We departed, happy in the knowledge that we had participated in a great British tradition. That’s the tradition that dictates that you’ve got to have a good idea, get it wrong first time out, then cook up an ingenious, Heath Robinson solution. Like all those under-developed British Leyland cars of the 1970s where the customers were unknowingly carrying out much of the company’s testing for them. “I think of this bridge as an experiment,” said another of the Arup engineers. “We’ve learned a lot. We’ll be making all our research information freely available throughout the world.”
Well, that’s good. And once the data from our walk is analysed and a few tweaks made if necessary, London’s Millennium Bridge will reopen, having been closed for a year and eight months. But there’s one little problem that will linger. Given that such beautiful pedestrian bridges are now part of every big city’s marketing drive - symbols of dynamic progress the way office towers and motorways used to be, and part of the great “cultural regeneration” game of new galleries and concert halls - they’re no use whatsoever if they’re not famous.
Nobody used to give two hoots about pedestrian bridges. Architects had no hand in them. With rare exceptions, they were produced by dullards for the lowest possible cost, usually to cross busy roads. And they came nowhere in the constant international rivalry between cities. They were invisible.
Instead, cities competed to see who could have the tallest skyscraper, who could build the most motorways and multi-storey car parks and shopping malls, who could pack most Jumbo jets into their airports. Well, some of those things have changed. Cities still hanker after skyscrapers, but they hanker more after whizzo art galleries to pull in the tourist dollars. And if you have tourists, you need nice places for them to go.
So people discovered that good-looking car-free bridges could make previously run-down areas seem very nice. Particularly if they linked an affluent area with a poor one on the other side of the water. The money seemed to flow across the bridges. A new generation of designers - starting in the 1980s with the brilliant Spanish architect/engineer Santiago Calatrava - redefined the pedestrian bridge as a sculptural object, an observation deck, a destination in itself. A place to linger, rather than hurry over. Soon every city wanted one, preferably near the new art gallery.
This is why there was a high-profile international competition to design the one linking St. Paul’s Cathedral and the fabulously wealthy City of London with impoverished Southwark, where the Tate was making regeneration waves. This was the Millennium Bridge competition that Lord Foster won, with a pioneering super-thin design, stretched as taut as a crossbow. Which was then built, with hilarious consequences.
That’s why Bilbao and Seville and Newcastle and Manchester and Kyoto and Paris have them. And London’s is indeed famous. More famous than any of them, now. But for exactly the wrong reason. It’s famous not because it is a beautiful bridge that is now jolly stiff. It’s famous because it is a beautiful bridge that used to wobble. How long before people forget that? Well, let’s think. How long did it take people to forget that London Bridge was falling down, and needed building up with sticks and stones?
