Who is going to pay the £1m to rebuild the Black Potts footbridge over the Jubilee River. Now barriered and signed as closed – the timber bridge between Datchet and Eton is rotten, unsafe and dangerous. Built over the Jubilee River about 25 years ago by the Environment Agency, RBWM is now responsible for this bridge which has been closed since mid-2025 but is still being used. If no action is taken, this bridge will collapse and be removed in the same way as the Ashford Lane bridge – or remain closed like the Allotments bridge. Maybe this bridge will be partially repaired (at enormous cost) like the Berry Hill bridge. So who is going to pay to repair or replace this bridge? My recent Black Potts footbridge video asks the question and is now uploaded to YouTube
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The matter of all of the failed footbridges is an agenda Item that will be raised with the EA Regional Director at our Meeting with the EA on 22nd January at Datchet Parish Office.
Extracted from YouTube: What we see here is not untypical of the Environment Agency’s standard of design, construction, maintenance and concern for public safety. Having given this and another footbridge over their Jubilee River an engineer’s safety certificate, the Agency recently unloaded these dangerously ill-constructed and decrepit public footbridges onto the local authority. And it was only Cllr Larcombe’s evidence (above) that persuaded the Council to place their signs and barriers to prevent the public from using these bridges. Shortly afterwards, this bridge collapsed – as seen here.
This is far from atypical for the Environment Agency. In 2002, contrary to its irrational 1996 termination of regular dredging (as a cost-cutting ploy it claimed that hitherto maintained rivers were now “self-dredging”), resulting in the steady decline of the R. Thames’ safe flow capacity. The Agency was then persuaded under political pressure to excavate the Jubilee River past Windsor and Maidenhead – to relieve the flooding of properties unwisely built across the historic Maidenhead floodplain. This doubled the maximum flow that could safely pass those towns, and cost some £200 millions. Unfortunately, this project was so badly executed that its opening was followed by followed years of litigation. Worse still, having done nothing to enable the river below Windsor to safely handle the consequent increase in winter peak flow (storm water which used to accumulate safely across the Maidenhead floodplain and slowly drain away in spring was now discharged immediately). This caused disastrous flooding for many miles below Windsor in January 2003 (there had been nothing like it since the exceptional snow-melt of March 1947). Then came even worse floods in January and February of 2014 (resulting in the death of a 7-year old boy), and further significant floods in January 2024.
A freedom of information request recently revealed that the Agency has spent over £100 millions on planning a complex of bypass channels for the short stretch of the Thames from below Staines town to Chertsey Lock, but nothing to relieve the flood-prone stretch between Staines and Windsor. It is believed that the likely cost of this hard-to maintain network could reach £700 millions, but not a spade has yet been put into the ground. However, given the catastrophic ongoing garbage tipping at Kidlington in Oxfordshire, of which the Agency was made aware in April 2025 (but did nothing to prevent until October 2025) it seems that, even after 23 years of flooding from its Jubilee River, the Agency will now be unable to do anything to prevent future flooding from the unfortunate combination of increasingly intense Atlantic storms and the steadily decreasing flow capacity of their unmaintained R. Thames.