States of Emergency

Good lord, this is issue 200, somehow? This week: how hard can it be to fix a bleedin’ bridge; some ways of quantifying an apocalypse; and Europe’s half-secret road numbering schemes.

In 1882, a boat collided with Hammersmith Bridge. Whether anyone was hurt is difficult, at this distance, to confirm; according to some accounts, a policeman was sent out to inspect the damage and immediately fell through a walkway, presumably into the river.

At any rate, the bridge was damaged – and so the next year, an Act of Parliament was passed to authorise a replacement. A temporary bridge was installed, to allow some limited traffic to continue. Meanwhile, Sir Joseph Bazalgette – the man behind London’s sewers – drew up the designs for a new bridge, which could sit on the piers which provided the foundations of the old.

And in June 1887, Albert, Prince of Wales – who, his name notwithstanding, was the future Edward VII – ceremonially opened the new bridge to the public. The whole process had taken five years.

If only it worked. Image: Alex.muller/Wikimedia Commons/CC BY-SA 3.0.

It’s been nearly six years since Hammersmith Bridge was closed indefinitely to motor traffic in April 2019. (Between August 2020 and July 2021, it was closed to pedestrians and cyclists, too.) Last week Fleur Anderson, the Labour MP for Putney, told a reporter from the Local Democracy Reporting Service that the bridge would not reopen this parliament because “if they started [now], it would be 10 years of building”. That would be at least 16 years that a major London road bridge was closed to buses and cars.

To be scrupulously fair, the problem today does sound rather harder to solve than the one the bridge suffered in the 1880s. This time, the cracks that freaked everyone out are in the pedestals, suggesting – and bear in mind that I am not a structural engineer, here – that it might be a bad idea just to plonk a new bridge on top of them and hope. All the same, it seems worth noting that the construction of the original bridge – Act of Parliament June 1824; opened October 1827 – took not much over three years. It cost remarkably little, too: £80,000; a little over £9.3 million in today’s money. Last year, the cost of repairing the bridge was estimated at £250 million.

It is at least possible that Anderson is exaggerating the timescale here, highlighting an absurdity in an attempt to kick the government into action. Then again, it’s also possible she isn’t, because things do seem to take a remarkably long time to build in Britain. Normally I’d blame that on a planning system which gives voice to every human, bat or fish who a project would inconvenience, while denying it to those who’d benefit, largely because they don’t know who they are yet. (This is a problem which this government does seem genuine in its desire to address.) In this case, though, the problem can’t be just planning – the bridge is already there, it just doesn’t work. So something else must be going on.

Much of the delay, as Anderson suggests, can be laid at the feet of the last government: the taskforce which one time transport secretary Grant Shapps charged with finding a solution has not met, incredibly, since November 2021. That in turn must surely be in part because of the expense of the repairs (again: a quarter of a billion pounds). That we can probably credit to geopolitics (pushing up the price of energy and steel), the last government’s refusal to invest in infrastructure or enable housing (thus running down the construction workforce and, again, pushing up prices), and Brexit (ditto). At any rate, the Treasury has balked. And maybe – a quarter of a billion pounds! – that’s not entirely irrational.

Perhaps it doesn’t matter. The bridge isn’t really closed, after all: sure, you can’t cross it by car, but you can walk, or cycle, across. And that’s better, isn’t it? We don’t want cars in cities anyway, do we?

Well, I don’t. (Others disagree.) But I can’t help but notice that not everyone can walk or cycle; that buses exist, and matter; and that Hammersmith is a fairly major railhead, which is now inaccessible to anyone who relied on said buses to come from Barnes and points south. And I can’t help but think that the fact a major London transport link has ceased to function, and there are currently no plans to address that, is bad.

Hammersmith Bridge: surprisingly far from other bridges. Image: Google Maps.

(A sidebar. On BlueSky someone suggested that repairs weren’t necessary, because Barnes Bridge, on the left of the map above, isn’t that far away, and buses could surely use that. To which I would respond: It’s a mile and a half, which is quite far. It points northwest, which is the wrong direction for Hammersmith. But the biggest issue surely must be that it’s a rail bridge, and thus bugger all use for buses.)

It’s hard not to see this as a glaring symbol of national decline. We used to be able to build bridges quickly and cheaply, and now for some reason we cannot.¹ And if we can’t fix this in the capital – in a rich area of west London, an area in which many influential people in politics and media reside – what chance for the rest of the country?

Last week Keir Starmer refused to commit the mere £6m required to repairing Newcastle’s Tyne Bridge. Fair enough, the Prime Minister would rather not be making spending commitments in interviews to the Local Democracy Reporting Service. But really, at this stage, would you feel confident that the government would definitely find the cash to fix an even more important and iconic bridge, far from London? And what else out there is broken that we aren’t even trying to fix?

So… how much trouble are we in?

I have just finished reading my occasional co-author Tom Phillips’ book A Brief History of the End of the F*cking World, which tells the story of the apocalypse from the original armageddon (the battle of Megiddo, fought between Pharaoh Thutmose III and assorted vassal states in the 15th century BCE) to the exciting range of things that may actually kill us all today (pandemics, climate change, A.I. and so forth). It’s great. If you liked Conspiracy: A History of B*llocks Theories, and How Not To Fall For Them, or really any books, you should pre-order it now.

Among the many things I learned from Tom’s book is that there are not one but two ways of quantifying the threat of humanity going the way of the dinosaurs – of a “Near-Earth Object”, like an asteroid or a comet, ceasing to be near the earth and becoming instead part of it, at great speed, bringing fire, blastwave, nuclear winter and so forth along with it.