Hammersmith Bridge council approves plan not to fix it

Hammersmith and Fulham’s cabinet agreed last night to give up on reopening Hammersmith Bridge to cars and buses, then spent longer arguing about a campaign video than about the decision itself.

No cabinet member spoke against – or even about – the £128m bid to the government’s new Structures Fund, a pot for repairing ageing bridges and similar structures, which will keep the crossing open only to pedestrians, cyclists and river traffic. For Putney, that removes any remaining doubt: the traffic and bus disruption since the bridge closed in 2019 is not a temporary arrangement waiting to be undone. It is now the arrangement.

Passion, then a flat no

The deputy leader from the other side of the Thames in Richmond, Alexander Ehmann, asked to talk at the meeting and was invited to make his case for holding out for full restoration. He had made a similar case at a protest on the bridge in January, calling it “the embodiment of civic failure” and “a symbol of disgrace.”

He made much the same argument again on Monday. “The question tonight is not whether the bridge can be restored,” he told the cabinet, “it is whether there is the fight to restore it.” Then he was asked directly whether Richmond would help pay for it.

“The short answer is no,” Ehmann said. “The council have been asked that before, and I’m not planning on making a super announcement tonight that Richmond Council’s going to throw in a whole [sum].”

Nobody in the room challenged the contradiction between the two positions, campaigning for more ambition while declining to fund it.

The same is true for Wandsworth Council. Just days after publicly campaigning for the bridge to open and complaining about its impact on Putney and Roehampton, the-then transport cabinet member, Cllr Jenny Yates, sat in a closed meeting with Hammersmith & Fulham representatives and the government and refused to contribute to the cost. Pressed again at a hustings in April, Yates, said: “Wandsworth Council has never been formally asked to contribute financially and we’re not in a position to do so. We need our capital money to keep our own bridges safe.”

Nothing left to give

H&F’s leader, Stephen Cowan, has his own explanation for why his council has no room to offer more. He told cabinet that the previous Conservative administration spent only £63,000 on the bridge before Labour took control, and that “every single part of it is rotten.” By his telling, that inherited neglect explains why H&F has since spent close to £58m stabilising a bridge that would now cost roughly £300m to restore fully, money nobody, including central government, has agreed to provide.

Cowan was also clear about who he thinks should be paying instead. Three times in one meeting, he returned to the same framing: that the bridge “is a strategic asset that should be fixed by other strategic authorities,” and that the loudest complaints “are not coming from Hammersmith and Fulham. They’re coming from south of the river largely.” He recalled being asked why “one small, third smallest borough in London” should pay for a bridge “largely to the benefit of people in south of a river,” and dismissed as unhelpful the “people who lived in South of the River sending me letters saying that we should put council tax up by £800.”

It is a bridge across the River Thames in one of the world’s biggest capitals.

A row that showed the worst of both

By the end of the discussion, H&F’s Conservative opposition leader, Jose Afonso, had had enough. “It’s pretty self-evident you’re never going to reopen the bridge,” he said at one point, “so why would I have further questions?” Cowan used the moment to turn the questioning back on him, over a pledge from Afonso’s own election campaign: a temporary “military bridge” that Afonso’s party had promised to build, at a price Cowan put at seven million pounds.

Asked to repeat the figure, Afonso said he could not recall it, though he insisted it was “in the documentation.” Pressed again, he did not deny the seven million pound figure either. “If it’s not, I don’t believe it is,” he said, “because I believe it’s a good idea.”

Cowan did not let the point stand on its own. He raised Afonso’s inexperience twice, telling him early on that he did not “often come to these meetings,” then later that he did not “come here very often.” He said the chamber was “not a pub or a football terrace.” He then demanded, at length, that Afonso apologise “on behalf of your party” for having “played political games” with the bridge, repeating the demand when Afonso would not answer it.

Afonso would not apologise either, and did not engage with the figure again. Instead he turned the argument back on the government. “I’m not apologising for my manifesto pledge,” he said. “The reality is the ownership of this failure is on you.” Neither man returned to what the other had actually said.

Cowan closed by declaring, for the record, that Afonso had come to the meeting “not knowing the price of the Bailey Bridge that he proposed to build,” and told him the public would judge him “for the tomfoolery, the game playing and the sheer dishonesty of how you’ve treated this matter.” He ended by advising him to “know your stuff before you start making criticisms.”

Afonso arrived unable to defend a figure from his own party’s pledge, then refused to either confirm it or drop it. Cowan, having made that point once, spent several more minutes making it again in increasingly personal terms.

Seven years after Hammersmith Bridge closed to traffic, there is a solid case for simply demolishing it. Monday’s vote did not go that far. But it settled, for good, the question that has hung over every meeting on this bridge since 2019, whether cars and buses would cross it again. Cabinet answered that without a single voice raised against it, then spent far longer on a petty political spat.

That is the real failure: not the bridge itself but the pattern around it. Two councils spent years demanding more while declining, when asked directly, to help. A funding model inherited from the abolition of the Greater London Council in the 1980s, which leaves one small borough solely liable for a crossing used by many who live nowhere near it. It has never been seriously reformed, only argued about.

Last night’s meeting was not evidence that anyone plans to fix that model. It was evidence of what happens while nobody does. Politicians treat a shared infrastructure failure as a stage for scoring points off each other, because scoring points, unlike fixing bridges, costs nothing.