25 February 2025
Hammersmith Bridge, London. This key crossing has been closed for 6 years with no date to fix it in sight. Photo Jim Linwood / Flickr (CC BY 2.0).
A bridge in London is falling down: we need to make steel
Hammersmith Bridge over the Thames in London has been closed to motor vehicles since 2019. Cracks appeared in its pedestals and there’s no sign of it being fixed six years later.
The bridge connects two densely populated areas of London. The closure has increased traffic on other routes and puts additional stress, in all senses of the word, on neighbouring bridges. Emergency vehicles are delayed; all authorities agree that they are unsure of the implications in a major incident.
Symbol
This is a symbol for our times – and there are many other pieces of critical infrastructure needing repair or replacement. Workers see the need; they can imagine solutions and are keen to make plans.
There were no shortage of proposed engineering solutions once the fault was discovered. By April 2021 Fosters and Partners’ head of structural engineering, Roger Ridsill Smith, produced a fully worked up plan.
‘Governments lack imagination and purpose.’
In contrast, successive governments lack imagination and purpose. The latest politician to pronounce on Hammersmith Bridge, Labour MP for Putney Fleur Anderson, freely admits to a lack of imagination and wrongly implies this is a collective failing.
Speaking to the Local Democracy reporting service on 24 January, she anticipates that the bridge could stay closed to vehicles “for another decade”. She added, “Steel is less available because of the war in Ukraine. There are variables we couldn’t even have imagined six years ago…so the longer it is left the harder it seems to get.”
Dependence
Anderson may not have been able to imagine how an increased dependence on foreign steel would have consequences. But trade unionists in the steel industry have spoken out about this for decades.
She may not be able to work out that the provision of UK armaments to Ukraine, and Starmer’s effort to prolong the war, might use up our stock of primary steel, but others can. She may not have the imagination to work out that her government’s decision last October to close the production of primary steel at Port Talbot in Wales will have long term economic consequences for bridge building, but those steelworkers have said so.