Londoners and visitors looking for something new, inspiring – and free – to do this summer now have a fresh reason to head west: Chelsea Waterfront has opened a new walkable stretch of the Thames Path for the first time in over a century, complete with landscaped gardens and a permanent poem engraved into its new bridge by Poet Laureate Simon Armitage.
Passersby can scan a QR code to access a short film of the poet reading his work in situ – enabling them to hear his words as they look out over the Thames.
The bridge reconnects a 400-metre riverside path between Kensington & Chelsea and Hammersmith & Fulham, transforming the walk into an immersive cultural experience.
Armitage’s poem celebrates the power, continuity and beauty of water, drawing on the rhythm of the Thames and its role in London life.
Visitors walking the path are now able to cross the newly built bridge – fabricated in Amsterdam and brought to London by canal boat – to explore the gardens designed by landscape architect Randle Siddeley.
Chelsea Waterfront is the first major development of its kind on the north bank of the Thames, and includes the restoration of Powerhouse – the historic Lots Road Power Station, now reimagined as part of a 4.58-hectare site planned by Sir Terry Farrell.
The Drift, by Simon Armitage:
The way divided water gathers together
and mends – we can take something from that.
How tangled threads of rills and runnels
unknot in the river, how strict detachments
of channels and sluices eventually loosen
into a single flow. Stalled by canal locks,
partitioned as basins and docks, tamed water
vanishes into the air, then – abracadabra – it’s
somewhere else. The egret stamps its foot
through the glazed calm but the ripples heal;
sliced by turbines then shredded by weirs
the current comes out in one piece, rolls on
downstream shipping the sky to the sea.
And all bridges rise to applaud and salute.
