Have a read of this: another scandal from City Hall. And here’s a sonnet to (not) celebrate …
Roll up! Roll up! for BoJo’s garden bridge
We hope financial footfall will be brisk
A tourist trap for paying patronage
No groups of more than eight – a ‘protest risk’
Some sixty million pounds the public pay
He raised the cash by cutting transport staff
But don’t expect a public right of way
Just troubled water and a Mayoral laugh
No bikes, no rights, no access after dark
Our public funds misused to privatise
It’s no more than a plundered pleasure park
A Tory-governed London bridge of sighs
A private perk like Johnson’s cable car
This really is a Boris bridge too far
This poem was published on the news poetry website, Poetry24, on 24 November 2014, and described in the website’s Sunday Review as “a deft, brisk and scathing comment on Boris Johnson’s plan for the construction of a so-called ‘garden bridge’ over the Thames”.
