East Croydon Station’s Bridge to Nowhere is expected to be open, and finally allow pedestrians to go somewhere, in October.
Blocked off: an MP’s ‘update’ provided zero information on dates or details of plans for the Bridge to Nowhere
That’s according to Jeet Bains, the council cabinet member for planning and regeneration, in a speech at a Town Hall meeting last month.
It is suggested that he was trying to claim it as some kind of achievement for Croydon’s Tory Mayor. Which might be a bit of a gamble, since Jason Perry was the cabinet member responsible when the plight of the Bridge to Nowhere was first revealed 12 years ago.
Inside Croydon’s moniker for the £24million pedestrian access bridge that was supposed to link Cherry Orchard Road in Addiscombe to Croydon town centre via Dingwall Road, now appears to be in everyday use. This website first coined the phrase in 2013, when work was competed but the access on the eastern side remained blocked.
That inaccessibility has remained in place ever since.
The bridge is now routinely referred to by its iC moniker by Heather Cheesbrough, the head of the council’s planning department which was at least partically responsible for this multi-million-pound omnishambles, as well as by Google’s AI-powered search engine, and even by two of the borough’s Labour MPs.
Natasha Irons, the rookie MP for Croydon East, posted an “update” on social media yesterday, in which she referred to the Bridge to Nowhere, and even gave it a hashtag. Trouble was, Irons’s “update” was an exercise in virtue signalling vacuity.
A sort of #UpdateOnNothing, if you like.
“#BridgeToNowhere Update,” Irons wrote.
Update on nothing: a Network Rail staffer points Natasha Irons (left) towards the Bridge to Nowhere, as Sarah Jones looks on
“I know many of you have been waiting for news on the long-anticipated public footbridge at East Croydon Station,” wrote Irons, previously a councillor in Merton, perhaps not realising that many of her constituents have been kept fully abreast of the sorry saga for more than a decade by reading Inside Croydon.
Apparently, Irons and Sarah Jones, Labour’s MP for Croydon West, had been on a site visit. Which will have been nice for them.
According to Irons, “Network Rail and Croydon Council are working together to open the bridge.”
Irons failed to explain quite what Network Rail has been proposing in their most recent planning application to the council.
Nor how it was to be paid for. Nor whether there would be free pedestrian access across the bridge (as had been originally intended). Nor whether there would be ticket gates on the Cherry Orchard Road end to allow access to the station’s platforms, without having to traipse to Dingwall Road.
On all of these essential matters, Irons’ “update” failed to provide any update.
She wrote: “Final steps include linking the steps on the eastern side and raising the railing on the western side.” Fascinating, but not really useful.
One-way street: East Croydon’s entrance on Dingwall Road, where there are staff and ticket barriers, on a bridge that fails to connect to the other side of the tracks
“Network Rail is aiming to complete the project by the end of this year,” Irons stated, a paragon of vagueness.
“I’ll keep you updated as progress continues,” she said.
Don’t hold your breath.
Final work on the bridge, after a very long pause waiting for a commercial development of flats to be finished, was promised to be completed in 2024. By the early months of last year, everything appeared to be in place.
As Inside Croydon reported last year, Network Rail wanted to press ahead with opening the bridge at the eastern, Addiscombe side of the tracks, but without providing access to the station’s platforms for ticketed passengers. It’s the sort of thing you might expect a local MP to know, and to represent the views of their constituents, who are overwhelming hostile to the hare-brained, half-cocked suggestion.
Neither Network Rail nor rail operators Southern appeared to be willing to stump up the readies to pay for ticket barriers at the Cherry Orchard Road end, fatally compromising the long compromised bridge.
When originally proposed in 2012, someone in the council’s planning or legal department (most probably both) failed to get a binding agreement from developers Menta that, as well as granting permission for the access to the pedestrian bridge to straddle their development, about when they would be expected to facilitate this important public amenity.
Bridge to Nowhere: months after the Cherry Orchard Road link was finally completed, the bridge can still not be accessed by passengers or pedestrians
And exploiting that loophole, Menta bided their time over their money-spinning private development, keeping the public bodies who paid for the bridge – Network Rail, Transport for London and Croydon Council – all waiting for such a long time that now none of them have the cash available to pay to finish the job as intended.
Residents living on the cut-off, Addiscombe side of the Bridge to Nowhere say, “The current plan is confusing.”
Had Irons spoken to Addiscombe residents, she will have heard them suggest a cost-neutral solution, of just relocating a redundant ticket barrier from elsewhere on East Croydon Station. It might have been helpful to her constituents if Irons’s “update” had included her lobbying for this kind of solution. But she didn’t.
“Local Addiscombe businesses, including historic pubs, restaurants, greengrocers, charity shops, independent cafés and barbers, are all struggling. A meaningful ticketed entrance would help revitalise this area,” one of Irons’s constituents told this website six months ago.
In Network Rail’s planning application last October, they said: “There will not be a paid access on the east side and pedestrians will be required to walk along the south side of the bridge and enter the north side to platforms via the gate line.” Irons failed to update on this vital detail in her update.
Irons isn’t even up to date on the latest name for the Bridge to Nowhere, should it be opened but without proper access to platforms for Addiscombe residents.
Her constituents are already calling it the Bridge of Futility.
Read more: Network Rail can’t afford staff for Bridge to Nowhere ticketing
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Judging from the photo of Croydon’s two female MPs, the contractor who did such a good job with the leaky roofs at The Fold in Queen’s Gardens also laid the paving slabs they are standing on.
You’d expect them to push the Labour manifesto posturing about “getting Britain moving” and a “vision is to deliver a unified and simplified rail system that relentlessly focuses on securing improved services for passengers and better value for money for taxpayers”.
What this would mean here is ensuring the bridge does what it was built for – to give passenger access to and from East Croydon station. Anything less will just not do
Perry again on the road to nowhere? What a surprise!
Following on from The Simpsons episode of January 1993 – Marge v. the Monorail:-
As the passengers disembark, Marge narrates that the monorail was the last folly the people of Springfield embarked upon, except for “the popsicle stick skyscraper, and the 50-foot magnifying glass, and that escalator to nowhere.”
Anyone see a connection? or should we wait until October?
And don’t forget that the ‘bridge’ replaced an existing tunnel.
I remember using that tunnel but it wasn’t connected outside the railway station
Heather Cheesbrough didn’t even seem sure where the bridge went in her embarrassing self-promotion video. Only that it was called the bridge to nowhere. How long do we have tolerate the incompetence of these incompetents?
Maybe there is a diagram I have missed?
How is the bridge to be both ticket-gated access at both ends and an unticketed means of crossing the railway between Addiscombe and Croydon town centre?
Is the bridge wide enough for an unjumoable dividing barrier down the middle to facilitate both? Could the ticket gates be put on the bridge deck beyond the nearest and furthest steps to the three platform islands – or would this result in unsafe congestion on the steps?
Are there lifts at either end and to each of the three platform islands?
I have long thought that the railway presents a big dividing obstacle and that there should be a road bridge at the bend of Cherry Orchard Road, as the next road bridge is at St James’ Rd / Lower Addiscombe Road to the north.
Given that a footbridge has been so difficult, a road bridge is a pipe-dream.
I have refreshed my memory searching online for the huge flights of steps at Stratford Station / Westfield East London, and the pram scene on the Odessa Steps from the film Battleship Potemkin, of which your image reminds me.
I believe that the right hand side of the bridge, as you’re coming from the Croydon centre side (or the left if you’re coming from the Cherry Orchard Road side) is for pedestrians who simply want through access. The other side should have ticket barriers at both ends (they are already in place and in use at the Croydon end).
The problem that I see is that the new ticket barriers, if they are installed, will need to be manned, meaning that additional staff may be required.
Manned (or is that personed now?) only when closed. Although using Moorgate as an example, not necessarily
It’s “staffed”, a usage that’s been current for more than 20 years.
Remember the Talking Heads? ‘Well, we know where we’re goin’
But we don’t know where we’ve been
And we know what we’re knowin’
But we can’t say what we’ve seen’?
Which October? Given that we’re already more than 12 years on from when Condition 5 of Planning Permission 12/01828/P was granted, itself a variation of a timebound condition in an earlier permission from 2010 (that Network Rail didn’t want to comply with) and still not formally agreed – presumably because someone is still trawling through the 635 comments raised in respect of the flawed (IMO) proposal – a pithy photo-op by Ms Jones and her ‘parachuted-in replacement’ for the old Croydon Central constituency that she ran away from won’t really cut it.
But what of the ‘one constant’ left standing in this long, sorry, and protracted saga, what does Mr Perry say?
Even if it delivers on its promise of station access and public throughway (hard to see as it’s so narrow), the other foot’s now been shot with the Wellesley Road underpass to the Whitgift Centre boarded up with no prospect of reopening. The majority of pedestrian journeys from Addiscombe may as well use either end of Cherry Orchard Road as they do now. Bridge of Futility indeed.