I went last night to dinner at Goldsmith’s Hall, not one of the livery companies that I had been to before. It’s in Foster Lane, close to St. Paul’s. Designed by Philip Hardwick of the Euston Arch and built between 1829 and 1835, it’s a robustly classical building with rich polychrome decoration, bombed in the war, but restored in such a way that the vigour of the original is undiminished. In his speech at the dinner, Peter Murray, the Master of the Worshipful Company of Architects, claimed that the idea of a bridge across the Thames from Temple to Waterloo had been his and derived from a competition held at the time of the Royal Academy’s exhibition Living Bridges. I hadn’t heard this before. It helps give the current controversy over the Garden Bridge a historical perspective.
| Charles | Saumarez | Smith | 
Hugh Pearman <https://www.facebook.com/hugh.pearman.
Slight misunderstanding by Charles – there's a bridge planned across from Temple in the 1943 County of London Plan! Though not an inhabited one as in your Living Bridges show.
On 17/02/2016 08:07, "| Charles | Saumarez | Smith |" wrote:
> Charles Saumarez Smith posted: “I went last night to dinner at Goldsmith’s > Hall, not one of the livery companies that I had been to before. It’s in > Foster Lane, close to St. Paul’s. Designed by Philip Hardwick of the Euston > Arch and built between 1829 and 1835, i” >
Ah hah ! I’m surprised that the proponents of the bridge haven’t made more of its long history because there is an obvious logic to opening up the neighbourhood between Blackfriars and Charing Cross to foot traffic. Charles