Wandsworth Council is asking TfL for £200,000 to help fix the traffic at Putney Bridge junction.
The money would pay towards moving the pedestrian crossing on the bridge. Every time someone presses the button to cross, the green light for traffic turning left out of Lower Richmond Road is cut from 42 seconds to 25. Moving the crossing further down the bridge gives those drivers 42 seconds every cycle, 17 seconds more, and sends people on foot back to crossing in three stages via two islands, as they did before the junction was rebuilt in 2024.
Cabinet approved the move on 12 October, with £450,000 of the council’s own money given as the estimated cost. A new paper going to the council’s transport committee on Thursday adds £100,000 of Transport for London money this year and asks TfL for another £100,000 next year. The paper refers to the October decision but not to its £450,000, and the October paper says nothing about TfL money. Neither says what moving the crossing will now cost; the council has been asked.
The £100,000 for this year is being taken from a road-safety scheme nearly three miles away in Summerstown. The council had £100,000 of TfL money this year, and £260,000 pencilled in for next year, to replace the roundabouts where Wimbledon Road meets Plough Lane, Summerstown and Blackshaw Road with traffic lights, and to add better pedestrian crossings, new cycling infrastructure and bus improvements.
The new paper says that scheme “is no longer progressing” and moves its money to Putney, “to fund the relocation of a pedestrian crossing”. It does not say why that scheme has stopped, and next year’s £260,000 has gone with it.
TfL is being asked to put money into a junction it helped to shape, by a council whose previous administration refused to change it.
We went back through the junction’s history, from 2017 to the new funding paper.
Members can read how TfL turned down three safer designs, then set the lights to timings that did not match its own model. They also get how the junction became an election, from a leader who refused to revisit it to a private letter about public anger.
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What members get from this story
- The three safer designs TfL turned down, and the traffic data it insisted on
- The signal timings TfL got wrong, and the £169,000 of fixes that followed
- How the junction became an election, and what the winners did next
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The move still needs TfL’s agreement, which Cabinet made a condition of its decision. Neither paper says whether that has been given. The council’s own £450,000 is to come “where possible” from the payments developers make when they build, on top of a £250,000 budget the council already had for Putney High Street. Officers have already sent next year’s bid to TfL to meet its deadline; Cabinet is being asked to confirm it in December.
As with the council’s plan to charge roadworks firms, which won’t measure a single queue, no target has been set for what moving the crossing should achieve.
What happens next
The Transport Overview and Scrutiny Committee considers the funding paper at 7.30pm on Thursday 19 November at Wandsworth Town Hall. The meeting is webcast and the committee can only comment: the decision goes to Cabinet on 9 December. TfL is expected to confirm next year’s allocations in February.
Putney.news asked Wandsworth Council on 12 November whether the £200,000 is on top of the £450,000, what moving the crossing will now cost, why the Summerstown scheme stopped and whether TfL has agreed to the move. The council did not respond in time for publication.
