Bouygues JV paid £21.4m for Garden Bridge

A Bouygues joint venture received a total of £21.4m for work on the ill-fated Garden Bridge scheme in London before it was cancelled.

The figure emerged as Transport for London released a raft of documents related to the project, showing that £53.5m was spent on it in total.

The Garden Bridge, championed by former Mayor of London Boris Johnson, was scrapped in August 2017. Construction and management of the project had been under the control of the Garden Bridge Trust (GBT) since November 2015.

Of the total spent on the project, £43m came from public funds, £24m via Transport for London and £19m from the Department for Transport, with the rest coming from fundraising activities or donations.

The Bouygues joint venture with Spanish steelwork firm Cimolai received £5.1m under a pre-construction services agreement to progress the design and construction methodology.

It was also paid £13.4m for the main contract works, which involved “mobilising significant resources, systems, labour, supply chain and support networks to further refine the designs, create prototypes and samples, and submit designs for approval by GBT’s engineer (Arup)”.

That was followed by around £2.8m in demobilisation costs after GBT suspended the contract.

Meanwhile Arup received a total of around £12.3m for the project, including £6.4m in fees for acting as lead consultant to TfL before GBT took over.