The Bridge to Somewhere?: the view from Cherry Orchard Road last week, as at long last, the pedestrian bridge looks as if it might serve its intended function
Could it be that, at long last, after several false dawns, a piece of vital public infrastructure, costing £22million when it was built more than a decade ago, might finally get its long-awaited finishing touch?
In so many ways, the Bridge to Nowhere (© Inside Croydon 2012) at East Croydon Station has been a massive metaphor for so much about the shortcomings of the way the public realm is managed and curated in Croydon. Half-baked. Half-arsed. Half-finished.
For 11 years, it has stood there, to the north of the main concourse of one of the busiest railway stations in the country, left hanging in mid-air, literally.
The exit to Dingwall Road has been open since 2013, but what was supposed to offer a “vital link” across from the town centre to Addiscombe (and vice versa) was never completed.
This was largely because the dim-wits in the council planning department failed to insist on proper requirements of the developers on the Cherry Orchard Road side of the rail tracks to provide the necessary access to permit the completion of the bridge, while they, oh-so-slowly, went about their very profitable business of building very expensive flats (£300,000 for a one-bed apartment, since you asked).
The pedestrian bridge, built by Network Rail, Transport for London and Croydon Council, was supposed to provide additional access to East Croydon Station from Cherry Orchard Road when it was completed in 2013. But Menta, the developers who own the land on the eastern side of the tracks, opted not to allow any public access while they built on land that they had acquired.
Our council has shown no shame over its own part in this enormous, long-lasting clusterfuck. Eleven years ago, then under Tory-control, the council actually spent cash from the riot recovery fund to stage a party – food, drink, fireworks! – to “celebrate” the opening of the entrance to the bridge on Dingwall Road. It was as if the entrance to the bridge on Cherry Orchard Road didn’t exist. Which it didn’t…
It is now two years since iC last reported on progress on the project, when it seemed that matters might be edging, ever so slowly, towards a conclusion, as Crescent Gardens, the latest phase of Menta’s series of residential tower blocks along Cherry Orchard Road, had its topping out ceremony.
What did Croydon Council, then under Labour control, do then to hurry the developers towards allowing the bridge to be completed? Did they wag their fingers at them and tell them to get a move on? Oh no… they trotted along, made a couple of poor speeches which no one heard, and then sipped the developers’ cheap prosecco…
With no sense of irony, with the eight-storey Crescent Gardens nearing completion, sales agents for the developers started including in their spiel the new flats’ easy connectivity with the station and the town centre, provided by the erstwhile emasculated bridge.
“The multi-million-pound upgrade of East Croydon Station… means this is a location where connectivity is second to none,” according to Craig Marks, Menta’s chief exec, speaking in 2022. Without once mentioning that it was he and his company that kiboshed public connectivity for a decade.
Part of the £350million Morello “vibrant new urban quarter” project, Crescent Gardens comprises 118 shared ownership and “affordable” rented apartments developed through Latimer, part of Clarion Housing Group. The scheme was due to be completed in 2023.
But what’s a few months between friends, when locals have been waiting 11 years?
For much of that time pedestrians trying to cross the busy Cherry Orchard Road have been forced to “play chicken”, taking their lives in their hands as they scarper from one side to the other, because the pliant council removed the crossing because it was in the way of the developers’ construction traffic. Maybe the council can try to redeem itself by quickly re-installing a safe crossing point.
In the past couple of weeks, the barriers have started to come down. The building site that remained between the public highway and the incomplete bridge is being removed. Now, there can be seen a stairway, if not to heaven, at least towards Platform 6 on East Croydon Station.
Fingers crossed. It just might be…
Doubtless piss-poor Perry, the bankrupt borough’s part-time Mayor, will show up for a photo op and seek to claim all the credit for a mis-managed scheme which began when … checks notes … he was Croydon Council’s cabinet member responsible for development.
Trebles all-round!
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ROTTEN BOROUGH AWARDS: In January 2024, Croydon was named among the country’s rottenest boroughs for a SEVENTH successive year in the annual round-up of civic cock-ups in Private Eye magazine
Turn left: Oval. Turn right: Standard.
Choices, choices.
No planning department in the country (world) has the reputation – rightly or wrongly – for the incompetence, duplicity and distrust that Croydon’s has. Heather Cheesborough, Ross #Macarnage Gentry, Jan #Macarnage Slominski and the appropriately named Nicola Townsend, have been exposed time and time again on these pages. Truth is of course a double-edged sword. We are now stuck with them because no-one else will employ them and Katherine Kerswell won’t deal with them (in fairness it would be pot calling the kettle black).
Just as Kerswell, an extremely highly paid pubic servant, believes that attempts to hold her accountable or highlight her astonishing lack of achievement are ‘personalised and painful attacks’, so Cheesborough lacks the self-awareness to understand taxpayers’ reactions to the failures and waste that have her fingerprints all over them. Instead they cry ‘Infamy, infamy. They’ve all got it in for me’
Meanwhile we have not had pavement on Cherry Orchard Road where hundreds of pedestrians throw themselves across the road risking life and limb.
Local Government in Croydon is a pure and simple oxymoron.
Red or Blue it has seemingly been like that forever.
Apart from Jerry Fitzpatrick and one or two more similarly competent and caring Councillors there has been no one to praise.
On top of that , apart from the great trams and the number of eye wateringly expensive, over ambitious planning fiascos (yes, one should laud these. It takes great effort and determination to achieve so many!) there is nothing to remember in terms of admirable achievements either.
Isn’t the irony about this though it is now finally being completed it really has now become a Bridge to Nowhere. Central Croydon is in deep blight and shows no signs of halting it’s rapid decline. It really is a destination that no one is going to.
A clusterfuck…Croydon council in a nutshell
The bridge may be blocked off again in the near future when Network Rail begin their long planned expansion of the station adding extra platforms and moving the entire station building a hundred meters or so northward.
The station expansion plans, as we reported them six years ago, will have demolished the Bridge to Nowhere.
But that was pre-covid, and like the scheme to unblock the Selhurst bottleneck, those plans have been shelved over financial uncertainties.
https://insidecroydon.com/2018/12/28/east-croydons-bridge-to-nowhere-may-never-be-completed/
Now that the Cherry Orchard side is clear, do you have any more news on when the the bridge across and the gates might open?
Three months since this article was published with no progress made – I wouldn’t pin any hopes on the entrance opening any time soon.
More likely, the Bridge to Nowhere has just become a Staircase to Nowhere.