Hammersmith Bridge with Toll, 1827, designed by William Tierney Clark (Hammersmith & Fulham Archives)

We’re pleased to see that a ferry operator has finally been appointed, and conversely disappointed at a low proposed (peak) capacity of 800/hr. total, i.e. 400 each way, cost – not free – £1.55 proposed, though included in hopper & concessionary fares, restricted operating hours of 6am-10pm, and of course the service delay until later this year. 

But as the tale below shows, a temporary bridge was the right solution 140 years ago when the original bridge was falling down through neglect, and remains so today, on the second anniversary of bridge closure.
Accordingly, we  wrote to the Prime Minister recently.

John Dixon by Ian Pearce

Last month we were sent a copy of the lavishly illustrated hardback ‘John Dixon’ by Ian Pearce, published in 2019 (cover shown), which has a fascinating chapter illuminating the design & construction issues of the original Tierney Clark suspension bridge, and its rebuilding as the current bridge, which John Dixon’s company took over in the 1880’s, under Bazalgette and his son Edward.
Readers may order the book direct from the author at the much reduced price of £18 (including UK p&p) using this link.

Hailstone’s book

Here we also need to mention the joint endeavour by the Fulham and Hammersmith, and Barnes and Mortlake Historical Societies in recently updating Charles Hailstone’s 1987 book: A History of Hammersmith Bridge.

To say that the various accounts show history repeating itself would be rather an understatement. Included in Pearce’s book are warnings writ large for those again contemplating tolls and ferries.

A comparative list between then & now:

Hammersmith Bridge under reconstruction, showing Temporary Bridge, by John Archibald Webb
(Richmond upon Thames Borough Art Collection)

✔ A toll that irritated residents both sides of the bridge.
✔ Ownership issues preventing adequate finance & oversight.
✔ Lack of maintenance leading to near collapse.
✔ Concerns over bridge loading capacity, weight.
✔ Questionable strength of bridge chains and hangers.
✔ Roadway disintegration.
✔ Use of inappropriate materials for cost reasons.
✔ Engineers reports unheeded, or “disappeared”.
✔ Plan for a temporary ferry with low capacity & limited hours.
❌ Effect on navigation and the Boat Race.
❓ Temporary bridge, 23ft wide with a separate walkway.

It’s of note that Tierney Clark’s Széchenyi Chain Bridge in Budapest, of similar design to his one in Hammersmith and earlier in Marlow, is also currently closed – for repair and rebuilding – not for the first time,  perhaps with some familiar issues ?

During Bazalgette’s 1880’s bridge reconstruction, a temporary bridge was built both wide enough for traffic, and with spans sufficient for navigation and to allow the Boat Race to continue as shown here, in response to the inadequacies of a proposed ferry, an outcry from the residents of Castelnau (@TfL take note), and at the time, a statutory duty to maintain a crossing, needing an Act of Parliament to circumvent.  Eventually though, the rebuilding was done in just 30 months, and at a cost of £82,177 which is about £10.5M in today’s money. 

181 Talgarth Road – April 2020 RSHP scheme

In April last year we reported on the hotel development proposed for the former West London Magistrate’s Court site at 181 Talgarth Road, a proposal which would include two hotels:  a 442-bedroom, 23-storey luxury hotel, and a 440-bed, 10-storey tourist hotel. Permission for the development was agreed in July, and after referral to the Mayor’ office the consent was confirmed in December.

Since then, with the change in economic circumstances, the developer Dominvs Group has chosen to revise the scheme:  retaining the tourist hotel, but providing Student Accommodation for up to 696 students, possibly linked to the Imperial College White City campus, in place of the 23-storey luxury hotel. 

181 Talgarth Road – March 2021 proposed scheme

Initial proposals are for a student block with massing generally similar to the approved luxury hotel block, but adjusted to reduce the maximum height by two storeys, to 68 metres, and to enlarge the plan to add 2,400 sq. m floor area. We understand that TP Bennett, architects of King’s House at the other end of Shortlands, are to be appointed for this building, and that the accommodation would be run by Scape who are well-known in the sector.

No change is proposed to the tourist hotel design, but the landscaped public realm within the site would become a student amenity space, providing access to the student cycle store – a more mundane provision which lacks the tempietto, restaurant and bar which created a welcome spark in the earlier scheme. The prospect of a revised planning application has revived the considerable public opposition to the earlier development, and the Society is participating in consultations currently taking place.

181 Talgarth Road – 2021 proposed public realm

This new scheme opens a further chapter in the uncomfortable history of this important site. The story began with the sale of the land by the Ministry of Justice, evidently failing to follow Cabinet Office guidelines which require that, prior to commercial sale, sites in public ownership should be assessed for residential, educational or similar public benefit. The sale of the Magistrates Court site was advertised with enticements including ‘precedent for tall buildings’ and reports of ‘positive pre-application feedback from LBHF’  without revealing the LBHF advice received.  It is not clear if the £42m purchase price paid by Dominvs was based on a development valuation gleaned from the ‘evolving’ Town Centre Masterplan – a plan which has been evolving since 2015, but has still not been reviewed through public consultation. The provisional Masterplan currently circulating is based on a plan which incorporates the completed A4 fly-under tunnel, describing a misleading urban context for the hotel site. 

Ravenscourt Park Tea House – from 2021/00539/LBCHF

The Ravenscourt Park Tea House, a popular stopping point in the park, has been in a dilapidated condition for some time, and been a concern of the Friends of Ravenscourt Park, as well as being on Historic England’s Buildings At Risk register. It closed in 2019 largely because of its increasingly poor condition.

The Friends, chaired by our committee member Annabelle May, had a very informative and encouraging meeting recently with senior planning officer Steve Hollingworth and head of capital projects Nilesh Pankhania.  Two architects from Burrell Foley Fischer also attended, and showed their detailed plans for total external refurbishments, using the approved materials, with the aim of making the building weather proof and usable again. A stark revelation was the neglect and inappropriate patching-up of past decades. 

Ravenscourt Park Tea House – from 2021/00539/LBCHF

These works also include the much-needed total redesign and refurbishment of all the public toilets on the site.  The planning application has been lodged, and they hope to be able to start works in early summer.  We were told that funding has been identified.

Ravenscourt Park Tea House – 1831 – from 2021/00539/LBCHF

As the Friends have campaigned for a long time about the deteriorating state of this important 200 year old Grade II historic building, this was all extremely good news, and as a focal point in the Park we all look forward to seeing it in use as a café again before too long.

Smilers scrap metal merchants, Atwood Road (2011)

Garages are an endangered species, locally and across London. Where once council flats would have had rows of garages below – often beloved of British spy and detective dramas where exclusively bad stuff happens – new developments are mandated not only to have bicycle storage, but also to be car-free, meaning garage-free too.

Free-standing garages and similar small industrial buildings are being demolished for housing, and as we’ve experienced locally, offices too.

The car is next on the endangered species of course, and current bogeyman of every level of government and social media alike.  One can only wonder when the car is completely green, producing no emissions – tailpipe or otherwise – running on tyres made of waste plastic designed to shed no particulate matter, what will the Twitterati and government have to berate us old dinosaurs with?  Don’t laugh – it’s only a decade or so away.

Lest we disappear down that rabbit hole, let’s focus on garages, and why they might be important for a range of socio-economic reasons, not as just car storage, which few ever used them for anyway. The site pictured above is from our 2012 collection of 50 favourite places, and true to form, was redeveloped soon after and became the location of a Nancye Goulden Award of 2015 – with not a garage in sight.

We are reminded by last week’s Last Word that Sidney Alford, the maverick explosives expert who created methods of defusing the terrorist’s preferred weapon – the Improvised Explosive Device – started in a garage. Locally, Shepherds Bush, to quote our follower @sbcalling …nowhere else on the planet has a richer history of rock & roll, TV, film and pop culture than Shepherd’s Bush, White City & Hammersmith, and where the NME has claimed one rock star to every 1,222 of the population, may have significantly benefited from garages.  Many an act has started in one, often for practice, away from others, making as much noise as they like, there’s a plethora of terminology relating to garage bands, a garage rock genre and so-on.  It certainly worked out for locals The Who, punk icons The Clash (Garageland) and the maverick Sex Pistols, with Danny Boyle’s new drama Pistol filmed last week in The Cross Keys, 45 years on.  Not much more than a glorified garage at the time, the laundry behind the 2009 award-winning 22 St Peter’s Square, AKA Island Studios, became rather significant to a huge swathe of the music industry in the 1960’s and 1970’s as Chris Blackwell’s Island Records.

Maybe no longer to your taste, but while pondering a misspent youth fixing cars in parent’s garages, including a less-fondly remembered side-line of garage rock, think of the economic benefits of garages:

Steve Jobs Garage

• Apple Inc., was started by Steves – Jobs and Wozniak – in a garage. Now worth $2,100,000,000,000 – the most valuable company in the World.
• Jeff Bezos started Amazon in his garage, Now worth $1,700,000,000,000 – the second most valuable company in the World.
• Bill Gates and Paul Allen started Microsoft in a garage, close behind at $1,600,000,000,000.
• Larry Page and Sergey Brin started Google in a garage, now worth $1,000,000,000,000.
• Bill Hewlett and David Packard started their enterprise in a modest garage at 367 Addison Avenue, Palo Alto – now worth $9,000,000,000.  It’s clearly worth only $9 Billion, because it was only a single garage, though Walt Disney did OK from his single garage too.
• 

  Sipsmith Distillery: 27 Nasmyth St [Photo: Horton & Garton]

  Proving that being in the USA and the world of technology isn’t a pre-requisite, Brewdog is a recent Scottish garage success, now valued at nearly £2,000,000,000. They even have a bar in the aforementioned ‘Bush.

• Finally, and a lot closer to home, the now well-known Sipsmith gin distillery only started in 2009 in a modest 500 sq.ft. garage in Nasmyth Street W6, and was sold for £50M just 7 years later. There are differing views around early sales, but the relative numbers above tell their story.

It’s now just over six months since the Bridge was closed to pedestrians and cyclists, and over 22 months since it was closed to traffic, yet there is neither a Bridge repair contract nor an alternative crossing facility in place. Repair work will not progress until there is forward funding to pay the estimated £128M cost (over and above TfL funded temporary stabilisation works). Government funding has been offered conditional on a LBHF contribution of £64M, 50% of the cost, as reported in last weekend’s Observer. This is evidently way beyond the LBHF resources; whilst there has been media reference to the potential of council reserves, the 2019 external auditors report states “…Council do have ongoing financial pressures, which need to be addressed in the medium term… As a result, the Council is now maintaining a reserves position that is below the average when compared to other London Boroughs”.  Government funding for local authorities has been considerably reduced in recent years, and an uplift in council tax, aside from social and political issues, would only generate additional income of around £650K per 1% rise.

Foster & Partners bridge proposal

Hammersmith Bridge would seem to be a unique and most deserving case for special funding, and it is so frustrating that the critical issue of project financing is not addressed in the government Task Force meetings, despite its obvious importance. However we understand that, separate to the Task Force meetings, LBHF have been exploring initiatives which draw on the private sector, not only in the Foster/Ritblat temporary bridge proposal, but also investigating the viability of private funding, secured on an income stream provided by a toll: this financing method which has been used for a number of other UK bridges, including in London, the Dartford Crossing. LBHF residents would be likely to cross toll-free. We understand LBHF have now submitted a comprehensive financial plan to Grant Shapps based on this funding approach.  Consideration might be given to 1% of the toll to be set aside for social funding in Hammersmith, similar to the arrangement on the London Eye ticket price.

Some valuable comparative information has emerged regarding the financing of other London bridges. For the recent £9.6M repairs to Albert Bridge, RBKC paid £2.6M in line with many other bridge repairs as recent research indicates, while TfL paid £7M. The £9M refurbishment of Chiswick Bridge was paid for by TfL. Since TfL are out of funds, the recent upgrade of Wandsworth Bridge was paid for by Wandsworth Council – but since the bridge is a simple cantilever structure, fabricated in steel in 1940, the overall cost was only around £6M, less than 6% of the bill for the 1887 Hammersmith Bridge.

These comparative repair costs highlight the unique problems with the bridge, an ornate, Grade II* listed structure constructed from cast iron and wood in 1887, two years after the first internal combustion engine came off the Benz production line. Before the traffic closure in April 2019, over 20,000 vehicles and 2,000 single-decker buses were crossing the Bridge daily; until total closure in August 2020 16,000 pedestrians and cyclists were crossing daily. Until 1998 heavy goods vehicles and double-decker buses were using the Bridge.

The Bridge is clearly not fit for this purpose. If the outward appearance of the Bridge is to be retained, then within the decorative outer claddings the structure has to be not repaired, but replaced, to create a Bridge which is able to sustain the demands of 21st century traffic.  We discuss this in more detail in the accompanying article.

We’ve made several meaningful and thought-through suggestions in the half-dozen articles, and as many letters to the main bridge protagonists in the last year, from simple widening the pathways to make the bridge more accessible, and to improve public safety, to ways to invisibly fix the 19th century structure for the longer term, in a maintainable 21st century way.  Put simply, we believe the current premise for repairs has set the engineers off on a bit of a wild goose chase.  While much good work has been done, how much is useful under an alternate premise, and at what opportunity cost ?

Bridge anchor (cover removed)

As we pass six months since complete closure, we’ve made it crystal clear that there appears very little, if any, value in repairing the much-debated, though normally invisible, cast iron pedestals shown.  We continue to be dismayed that so much attention is paid to evaluating and repairing these simple yet demonstrably unsuitable bolted-in components (c.f. Mott MacDonald summary and more detailed  Aecom report) when replacement with modern equivalents is an obvious solution.  Not only that, but by including, as we’ve suggested, a built-in lifting or jacking mechanism for the chains in a new design pedestal, future maintenance inspections and bearing replacements (the cause of many of the current problems, and certainly the precipitous closure), would be reduced to perhaps scheduled weekend roadway closures every 5 years or so, at low cost and public impact.  This, without even considering the environmental and financial running costs of the proposed chain heating and monitoring systems that would no longer be needed. 

Surely we can’t be the first to spot such an opportunity for a better and long-lasting engineered solution at lower overall cost – plus the opportunity to cut a whole phase of repair work ? The question is why can we only find passing reference to renewal as an option in the copious Aecom report?  Which is where we return to the issue of the premise, assumed to include retaining the original components.

A false premise

Temporary pedestal support frame

The TfL drawings shown at the public meeting in October, to which we responded, show a temporary support frame for “emergency stabilisation” – already designed – that could be better used during pedestal renewal, using offsite built and tested replacements, instead of a long and expensive (£13.9M + percentage  – say half – we don’t have a detailed cost breakdown) of the permanent stabilisation costs, totalling c.£30M. 

The current proposal for onsite shoring-up would hardly respect the Grade II* listing, Bazalgette’s design, or materials (assuming that’s the rationale), rendering the pedestals unrecognisable as historic components, especially when infilled with [c. 6 tonnes] of steel fibre reinforced concrete as proposed, and would, according to the Aecom report, leave further nascent cast-iron problems, including a possible failure mode where the cast iron collapses onto the unusual prop/concrete/cast iron mix. The cast iron pedestals would instead make fine museum pieces, to accompany Tower Bridge’s stream engine, removed from service when proven equally obsolete over 40 years ago.

As membership secretary, I regularly hear the clarion call  “I’m not on Social Media so I can’t see your posts…”  It’s a popular myth that you must sign up, notwithstanding the fact that our latest Twitter and Facebook postings automatically appear on our home page (have you checked recently..?),  all three “platforms” that we use are publicly accessible to anyone, as are most social media sites.  They will encourage you to sign up, perhaps even boost the myth that you must for obvious reasons, but you can ignore that without missing that much.  However paradoxically it will help our cause if you do sign up and follow us – read on…

Facebook Twitter Instagram

I’ve read concerns about  tracking, cookies, and a good range of urban myths too, but many are outdated.  A number of issues are addressed in our website and accessibility guide and related privacy policy, but in short if you don’t have an account with the platform in question, there’s limited tracking they can do, while at the same time still giving you access to useful local material. Increasingly newer browser versions are closing these avenues of tracking joy, and the effects are often rather more prosaic than perhaps popular hyperbolae might suggest.  You can, of course, always delete browsing data, including cookies, or use the Incognito/inPrivate modes available on all modern browsers to properly eliminate tracking if it still concerns you.

Why follow us on Social Media?

#BernieSanders patiently waits to cross the Bridge

It’s a lot simpler and quicker for us to post short updates, reactions to news, and links to events of interest on these platforms – particularly Twitter – than it is to create longform articles such as this, or physical/pdf newsletters.  One or two of our survey responses have suggested more regular updates, and this is one way to respond.  These postings form a useful complement to our other publishing, as text messages complement email and letters.  We post something almost daily on one platform or another,  so there’s always something new on the website as a result too.

Foster & Partners / Delancey temporary bridge proposal

Bridge proposal

We were surprised and excited in equal measure to see a radical new proposal published by the council, in partnership with Foster and Partners and Sir John Ritblat of Delancey, the company now owning the Earls Court development site.  This is designed to temporarily solve the conundrum of getting across the river while the original bridge is repaired.  Details can be read on the council’s website, there’s obviously more detailed work needed to bring it to fruition.

Key points are:

• Raised temporary deck envisages crossing for vehicles, pedestrians and cyclists on 2 levels.
• The deck would overlay and rest on the footings of the existing bridge.
• River traffic could pass underneath.
• Costs believed lower and timescale significantly faster than previous plans.
• Partial dismantling and offsite refurbishment of the existing structure while temporary structure in place.
• Transport Secretary given outline brief by H&F Council Leader on 25th November.

There’s been generally positive comment in the press and social media, and we were particularly pleased to see our favoured approach of offsite construction/restoration being embraced, which should improve the quality of the end result.

Funding

Since the public Task Force meeting in October, there have been snippets of gossip from behind the scenes, but little significant  progress to report. TfL have been instructed to pay for a temporary ferry river crossing, and to contribute £4M towards the bridge stabilising work, drawing from their recent £1.8B government emergency funding.

Central government has now promised to fund the project, conditional on a substantial contribution from the local authority.  LBHF report that funds are not available to meet this demand.  The Hammersmith Society and others are pressing the government to take the long view, and release the Bridge funds now, and negotiate separately with the local authority,  and this is set out in our letters to the Task Force chairman and the Secretary of State for Transport, as previously published.

Enquiries to LBHF and other parties have revealed some further context to the funding problem.  We understand that Hammersmith became involuntary owners of the Bridge in 1985, when the government abolished the GLC (Greater London Council); there is no record of a condition audit taking place at the time, and no maintenance arrangement accompanying the gift, which was perhaps a mistake.

In normal circumstances structural repairs to the bridges over the Thames have been paid for by TfL, with costs of a fraction of the c. £150M budget for Hammersmith Bridge;  this very substantial cost arises largely from the design of the structure with cast iron, and design restrictions on the repair methods imposed by Historic England Grade ll* listing status.