The road bridge infrastructure in London is creaking and inadequate, and ownership and responsibility is fragmented. The soundness, or not, of these bridges has consequences. However, we, Liberal Democrats, do not yet have a policy for London’s bridges and we need one.

London is a massive centre, drawing people, and with them goods and other resources, from right across the country, but particularly from across the southeast of England. And this creates a need to cross the river that flows through the heart of that centre. Whatever we do with public transport, road traffic will always be part of this need.

The issues themselves are actually well understood. The London Assembly Transport Committee, chaired by our own Baroness Pidgeon (Caroline Pidgeon MBE AM, as she then was), prepared a report in November 2021, which sets out the situation and offers a suite of policy suggestions.

But thinking about London’s bridges has stalled and now, as their condition deteriorates, they present a problem. Their importance is such that they need to be considered as strategic assets, and planned for as such, and this does not appear to have happened.

Other people are noticing this problem too. Recent opinion articles by Juliet Samuel in The Times and Simon Jenkins in The Guardian have both highlighted the issue and proposed solutions. Rightly recognising the importance of the bridges to the efficiency of the city, we can be sure that voters will see this as well and we need to have something to say.

You will notice that, in offering their solutions, both Samuel and Jenkins reach for the funds of the City Bridge Foundation. Renamed in 2023, the City Bridge Foundation is a 13th century charity with, by its own admission, more money than it needs to look after the bridges in its remit. So it looks like an obvious grab. But it would be a mistake to rush to do so, for, as barrister Barbara Rich points out, there are serious questions of trusts law and public policy to overcome first. So when looking for our own solutions we need to be more judicious than that.

Bridges are of course real-world, essential infrastructure. But they not only carry traffic over an obstacle: they also symbolise much more: a sense of place, connection, human endeavour.

They are landmarks. When we think of London, we know that Tower Bridge is a global symbol, almost a logo for the city. San Francisco, even California itself, is symbolised by the Golden Gate.

Bridges stand for a human connection. We can think of Széchenyi Chain Bridge, linking Buda and Pest, for example, or Pont des Arts in Paris, for a less literal connection as well. Or, more poignantly, we can think back to the tragedy that followed the break-up of Yugoslavia and of the old Ottoman bridge in Mostar, in Bosnia, which gave that town its name.

We have an opportunity ahead of us in the London mayoral and Assembly elections; we should make a bridge policy for London a leading part of our overall transport and infrastructure plan and use the symbolic aspects of London’s bridges to help say what a Liberal Democrat London would look like.

At least one interpretation of the titles of Roman emperors as Pontifex Maximus and modern popes as Summus Pontifex is as “bridge-builder-in-chief”. We too should aspire to build bridges, or maintain them at least. Bridges matter, they always have done, and London’s Liberal Democrats need a policy for those across the Thames.

* Francis Chubb is Chair of Wandsworth Liberal Democrats