View from the bridge
THE City's Millennium Bridge must span an unexpected obstacle. On the planning committee of the Corporation is a lady who says that it will be built over her dead body. Hurry round to the Lothbury Gallery and see if she appears on the architect's model. Once the marble hall of the National West- minster's head office, this gallery now has an exhibition of London's millennium pro- jects. (I learn with pleasure that they include a Vinopolis.) The bridge will link St Paul's with the new Tate Gallery of Mod- ern Art on Bankside, in a single span of steel across the Thames. As compared with the dome that is destined for the site of Greenwich gas-works, this bridge will be more graceful, more useful, more centrally located and about £990 million cheaper. I look forward to it. The planning committee ought to turn its mind from this pedestrian bridge to the pedestrian buildings that will flank it — the Swiss Banking Corporation's barracks, the latest charmless Japanese development. Both must now be surplus to requirements and both obstruct what was Wren's view of his masterpiece from his site office on Barikside. They will obstruct the view from the bridge, too. Restoring it would be a noble millenary ambition and (like most things) would be cheaper than building a dome.
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