Hungerford Footbridges
Won in competition, the award-winning Hungerford footbridges, also known as the Golden Jubilee footbridges, involved the addition of two new decks to the listed riparian structures designed by Brunel in 1845. The £50m scheme to build the 300m long footbridges involved works to private property, Railtrack property, listed buildings and London views of national importance.
As a complex construction project, the scheme had an equally complex client base. Backed by the Cross River Partnership (consisting of the City Corporation, Southwark, Lambeth and Westminster City Council), the project was led by Westminster, with English Heritage joining other key contributors including Railtrack, the London Development Agency, the Millennium Lottery Fund and the GLA.
The bridge design seeks to make best use of what exists on site and the final form acts as a delicate foil to the heavy railway structure behind. The use of inclined pylons pays homage to similar structures created for the 1951 Festival of Britain held on the South Bank but takes advantage of advances in structural analysis to create an elegant, lightweight structure.
As no bridge had been built over the Thames for many years, the route to planning was developed in painstaking detail with legal officers and involved a Parliamentary Act rather than a planning consent; also, intensive dialogue with English Heritage, CABE and all affected boroughs. Appropriate technical and design material was developed to satisfy the concerns of design and conservation officers, in particular historic views and alterations to the listed structures which surround the bridge. Each step required the agreement of English Heriate, as well as Westminster City Council, the London Borough of Lambeth and the Cross River Partnership.
This project required a very large, and often competing, group of agencies to be consulted alongside English Heritage to ensure a smooth road to planning permission.
