Imagine admiring the azaleas as you hear the river gurgling below, smelling the roses as you look over to St Paul’s or enjoying the shade of small oaks as you hurry across to a business meeting in the City. Thousands of Londoners have already endorsed the garden bridge that Thomas Heatherwick has designed for the Thames.
Some £85 million in private money has been raised to plant 270 trees, 22,000 perennials, ferns and grasses and 64,000 bulbs along its spans. Designers, businessmen, celebrities and local residents have backed this horticultural version of the medieval London Bridge.
But now, as the first pile was ready to be driven into the riverbed, Lambeth council is threatening a veto, pulling out of talks over the land lease required for the bridge.
The reason, its Labour leader argues, is that £30 million in public funding will come from Transport for London, and a “blank cheque” cannot be justified at a time of spending cuts to the transport budget. The political context is that Sadiq Khan, Labour’s mayoral candidate, calls the bridge a “white elephant”, and the National Audit Office is questioning its cost.
Such a blinkered, last-minute attempt to renege on a previous commitment is not only a disgrace that reflects badly on Lambeth; it is the kind of political obstinacy that has threatened to derail many previous innovative structures now seen as adding joy to the capital’s landscape: the London Eye, the Gherkin, the Shard and the Millennium Bridge.
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The issue goes beyond the banks of the Thames, however. The garden bridge is an affirmation of the beauty and peace of nature amid the turmoil of a man-made urban environment. All the greatest British cities now cherish their parks as the lungs that bring us air, light and rest. Many are thinking of how gardens, the quintessential glory of Britain, can be extended. London has shown us how.