[Closed] Garden Bridge scrapped.

Also think how much the Houses of Parliament are really going to cost to fix...

Ok fair enough but there's no big parks or zoos or any type of outside things to do are there?

Big parks:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parks_and_open_spaces_in_London

Zoo:
www.zsl.org

😉

Engineering consultants, Architects, Environmental Consultants, Heritage Consultants, Public Consultation Costs, Horticulural Consultants, Lawyers, Accountants, Penalty charges etc etc.

Mehhhhhh.........
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_museums_in_London

This sounds like one of those projects that should never have got off the drawing board, that successive people have let carry on because they don't want to be the one who killed it because they'd be blamed for the spend up to that point.

We have/had one going on here in Wales for, oh about 2 years. "Circuit of Wales" a £425m project or 'scam' to build a international racing circuit in middle of nowhere - the backers made wild claims about securing races from MotoGP and F1, how it would be the basis for a World Motorsport Hub and how it couldn't lose money - it's been scrapped 3 times already because the Welsh government refuse to underwrite the cost (which in this case would be the same as just paying for it, because no one else wants to) but everytime they come back with wilder and wilder claims for it and even go as far as to claim private backers are interested. They've managed to burn through £10m of public money so far, partly on gardening for one of the directors and on a motorsport company HQ in England.

For reference, whilst £425m isn't massive in terms of public sector spending, it's worth considering that Silverstone - which does have a F1 race and will likely always have an F1 race has been for sale for £33m for quite some time, no takers.

deadkenny - Member

That's money going to businesses who pay wages and suppliers (inc other consultants, architects etc) who are paying wages, to employees and contractors who pay taxes, and buy things with more taxes which go to companies who pay those taxes back to... the government and back into public funds.

And that'd also be true if they'd spent the same amount of money on something that wasn't a pointless pile of **** and that got cancelled. So it's not much of a defence really

This sounds like one of those projects that should never have got off the drawing board, that successive people have let carry on because they don't want to be the one who killed it because they'd be blamed for the spend up to that point.

Umm no, that is charmingly naive - it has carried on because influential people stood to make a shed load of money from it, siphoning cash from tax payers into their own bank accounts - Tory business as usual.

https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2017/apr/28/garden-bridge-dead-38m-public-money-repaid-boris-johnson

would it have been "public" in any sense, despite the use of our cash?

No.

I'd expect there's some almost criminal goings on behind the scenes here. Boris seems to have skipped all the regular checks and balances to hand over large chunks of taxpayers money to build a corporate entertainment space.

The Guardian article gives an insight into how it was justified... a predicted income of 200k from "T-shirts and pens"
https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/architecture-design-blog/2015/mar/04/revealed-boris-johnson-duplicitous-handling-garden-bridge-london

Oh yes. Circuit of Wales. I saw the support for it on the home page here once and thought "Really STW? Would a couple of miles of blues make a dead idea work?"
Oh a quick check and it seems that has had over £9,000,000 so far given to it.

And in my opinion it stands more than anything as a great big two fingers to the rest of the country from London

You'd be as hard pushed to find anyone in London who supported it as you would anywhere else in the country to be fair

[b]@deadkenny[/b] - Yeah, I hear what you're saying; lots of overpriced London biased money to conceptual consultancies, PR firms, political lobbyist consultants, message modifiers, financial climate pioneers etc etc etc.

Golgafrinchan Ark Fleet Ship B parasites.

The lot of them. Parasites.

That money should be spent on (in no particular order)

-schools
-doctors and nurses and bum wipers
-social services
-libraries
-colleges
-mental health

None of it should be going towards self serving cun-wats, who are only too happy to dive onto a gravy train vanity project.

Especially a vanity project for Johnson, the man who has broken this country for a couple of decades.

Perhaps we should 'bill' him?

The sad thing is we just can't do 'big' public engineering in this country any more. Too many NIMBYs, Too many lawyers needed, Too many people taking Too big a cut.

Lets face it, it's a pretty short bridge, with some trees on it, hardly the most difficult engineering task to do, yet the politics have killed it, after years of expensive arguing.......

as people don't bother to drive into Paris for dinner.

I should flimmin hope not too. If they are bothered, they'll find an alternative means of transport or eat locally.

"The sad thing is we just can't do 'big' public engineering in this country any more."

Overpopulation.

[b]@outofbreath[/b] - for the purposes of general understanding, and validating your own comment; would you care to expand upon what you mean by "overpopulation"?

. . . lest the good folk of STW assume the worst about your agenda?

maxtorque - Member

Lets face it, it's a pretty short bridge, with some trees on it, hardly the most difficult engineering task to do

It's nothing to do with the engineering- you say politics killed it but really only politics, and vested interests, created it in the first place and kept it on life support. As soon as the politics stopped it died.

When the bridge isn't a pointless vanity project designed to soak up public money for private purposes, this happens, so don't tell me we can't do big engineering any more:

[img] [/img]

"@outofbreath - for the purposes of general understanding, and validating your own comment; would you care to expand upon what you mean by "overpopulation"?"

I mean too many people.

France (for example) just doesn't have these problems. There's always somewhere to put a new road or airport.

We need 8 lane motorway between Brighton and Bournemouth. There's nowhere to put it.

When the bridge isn't a pointless vanity project designed to soak up public money for private purposes, this happens, so don't tell me we can't do big engineering any more:

So long as it doesn't have a cycle lane 😀

Big parks:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parks_and_open_spaces_in_London

Meh!!!

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cairngorms_National_Park

Also think how much the Houses of Parliament are really going to cost to fix...

A whole lot more than it would cost to build a new parliament building somewhere else?

[b]@outofbreath[/b] - fair enough. It is indeed a crowded little island. And the French do a fine line in bridges (I've been there and driven / cycled over a few).

Yet this particular bridge was never about necessity, was it? Political ego, yes. Necessity; no.

A whole lot more than it would cost to build a new parliament building somewhere else?

Spot on. Well said.

Wow, the "whoosh" is strong in this thread 😀

so don't tell me we can't do big engineering any more:

Well from that pic, it looks like we can't. There's massive gaps in it!

+1 from a Londoner that Londoners didn't support the idea of the bridge either. Despite London looking pretty wealthy at the moment, there's a lot of anger that the city's being sold from underneath our feet to (not always legit) international money and tearing out the soul of the place. Let alone the amount of money laundering that's gone on and made it totally unaffordable to live there anymore...

The sad thing is we just can't do 'big' public engineering in this country any more.

Not totally true, think 2nd Severn bridge crossing in the 90's and new Forth Bridge now. Also there have been a heck of a lot of big stadiums built across the UK over the last 20 years e.g. Millenium in Cardiff, City of Manchester, Glasgow Velodrome complex and then there was the whole Olympics thing.

More civil engineering - crossrail, hs2 (ignoring the politics), st pancras, kings cross, birmingham new street, national grid hv tunnels under london, thames tideway super-sewer.

I know i'm being deliberately awkward here and that list isn't doesn't cover every civil engineering project in the UK. But...

London, train to London, London, London, not London, London and London.

It would have been money well spent had the thing collapsed into the Thames at its opening party, taking all the vanity pillocks with it.

This sorry business has certainly taken the enjoyment out of watching New Avengers repeats 🙁 Purdey's bob does start to look a lot like Boris's infantile hair style.

Don't worry the U.K. Isn't the only country good at wasting public money on vanity projects. You just need to look at the Berlin Brandenburg Airport fiasco to see how public money can really be wasted.

@harry - fair point but they were only intended to be some high profile examples, not an exhaustive list; HS2 could be described as 'train to birmingham with intermediate stops at new stations, travelling through new tunnels etc'

The next time some well connected people propose a public-private scheme they should be ignored unless they can prove irrevocable commitments from private donors for at least 50% of the projected construction cost - with funds into escrow account or similar; all pre-construction costs to be 100% funded by private donors/backers; cost projections to be thoroughly tested; claimed economic or regenerative benefits to be independently reviewed a la Hodge; fully transparent process from concept to design (competition), tender, evaluation and contract awards; completed scheme to be available for private hire, if applicable, on legally limited number of occasions annually - and never to the detriment of public use or enjoyment.

So - £37 million of (largely) public money spent; what about OJEU compliance which is a key requirement in public spending?
Non-compliance with the regs is an offence and can carry significant penalties. From my understanding I would say Johnson should be in the firing line.

I'm pleased it's been canned but it's yet more money pissed away which could have been used beneficially - multiple posts above refer.

Has anyone attempted to tot up the cost of mega projects initiated by government over the past say 10 years which have been aborted or failed to deliver or have been subject to budget overruns or delayed delivery? Private Eye shine a light on some of these and the usual culprits are C(r)apita and major IT companies - mustn't forget civil servants and ministers being seduced by the thought of shiny new all singing, all dancing interconnected systems.

The sad thing is we just can't do 'big' public [s]engineering[/s] anything in this country any more [b]because the whole shitty place is devoted to funneling money into private pockets.[/b]

FTFY