Hammersmith & Fulham council has ‘washed its hands’ of the Bridge, says Hammersmith Bridge SOS chair.
Story 210
Nigel Edwards, chair of Hammersmith Bridge SOS, made the comment in an interview with Helen Edward on the Barnes Pond Life Podcast.
Hammersmith Bridge SOS has campaigned since 2020 for motor-vehicle access to be restored to the bridge.
In the interview, Mr Edwards also questioned the traffic data used by car-free bridge campaigners and set out what he sees as major technical obstacles to running an electric shuttle or pod service across the bridge.
Welcome to Barnes2050, a place-based futures project asking: how do we make sure Barnes - the place and its people - is thriving and climate-ready by 2050?
If you have any interest in the future of Hammersmith Bridge, you’ll find the interview worthwhile.
Three points are especially worth pulling out:
engagement with Hammersmith & Fulham council
the challenge of electric shuttles or pods
the limitations of the traffic data used by car-free bridge campaigners
Hammersmith & Fulham council. Hello? Anyone there?
Nigel Edwards set out a bleak view of Hammersmith & Fulham (H&F)council’s handling of Hammersmith Bridge.
Shift away from the Foster+Partners/COWI proposal
For some time, H&F council had focused heavily on the Foster + Partners/COWI proposal, which involved a temporary double-deck crossing within the existing bridge structure.
Mr Edwards said the council now appeared to have stepped back from that approach. The council had argued that the funding plan would require a toll, opposed by the Mayor of London, and that introducing one would need legal approval from central government and could take time to implement’.
Lack of engagement and prioritisation
Mr Edwards said it had become extremely difficult to engage with H&F council or get clear information about progress. Campaigners, he said, have been forced to rely on Freedom of Information requests.
He also said the bridge was omitted from the council’s recent town plan. Instead, he argued, the council seemed more focused on other major local investments, including an £800 million ‘flyunder’ to replace the flyover, a new civic campus and pedestrianisation around King Street.
‘Washing their hands’ of the Bridge
Mr Edwards said he felt the council had ‘washed their hands’ of the Bridge and was no longer interested in funding further work.
He pointed out that Hammersmith & Fulham council’s sole ownership of the Grade II* listed bridge is, in effect, a historical accident. His suspicion is that the council does not want to carry the extraordinary cost of repair.
He was also unsure whether the council even planned to apply to the Government’s new billion-pound structures fund to help finance the restoration.
Strict enforcement of weight limits
Mr Edwards said Hammersmith & Fulham council had made clear it would not increase the bridge’s current 1.5-tonne weight limit.
That matters because the restriction appears to rule out many proposed interim solutions, including heavier electric mobility vehicles or hopper buses designed to help less mobile people cross the river.
Electric shuttles a no-go?
Mr Edwards identified several problems with the proposal to run a small electric bus or pod across Hammersmith Bridge.
Strict weight limits
The first obstacle is technical.
The typical proposed electric vehicle, he said, weighs nearly four tonnes. That is far above the current 1.5-tonne limit. If the limit is fixed, the vehicle is not a practical option.
Poor public transport integration
The second obstacle is public transport.
Mr Edwards argued that an independent, privately funded hopper would not integrate properly with the existing network.
A less mobile passenger might still have to get off a bus at the top of Castelnau, navigate junctions to reach the bridge, pay separately for the hopper, cross the river, and then find another bus or the Tube on the Hammersmith side.
That is not seamless travel. It is a series of small frictions, exactly where friction matters most.
Inadequate capacity
The third obstacle is scale.
Before closure, the bridge carried about 23,000 daily motor-vehicle movements and five bus routes. Mr Edwards argued that a small electric hopper could not begin to replace that level of capacity or connectedness connectedness’ required to adequately serve the area’s transport needs..
Ignores emergency services
The fourth obstacle is emergency access.
Mr Edwards said the proposal does nothing for ‘blue light’ services, including ambulances, which he argues need direct access across the river.
Mr Edwards also said the key structural issue preventing a higher weight limit was not the piers but one of the bridge’s anchor chains. Hammersmith Bridge SOS, he said, has repeatedly asked Hammersmith & Fulham council what work and investment would be needed to stabilise the bridge and safely raise the limit.
He said the council had not answered those questions.
Traffic data not as compelling as it seems
Mr Edwards also challenged the traffic data used to argue that traffic across south-west London’s other bridges has fallen since Hammersmith Bridge closed to motor vehicles.
His case rests on two objections:
Limited sampling: he said the data is collected only once every two years and relies on single-day counts.
Timing: he said that, on every bridge, at least one of the data points was collected during school holidays, which could exaggerate the apparent reduction in traffic.
Image - Charts on bike at double demo day
He then made a bridge-by-bridge argument.
Wandsworth Bridge: he suggested any reduction in traffic volume may be caused by lane closures and reduced bridge capacity, rather than a genuine fall in driver demand.
Putney Bridge: he strongly disputed the idea that traffic had meaningfully fallen, describing the route as “absolutely gridlocked”. He blamed what he called a “disastrous remodelling” of the traffic lights at the southern end.
Chiswick Bridge: he accepted there had been some reduction in real volume, but said this was the only bridge still flowing relatively normally, with traffic moving at around 24mph.
His wider point was simple. On bridges such as Putney, Wandsworth and Kew, he said, vehicles are often crawling at between 7mph and 9mph, meaning practically ‘nothing is moving’.
In other words: the data may say traffic is down. The lived experience, he argues, says something else.
Notes & thoughts
Mr Edwards makes his case well. But, for Barnes2050, it still falls short of being compelling.
An electric shuttle over Hammersmith Bridge does not need to replace every historic trip to be worth doing. It only needs to solve a real problem for a specific group of people: those who can walk or cycle less easily, but who do not need a car-dominated bridge restored around them.
Nor is the pro-car case quite as clean as it sounds.
If the argument is that nothing is moving on nearby bridges, how exactly does restoring motor traffic to Hammersmith Bridge solve that? Would it relieve congestion, or simply create more trips through Barnes, Castelnau, Hammersmith and the wider south-west London road network? More roads means more cars, induced demand and all that.
And how does that square with the stated ambition of local, regional and national policy to reduce car dependency, cut emissions and shift more short trips to walking, cycling and public transport?
There was also little nuance in the interview about different user groups, beyond emergency services. Commuters, schoolchildren, older residents, disabled people, cyclists, pedestrians, bus passengers and local businesses do not all have the same needs. The future of the Bridge cannot be reduced to a single binary: cars or no cars.
On some issues, though, Barnes2050 shares Mr Edwards’ frustration.
Why can’t the Department for Transport and/or Transport for London produce one comprehensive, trusted dataset, as it committed to doing? At least then everyone would be arguing from the same facts, even if the interpretation differed. As things stand, FOI releases and council papers reveal fragments of the picture, but not enough to settle the argument.
Likewise, it would help all parties if Hammersmith & Fulham council set out what work, and what cost, would be required to allow vehicles in the four-tonne range to use the bridge safely.
Once again, a void wilfully created by central, regional and local government is filled by speculation.
Those — like Barnes2050 — who support keeping the Bridge open to pedestrians and cyclists, but not private cars, need to do two things.
First, we need to engage with people such as Mr Edwards, even where we disagree. He and his fellow campaigners will be right about some things. That is usually how difficult public arguments work.
Second, we need to crack on with redesigning life on the peninsula for 2050.
Those who want full restoration are waiting for a UK government cheque. The rest of us can start building a better future for much less than that.
One final thought.
Mr Edwards sounded downbeat. He has a gentle, thoughtful manner. But there was something else in the interview too: a kind of civic exhaustion.
In one sense, he represented one perspective very well. Like so many others he clearly cares deeply about Hammersmith Bridge.
But, so far, no-one cares enough to invest £250million to make one future version of it, real.