We love nothing more than a barmy idea that never comes to fruition, and one almost came into fruition in that very bastion of barminess, Vauxhall. In  1963, London County Council were accepting applications for a never to be realised bridge to replace the current Vauxhall Bridge. As the objective was to ease congestion and overcrowding, the Glass Age Development Committee submitted a plan for a 300 metre, seven storey glass edifice called ‘The Crystal Span’.

The vision for the recumbent skyscraper was to create a wide berth for cars on the ground level, and above it, create an extension of the Tate Gallery, a shopping centre, roof gardens, an open air theatre and residential development. So as you can see, paying over the odds for a tiny Vauxhall flat above traffic fumes and noise is by no means a recent phenomenon. Structurally, the bridge would have been made of a pair of double-decked concrete boxes for the road sections, that in turn supported the buildings above. A glass curtain surrounding the bridge and enclosing the pedestrian spaces would have hung from the sides of the bridge structure.

The Crystal Span caused a bit of a stir and some support, but in the end, sadly, LCC declined to pick up the estimated £7 million (£132 million in 2024) construction costs, and the scheme was abandoned. In the office we had a little pool going to guess what clever nickname this project could have had if it had bee executed. Of the ones that can be printed, we had the ‘crystal protrusion’, ‘dead Shard’ , ‘Passport to Pimlico’ and ‘carbon monoxide alley’.