UPDATED This week we learned that, after seven years of inaction, the government, and Hammersmith and Fulham Council have settled on leaving it a road bridge that carries no cars or buses. We asked what you made of that, and 50% of you, 137 of the 278 who replied, were beyond fed up and chose the option: “Honestly? Just blow it up and start again.”
So we decided to look at exactly that. Why not blow up Hammersmith Bridge and build a new one? Why has the obvious answer to a brittle, broken crossing not been taken years ago? We could all be driving over it by now.
What we found is a tangle of history, politics and good old-fashioned buck-passing… and a way through if the politicians that put us in this predicament in the first place had the skill and energy to take it.
But first the case for simply demolishing Hammersmith Bridge. We’ll start with the money: Hammersmith and Fulham pays £2.7m a year just to stop the closed bridge falling down, more than the £1.5m it would take to keep it open to walkers and cyclists, and none of that buys a reopening. More than £54m has gone in, and the bridge is still shut.
Repairing the Victorian structure is now costed at around £250m, up from £40m when it shut in 2019. The council admits a new bridge would cost “similar”, and even two crossings, one for traffic and one for walking and cycling, comes to between £180m to £360m, the same ballpark for new bridges with far more capacity.
There is a tendency for the cost of new builds to balloon, just as with repairs, but the case was never that a new bridge is cheap, only that it costs no more than the repair, carries cars and buses again, and stops the bleed.
So if it makes sense to take down Hammersmith Bridge, what has stopped it? Three things, and none of them is engineering.
The one word that changes everything
The first is a single asterisk. The bridge is not just listed, it is listed Grade II*, the tier covering about one listed building in twenty. The rules say demolishing an ordinary Grade II building should be “exceptional”, and a Grade I or II* one “wholly exceptional”. That one extra word, “wholly”, is close to an absolute bar.
How close? We could not find one Grade II* structure in England ever granted permission and pulled down through the normal planning system. When the government tried to demolish its own Richmond House in Whitehall, the plan collapsed in 2021 amid warnings, from architect and former English Heritage commissioner Piers Gough, that it set an “ominous precedent”. Even HS2, armed with its own Act of Parliament, spared every Grade I and II* building in its path, taking six humbler Grade II ones instead.
The star is earned. In Hammersmith’s case, Bazalgette’s 1887 bridge is Victorian showing-off in iron, all monumental towers, dark green and gold paint and the arms of London, Westminster and Kent, sitting on the piers of the 1827 bridge that was the first iron suspension crossing of the Thames. In short, it’s a pretty bridge, although not everyone has been charmed: the designer William Morris – the great Victorian champion of beautiful things, who lived on the Hammersmith bank – called it “this ugly suspension bridge”. Tastes changed, but the star stayed.
That’s the star explained. The Grade II is because it represents a unique piece of Victorian engineering: the only suspension bridge Joseph Bazalgette, the man who sewered London, ever built, its wrought-iron towers clad in ornamental cast iron and its deck slung from massive chains. But it is worth noting that demolition would not wipe out this type or era of bridge: Telford’s Menai and Brunel’s Clifton are still standing. But it is one of only two suspension road bridges over the tidal Thames, alongside Albert upstream. Albert is also closed, for much the same reason. A Victorian-era bridge may look beautiful but is not good at actually serving as a bridge.
So how do you get past this level of protection? Not by arguing harder at a planning meeting, because ordinary planning is the wrong door. A decision to remove the protections would take not one but two Secretaries of State: the Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG) to call it in, and the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) to override it. The one path that is open is the route that HS2 and Crossrail took: treat the crossing as nationally important and authorise it by a bespoke Act of Parliament, which grants consent directly and switches off the heritage veto. Hammersmith Bridge was created by an act of parliament; it would take another to get rid of it.
It is the nuclear option that only central government can reach for, and nobody has.
No one is in charge
The second barrier is that nobody owns the problem. The bridge is split four ways, between the borough that holds it, Transport for London, the Department for Transport that holds the purse, and Historic England, which guards the listing. None has the money, the power and the will at once.
This is not bad luck but the wreckage of 1985, when the Greater London Council was abolished and the capital’s bridges were parcelled out to boroughs, leaving a strategic river crossing at the mercy of one council’s budget. The deadlock has run for years, showing most plainly when ministers found room on a billion-pound wish list of London tunnels while the bridge stayed shut. It is a system that is failing all the way along the Thames, with council unable to afford even upkeep of the bridges they are now responsible for. The answer is obvious: put all the bridges under a single body, put that body underneath the mayoralty of London and fund it; it’s what every other major capital does except London.
The sad story of Hammersmith Bridge, and now Albert Bridge, as well as several other outdated bridges on the Thames (even Putney Bridge) could be used to finally come up with a workable solution, if only there was the political will and skill in place. The legislative route needs one sponsor in central government and one budget line, owning the job from decision to ribbon. Settle who is in charge and most of the rest follows.
The levers nobody pulls
The third barrier is the quietest, because nobody with power is asking for a new bridge. There are letters, debates and plenty of disappointment, but no costed plan to replace it beside the plan to repair it.
The tools to force one exist, and they gather dust. A Transport Select Committee inquiry can haul in ministers and demand a government answer within 60 days; a Backbench Business debate can put a motion MPs must vote on, not another airless hour in Westminster Hall; and budget pressure can be aimed at the Treasury, where the real blockage sits. Above all, an MP could demand the document nobody has produced: a published, costed study weighing a new bridge against forever patching the old one.
That is where you come in. Write to your MP, Fleur Anderson in Putney, Andy Slaughter in Hammersmith and Chiswick, or Sarah Olney in Richmond Park, and ask for two things by name: an inquiry into how London’s bridges are funded, and a costed study that puts replacement on the record. The obvious shortcut, a backbencher’s own Private Member’s Bill, is a dead end: name a single bridge and the bill would likely be ruled “hybrid”, killed by one shouted “Object!”, or starved of money only the government can grant.
What happens next is much smaller. On 6 July the Cabinet votes, not on any of this, but on whether to bid for a £128m phased repair that keeps the bridge open to walkers, cyclists and boats, but not to buses or cars.
The climate objection you may make
With the question of demolition comes another word: carbon. Surely tearing down a Victorian bridge to build a new one is vandalism against the planet, when the greenest structure is the one already standing?
For most buildings, true; for this one, mostly not. The bridge has already failed, which is why it is shut, so “repairing” it is no gentle green retrofit but a £250m, material-heavy near-rebuild in its own right. The most carbon-hungry part of any bridge, the foundations, already exists and survives under either plan, exactly as Bazalgette reused the piers beneath him; the metal that failed is brittle Victorian cast iron, not modern steel, so saving it saves heritage, not reusable carbon.
Nor is a shut bridge green: it sends tens of thousands of daily journeys onto long detours through Putney and Chiswick for decades. Carbon can still be thrown into a planning fight, as when ministers blocked the Marks and Spencer demolition on Oxford Street over its embodied carbon, only for the courts to overturn them. But on this bridge, the usual green trump card does not play.
- Built for £82,117, about £9.3m today
- One body owned it, decided it and paid for it
- £250m to repair, £54m already spent
- Split four ways, with no one in charge
Built in four years
So we come back to where we started. We can still build when we choose to: the Elizabeth line, late and over budget, is now the country’s busiest railway, and Bazalgette’s own sewers are being finished beneath the Thames as you read this. The bridge is its own proof, authorised by Parliament in 1883 and open by 1887, four years later, for £82,117, about £9.3m today, under one body that owned it, decided it and paid for it.
That bridge has been shut to traffic for more than seven years, and we could all be crossing a new one by now. The problem was never that we cannot knock it down, or that we cannot build. It is that we have built a system in which no one can say yes.
From the comments
Updated 2 July 2026
Half of readers in this week’s poll said knock the bridge down and start again; this article examined why that has not happened.
Readers have been making the alternative case in the comments: most Hammersmith and Fulham households have no car (it’s true: 57.5% had no car or van according to the 2021 census); the riverside is quieter and cleaner without motor traffic; and reopening any bridge to cars would generate new journeys, the effect known as induced demand, which a government evidence review confirms is real, though its size varies with circumstances.
One point of record, since the bridge is repeatedly described below as open: it is open to walkers and cyclists only, under constant monitoring of a structure the council’s own engineers still class as sub-standard, and it has carried no cars, buses or ambulances since 2019.
Two readers brought data, and both claims stand up. Sunny pointed to the Department for Transport’s traffic counts as showing less motor traffic in Putney than before the closure. They do: DfT figures for the A219 through Putney put 2025 flows between roughly 13% and 27% below 2018, the last full year before the bridge shut to vehicles. RuthP flagged sensor monitoring of the bridge itself: Telraam, the traffic-counting network that runs the sensor, records more than 12,000 pedestrian and cyclist crossings a day. Both datasets will feed our continuing traffic coverage.
Two ideas stand out. Henrietta Bewley suggests a walking and cycling crossing on the disused piers beside Barnes Bridge. And RuthP asks what it would take to revive Putney High Street as a place rather than a through-route. We will take that up as a story of its own.
The full exchange is in the comments below.
And if it falls down, due to natural causes?…….blocks the Thames….
So many false assumptions and untruths in this article! The idea that ‘we all’ want a bridge that ‘we all’ could be driving over is nonsense: most Londoners don’t drive, and many of the residents of Hammersmith and Barnes – perhaps a majority – would be quite happy for the bridge to remain permanently car-free.
The bridge is used by 1000s of people to walk or cycle across it every day: a far more popular and pleasant experience now than it ever was before 2019 (when the bridge was closed to motor traffic).
As for the writer’s claim that the closure has just pushed all the traffic elsewhere, and that demolishing it to replace it with a grimly functional road bridge is a ‘green’ solution: check the data! Traffic over all the neighbouring bridges has fallen since 2018.
Reopening Hammersmith Bridge to cars would effectively be opening a new road and would soon see a massive increase in traffic overall (it’s called ‘induced demand’).
The important challenge is to provide a lightweight public transport option, which the current, much-loved bridge could carry, for this who need it. Rather than encouraging ugly dreams of demolition, the writer should engage with that challenge.
This topic always stirs a lot of passion, in large part because the importance of this crossing still hasn’t been properly recognised, or a solution found that works for everyone. The longer it drags on, the more entrenched people become.
So, in the spirit of engagement rather than entrenchment, let’s take the points on, but first let’s note what isn’t the case. We asked our readers what they wanted, half said blow it up and start again, so we took that seriously and looked at why that hasn’t happened and what it would actually take.
That isn’t a plan to demolish anything, and it doesn’t assert that everyone wants to drive over it. On the traffic, we agree it has fallen, and have said so: the congestion comes from a junction the council rebuilt expecting Hammersmith to reopen, not from a wave of new cars. And the best answer may not be either/or: two crossings, one for traffic and one for walking and cycling, would cost about the same as the repair and give everyone what they need, cyclists and pedestrians kept clear of cars, buses and ambulances. That’s a case we’ve made before.
Whatever the answer turns out to be, we’ll only reach it by agreement, and that’s the conversation we’re trying to open.
It’s not just about the residents of Hammersmith and Putney though is it? It’s a major route for thousands of people including the trades that keep this city going. Nimbyism at its absolute finest. .
It is hardly Nimbyism not to support a landmark bridge, currently used by thousands of people every day, not needlessly to be knocked down.
It needs a form of public transport, clearly, and I hope the pods proposal into which a huge amount of work has been put will be given the consideration it deserves.
Have you been in Putney recently? Traffic is horrific. Where do you think the traffic has shifted?
Agree that the highly complex political structures are not helping . But I think we need to move away from just talking about cars. I would like to see a piece in Putney News about what is needed to rejuvenate our High Street, Lower Richmond Road and Town centre. The focus has been for too long on rehashing already failed strategies for trying to move more traffic – and not enough on want we need and want for a 21st century high street. the Hammersmith Bridge group’s monitoring shows 12,000 journeys per day across the existing Hammersmith bridge. https://bsky.app/profile/telraam.bsky.social/post/3mplrljfwss2i
Building a new bridge or restoring the existing bridge to take cars will not help Putney. The traffic will still be clogged and the high street still in decline. Would love to see more on – how can we recapture Putney High Street as a place rather than simply moving through traffic? What can the existing infrastructure cope with so that buses and emergency vehicles can move? -How many cars per day and what do we need to do to get to that target? How can we help people (who can) to use their cars less to keep essential traffic – buses etc moving? What are the successful Town Centres in London and elsewhere doing?
As a resident of Putney, Kieren McCarthy will be well aware that Putney High Street and Putney Bridge have been choked with traffic since time immemorial. But of course, it’s always someone else’s fault, and if only Hammersmith Bridge could be knocked down and replaced with a six lane motorway, Putney would once again revert to being a peaceful rural idyll.
As a matter of fact, traffic on Putney Bridge has reduced since Hammersmith Bridge was closed to cars. That’s right – reduced. And the same is true of Chiswick Bridge as well, Hammersmith’s neighbour in the other direction. It’s a simple truth that if it is made less convenient to drive, fewer people do so; conversely, if more routes are opened to cars, more people drive, with the resulting reduction in air quality and increase in danger that you’d expect.
So where does all the traffic go, people ask – well, it doesn’t. People simply find other ways to travel. Thousands of people cross Hammersmith Bridge every day, by bicycle and on foot, pushing buggies, jogging, chatting with their friends, and so on – it has become a lovely place, in contrast to the noisy, polluted crossing that it was when hundreds of cars a day rumbled across it. Hammersmith Bridge was there before cars were invented; cars came and broke it, and now they have been stopped from crossing again.
We live in London, a city with superb public transport. Very few people need to drive a car in London, and there’s no reason why those that choose not to should be inconvenienced and endangered by those that do, as Mr McCarthy advocates.
Kieren, this is wrong on so many levels. But first, a much-needed correction: you repeatedly claim that the bridge is shut, closed. But it isn’t, it is fully open for people to walk and cycle across, and thousands do so every day. And it doesn’t help to use over-the-top language like “stop the bleed.” Really, what bleed?
And there are, as you half-heartedly admit, two major barriers to your “solution:” The fact that the bridge is Grade II* listed, and the cost of a new bridge, which you optimistically put at £180 to £360 million.
Scrapping the listing wouldn’t happen (in any case, why stop there? Tower Bridge is traffic-clogged because it’s only one lane in each direction, so why not scrap that?). And the cost? You refer at one point to HS2: remind us how the cost of that has ballooned, and see if the cost estimate will survive (spoiler alert: it won’t). Furthermore, the whole process will take at least a decade, by which time with global heating we’ll be in a different world.
As Peter Self wrote about the Third London Airport proposal many years ago, it’s nonsense on stilts. But one consolation: at least it wins a prize – for the most crackpot suggestion yet for Hammersmith Bridge.
Kieran, have you looked at these statistics from the DfT: https://roadtraffic.dft.gov.uk/count-points#16/51.466837/-0.213899
If you click into the points, you’ll find that pre-closure traffic levels in Putney were higher that they are today. In fact, Putney was more of a traffic jam before than it is now. It’s clear that the increased difficulty of crossing the river has strained Putney, but it also pushes people to consider alternative travel, like the tube/bus/bike.
The throughput in certain directions is the real problem. If you imagine the traffic system as a bucket of honey with some taps, if the bucket fills up to a certain level and the honey level stops rising, you don’t fix the problem by reducing the flow coming in, you add another outlet, make the bucket bigger. make the honey flow more smoothly out of the existing outlets or reduce the inflow of honey.
The bucket can’t be made bigger. That means more lanes and there’s no space. So that leaves adding another outlet or making the flow smoother.
There could be a bypass built to stop Barnes traffic from clogging up the high street, but Upper Richmond Road already exists. Similarly, local Putney traffic could be routed off West Hill earlier so that the junction by Putney Station becomes ahead only.
OR, you could reconfigure the junction to allow traffic to flow more freely by building some type of pedestrian/cyclist overpass/subway so that they cross less disruptively.
Then there’s induced demand. If the Putney junction flows more freely, even more people will consider driving to be a viable option and traffic will increase again.
Hammersmith Bridge IS open – 1,000s of people walk, cycle and run over it every day.
The majority of hammersmith and Fulham residents do not own a car or have access to one. Most H& F residents don’t want lots more private vehicles driving over Hammersmith Bridge or its replacement to pollute Hammersmith and Fulham with noise and air pollution.
The Thames riverside is soooo much nicer now that we don’t have the noise and air pollution from the traffic driving over Hammersmith Bridge. The walks on both side of the river are important for recreation, especially in H&F, which has relatively little open space compared toto the population.
Castlenau and other parts of Barnes are so much nicer now they do not have lots of through traffic headed for Hammersmith Bridge.
How about considering more options – such as a vehicle club for Barnes residents that includes micro mobility vehicles that are light enough & small enough to go over the bridge as it is now?
Opening a cycle & pedestrian Bridge on the disused piers next to Barnes Bridge would also be a great way to increase the number of river crossings.
More measures to discourage bigger, heavier cars, and to encourage micro mobility & public transport would also help make more space on the roads for the small numbers who really do need to drive.
You say the bridge is open, and people can indeed walk and cycle across. But that is not the test of a bridge.
Hammersmith Bridge carried 22,000 vehicles a day until 2019, cars, buses, lorries, ambulances. It was built to take heavy loads and did so for over a century. Today it cannot safely carry a 1.5-tonne shuttle for elderly and disabled residents, and the number of pedestrians allowed on at once has to be limited so the structure is not overloaded. A bridge that once took buses and now has to ration walkers is not an open bridge. It is a broken one that people are still allowed to cross.
The council’s own engineers say so. They still describe it as “sub-standard”, needing constant monitoring and significant maintenance just to stay open to foot and bike. Right now they are reinforcing 172 overstressed hangers that hold the deck to the chains, propping them with temporary steel rods and greasing the joints so the old structure can still move. I’ve been on the bridge while engineers are manually applying grease – pushing it into the joints with their fingers (I have some pics somewhere). That is not a sign of a healthy bridge.
The stabilisation strengthened the cracked cast-iron pedestals and replaced the seized Victorian bearings – and that was the thing that meant the towers won’t crash into the Thames, but the council calls that only the first phase. Around £50 million has already been spent since 2020 getting it to this point, close to the cost of a new bridge, and all it has bought is a Victorian structure held upright by permanent engineering.
So let us be clear what “open” means here. This is not a sound bridge some would prefer to keep car-free. It is a broken bridge that people are permitted to cross, at a cost of millions, while the argument goes on around it. The only question worth asking is what would actually fix it.
“You say the bridge is open, and people can indeed walk and cycle across. But that is not the test of a bridge.”
Oh, really? Will you now be arguing that the pedestrian Millenium Bridge should be demolished because not only motorised vehicles but even cycles are forbidden from crossing it?!
I disagree that the only question worth asking is “what would actually fix it?” For a start, define ‘fix’: to what standard?
Better questions include:
1) In the short term, how can we help people with mobility issues to cross the bridge?
2) In the long term, what kind of bridge is most desirable and most sustainable?
My own answer to the latter would be the original Victorian structure, repaired to a level where people can walk and cycle safely across it for the forseeable future! And if it could be made strong enough to suport a lightweight electric pod or buggy service, so much the better!
Buses can not go over the bridge, this itself excludes a lot of people from using it.
Hammersmith is a vital public transport hub for SW15 and beyond commuters.
The bridge also needs cooling during the summer and heating during the winter.
The original lights on the bridge are insufficient for pedestrian use, so they have added additional new lighting that is out of character of the original design as is the boxing in on the sides and pedestals.
Repairing the bridge is not only going to be expensive but also short term and will be followed by further closures.
Looking at costs of bridges built elsewhere in the UK we probably could have had a new one with all the money spent on it over the last decade or so.
Of course you will get people advocating spending huge amounts to repair it, but given the size of the UK infrastructure budget they are living on a different planet.
This may sound like a point already made, but cyclists and pedestrians are traffic, too. Motor vehicles aren’t the only legitimate traffic, and they also aren’t what that bridge was built for. As it stands now it’s less silly than Boris Johnson’s idea… On the other hand, listing only compels consideration before disposing of a national treasure, it doesn’t really make it impossible – though I seem to remember it being invented to stop egregious redevelopment of historic London sites. I may be mistaken in that. Regardless, it was built with a life span, which has passed. Though building something new and completely without historic merit will undoubtedly take much longer and cost much more than you say.
Glad to see it pointed out that those cycling and walking are traffic, too. It’s not a point made often enough.
It is equally a national treasure (and certainly a landmark) but it would be hard to defend this if it were simply this rather than used, now, by thousands of people every day.
It does need a form of public transport, clearly. Am so glad the pods proposal is receiving more attention now. A bridge is not a bridge only when you put a car on it.
https://www.bhelt.org.uk/ Many comments above talk about considering a public transport solution for the bridge in the form of clean electric light transit. A new cross river group Barnes Hammersmith Electric Light Transit (BHELT) is bringing Ohmio autonomous shuttles/pods to Barnes Fair on Saturday 11 July for people to see and ask questions to the Ohmio/BHELT team. These are currently operating on the roads in Milton Keynes and could potentially carry thousands of people across Hammersmith Bridge who for whatever reason can’t walk or cycle. The pods will be seen on the roads in Barnes in the week preceding the Fair. Pl see the events page of the website for more info.
Knock the bridge down , its just a giant meccano set . Put it in Bishops Park to span the Thames to Putney Embankment. Rebuild Hammersmith Bridge with a mdern Bridge. Stop the Horrendous waste of money on this doomed project . Keep it simple .