Wild designs – and fierce opposition – for another new bridge across the Thames
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Version 0 of 1. There are waterfalls and go-faster striped cycle lanes, funhouses and fairy lights, as well as a handful of odd things to which no words can do justice. A diverse assortment of 74 designs has been unveiled for a new bridge across the Thames, to span the river from Nine Elms to Pimlico in southwest London, providing a “distinctive gateway” to this rapidly changing part of the city. “We want not only a functional bridge, but a beautiful bridge,” says Wandsworth council’s Conservative leader, Ravi Govindia. “It should be a genuine link between time and space that is both a marker and a wayfinder.” One word he is careful not to use for this thrilling new space-time portal is “iconic”. But that’s what they’re after: a monument to trumpet a place being touted as “the greatest transformational story at the heart of the world’s greatest city”. Longtime home to a jumble of sheds, from Royal Mail’s South London Mail Centre to the New Covent Garden fruit and vegetable market, the stretch of the river from Vauxhall to Battersea power station is fast turning into one of the city’s flashiest residential districts: 18,000 homes are currently rising out of the ground, forming a forest of towers along the riverfront, mostly consisting of luxury flats marketed to overseas investors. Penthouse apartments are on sale for a cool £9m, while only 3,000 homes will be classed as “affordable,” ie up to 80% of the superheated market rates. In a piece of urban planning worthy of JG Ballard, the new developments are arranged in a fortified arc around the forthcoming US Embassy – or as close as its defensive mound and 30m bomb-blast setback will allow. The Dutch and Chinese missions will soon be moving here too, the marriage of embassies and super-prime “buy to leave” property forming a high-security urban enclave, an eerie, empty place where few lights will ever be switched on. Still, perhaps the bridge will bring some life. As Govindia puts it, “people from Pimlico will be able to cross the river to shop at Waitrose and frequent the new restaurants and bars of Nine Elms”. But the residents of Pimlico are not quite so keen. In fact, both Westminster’s Labour and Conservative parties have come out in fierce opposition to Wandsworth’s plans, claiming it would destroy one of the few green spaces left on the riverside. “Our officers have, and continue to express strongly the council’s opposition to the proposed bridge,” says Westminster’s Heather Acton, its cabinet member for sustainability and parking, “on the grounds of its visual and environmental impact including the impact that a new bridge would have at a landing site in Westminster, on traffic flows, pedestrian movement and on residential amenity.” Related: London's Garden bridge: 'It feels like we're trying to pull off a crime' The competition follows the recent furore over plans for a garden bridge in central London, a fairytale glade proposed to sprout between Temple and the South Bank, initiated by Joanna Lumley and Thomas Heatherwick. But unlike this controversial scheme, which will be just 300m from an existing bridge and attract 7 million people a year, bringing an extra 3 million visitors to the already overcrowded South Bank, Govindia insists that the Nine Elms crossing will be “a genuine contribution to London’s transport infrastructure”. If he can convince his neighbours across the river, the planned bridge will have separated pedestrian and cycle lanes, unlike the garden bridge across which cycling will be forbidden, and be “freely open to the public at all times” – again differing from the planted folly, which will close at night and require advance registration for groups, not to mention be shut 12 days a year for corporate events. The Nine Elms-to-Pimlico bridge is following the general rules by which big new pieces of London infrastructure come to be. The open design competition has come after a long-drawn-out and detailed Transport for London feasibility study, and the shortlisted schemes will be assessed by an architectural jury and an expert technical panel. The garden bridge, on the other hand, came out of the private lobbying of a well-connected celebrity and meetings with the mayor behind closed doors. It was smoothly oiled through the planning system, granted permission by councils on both banks, based on little detailed information, and took a whopping £60m of public funding before anyone knew what was happening. It will cost a total of £175m to build: bridges with trees on don’t come cheap. Related: Boris Johnson: cable car numbers crunch The Nine Elms bridge is set to be a fraction of the price at £40m, £26m of which has already been earmarked from community infrastructure levy contributions from nearby developments. The rest, says Govindia, could be covered by sponsorship – alarmingly opening the doors for a branded bridge along the lines of the empty Emirates Air Line or the Barclays cycle super highways, the bright blue billboards that thread their way through the city. One entry appears to be designed with that very sponsor in mind, as a big blue strip terminating in circular cycle ramps at either end. Such details of funding are still to be ironed out, but it is astonishing that a new pedestrian and cycle connection for one of London’s fastest growing “opportunity areas” should have to rely on private sponsorship, while substantial public funds are being lavished on a superfluous mayoral vanity project in the centre of the city, which will be closed to the public for much of the time and likely require ticketing (although the trust behind it insists that it will not). Still, if Westminster can’t be persuaded, Nine Elms might end up with a fancy pier to nowhere instead. The 74 entries to the Nine Elms competition have gone on public display and can be viewed online here. Wandsworth is inviting comments, which will be fed into the jury’s discussions. In the meantime, here are 10 entries that caught our eye ... The gushing mandolin No doubt inspired by the fabled lute-making workshops of ancient Pimlico, this scheme takes the form of a gigantic bowlback mandolin plonked on the river. As if a bridge shaped like a medieval instrument wasn’t enough, the designers have also proposed a majestic waterfall to gush down either side, while cyclists will be forced to go on an inexorable spiralling journey down into the depths of its bowl. It promises to be a popular hangout for budding minstrels. Garden bridge on a budget As if a model of Thomas Heatherwick’s garden bridge had been dropped on the way to the photographer’s studio and hastily reassembled with some string, this scheme is perhaps a more accurate depiction of how a bridge with trees on it would actually turn out. Like Joanna Lumley’s floating forest, it is formed from two big planters, although rather than growing towards each other to make the bridge they seem to be desperately trying to get away, reluctantly tied together by a cumbersome assemblage of ramps and wires. The greenhouse funhouse More a greenhouse bridge than a garden bridge, apparently modelled on the diagrid structure of OMA’s Seattle library, only extruded into a long latticework tube. Or were the designers inspired by the multi-storey pleasure-palace bridge proposed for Vauxhall by the Glass Age Development Committee in the 1960s? Either way, it promises to be a miraculous gravity-defying place, where bronze Henry Moore sculptures will float in the air and children will hover above the floor, a delirious scene that promises to drive visitors into a selfie-taking frenzy. Mini Millau One of the most elegant entries, this ghostlike apparition of a bridge recalls the ethereal structure of Norman Foster’s Millau Viaduct, which hangs above the clouds in southern France like a silvery spider’s web. It even comes with the promise of returning London to the hazy world it was when the misty-eyed Mr Turner roamed the banks of the Thames, complete with a Battersea Power Station merrily chugging out enough smoke to obscure the towers rapidly rising along the riverside. Sol LeBridge Like a Sol LeWitt sculpture that’s been staggered and stacked to oblivion, this skeletal structure seems to wilfully undermine conventional engineering logic. It’s a box girder bridge that wants to be a suspension bridge, taking the silhouette formed by two towers and curving cables, reinterpreted with a series of connected portal frames. Madness or genius? You’ll have to ask an engineer. Either way, it looks like it will make a fun climbing frame for protesters outside the new US Embassy, with plenty of convenient places to hang banners. The go-faster bridge There’s no doubt which mode of transport has priority on this go-faster striped bridge, which has a red uber-highway for cyclists charging down its centre. The stripped-back deck will be a sure-fire hit with the Lycra lobby, while pedestrians can choose between ambling along a wiggly profiled boardwalk, or venture upwards and over the vertiginous arch. Little funicular railway cars also appear to be part of the offering, curiously emblazoned with union jacks. Although you might want to think twice before you get locked into a capsule on a bridge that seems to be held up by helium balloons. The spaffy tangle A kind analogy might be the swirling ribbons of rhythmic gymnastics, frozen in a poetic ripple. But it looks more like the sticky mess you end up with when you step on a piece of freshly spat-out chewing gum and try to pull it off your shoes. Or perhaps it’s a hymn to the ecstasy of Old Father Thames, excited by the priapic monuments shooting up along his banks and caught mid-climax in a spaffy tangle. It could be straight from the X-rated stable of Japanese sculptor Takashi Murakami. The blade A dose of calming simplicity after the crazed writhing of the previous entry, this essay in minimalist design is a paean to restraint and technical prowess – indeed it looks too slender to be true. A single blade, gently drooping under its own weight, it is startling for being the opposite of every icon-forging “place-making” tendency that such a design contest usually encourages. Either that, or they ran out of time in the model-making workshop and used a ruler to stand in for their design. Razor-wire party bridge What could be better to represent the high-security leisurescape of Nine Elms than the delightful duo of razor wire and fairy lights? Fusing the two into a curly-whirly loop-the-loop tangle of twinkling pink steel, this proposal effortlessly embodies fun and fear in equal measure. And it would make a great place to walk down the aisle for a flamboyant Vauxhall wedding. Too bad Elton John already got married. The flaming mouth of Hades Getting through US immigration procedures can be quite an ordeal, so perhaps there is no better entrance to welcome visa applicants to the high-security domain of the US Embassy than the roaring mouth of Hades itself. Pushing the boundaries of technology, the architects appear to be proposing the novel structural solution of a great swirling fireball to hold up their bridge. Either that, or a nest of coloured neon thread. Whatever it is, it looks like the most appropriate solution to usher people into the paranoid high-security high-end hellhole Nine Elms is fast becoming. • This article was amended on 27 February 2015 to add a line pointing out that the trust behind the proposed garden bridge insists that it will not require ticketing, and to clarify expected visitor numbers: an earlier version suggested the bridge was expected to attract an extra 7 million tourists a year to the South Bank. |