Putney Bridge than before Hammersmith Bridge was closed to cars. Putney’s traffic problems have nothing at all to do with Hammersmith Bridge.