Victoria Embankment Gardens

The Victoria Embankment was one of the greatest engineering projects of the nineteenth century, designed by Joseph Bazalgette and completed in 1870. It gave London a trunk sewer, an underground railway, a new riverside road - and the Victoria Embankment Gardens. But it also allowed a major road to separate this part of London from its river. What looks like a garden building in the photograph (right) used to be a rivergate. It is difficult to see how the river and buildings can ever be re-connected but it would be worth building glass sound-barrier walls on both sides of the road - and then holding a design competition to find ways of crossing them. A high-level bridges could be projected from the Adelphi to bring pedestrians from The Strand to a floating deck above the shore. It would link Strand to strand (' Strand' comes from the Old English word for 'shore' or 'river bank').

HOMEPAGE - Landscape Architecture London List