"It was a pity ... but never mind" - Boris on £43m Garden Bridge:
Former Mayor of London Boris Johnson has described the cancellation of the highly controversial Garden Bridge project - which left taxpayers with a £43 million bill - as "a pity".
The Garden Bridge - a planned but unbuilt tree-lined footbridge across the Thames between the South Bank and Victoria Embankment - gets just two mentions in Boris Johnson's new memoir Unleashed.
In a section on the end of his tenure at City Hall, Mr Johnson wrote: "Among the many other things I was forced to leave on the drawing board was the Garden Bridge, on which my successor was to spend another £17 million before cancelling it.
"It was a pity, because it was a truly beautiful scheme, and every city must keep doing new and interesting things. But never mind."
Mr Johnson makes no reference to the final £43 million bill to the taxpayer, or that only £70 million of private funds towards an expected £220 million total had been raised by the Garden Bridge Trust at the point incoming mayor Sadiq Khan withdrew City Hall backing for the project in 2017.
The failed bridge project also gets a mention in the acknowledgements at the back of the book where Mr Johnson records his thanks to "Mervyn Davies for bravely championing the Garden Bridge".
Lord Davies of Abersoch was the chair of the Garden Bridge Trust. He was empty-chaired by the London Assembly in 2019 when he refused to answer questions about the project. In a 2020 interview, he said of the bridge scheme: "I look back on it with nothing but pride."
Others cited in the acknowledgements include former Garden Bridge trustee Claire Foges and Evening Standard proprietor Evegeny Lebedev whose paper was a tireless cheerleader for the bridge scheme.
Mr Johnson's former communications chief Will Walden is also thanked in the book. In 2022, Walden admitted to Radio 4 that the Garden Bridge was "completely impractical" and "was never really going to get off the ground".
Whilst Thomas Heatherwick gets five mentions in Mr Johnson's book - all in connection with the New Routemaster bus project - the bridge's instigator Joanna Lumley is not named at all.
Announcing the ill-fated bridge project a decade ago, Ms Lumley had promised it would be "sensational in every way".
Two years ago Garden Bridge trustee Paul Morrell claimed that South Bank residents who opposed the Garden Bridge were guilty of "the worst kind of nimbyism" and that "all of those involved in [the Garden Bridge] will go to their graves believing would have been a great thing for London".
