Westminster Bridge balustrade destined for South Coast quayside
After a quarter of a century in storage, ironwork from the balustrade of Westminster Bridge has been sold to a business owner on the South Coast.
Architectural salvage firm LASSCO has been trying for years to sell 463 metres of redundant balustrade from Westminster Bridge, replaced by a facsimile when the bridge was repaired in the late 1990s.
This week the company confirmed that the ironwork had been sold and dispatched on nine articulated trucks.
"Visitors to LASSCO Three Pigeons in Oxfordshire know we’ve had the original Westminster Bridge ironwork on display here – but now it’s gone," the salvage firm said in an email newsletter to customers.
"We’ve sold it - all 185 tons of it. It’s a sizeable bridge.
"We had fielded interest from as far afield as China and then from Paraguay (for the latter we’d priced to have the whole lot containerised and shipped up the Amazon but it wasn’t to be).
"Ultimately, we have sold it to an Englishman who now has half of it lining the quayside of his commercial premises on the south coast; the rest is being cunningly inserted into his ha-ha as the retaining wall.
"The cost of delivering all that ironwork was included in the deal: in the end we squeezed it into nine articulated trucks. How much did it sell for? I can tell you that it was a lot of money… but it was cheap."
The ironwork had previously been advertised for sale on the LASSCO website at £250,000 plus VAT.
