Dean Nicholas

Lambeth Lib Dems Call For South London Monorail



As reported by London SE1, a comment piece on the Lambeth Liberal Democrats website has called for the Northern Line Extension (NLE) from Kennington to Battersea Power Station to be abandoned in favour of a monorail.

The anonymous article dismisses the Tube extension as "barmy, wasteful of resources and needlessly expensive" and suggests that a monorail, running from Waterloo via Vauxhall to North Haverbrook Battersea, would be more beneficial to local residents. The article claims the monorail could be "attached to the existing railway viaduct", much as the now-kyboshed SkyCycle plan proposed. Warming to the theme, the writer(s) then suggest that the scheme could somehow be linked to the Docklands Light Railway.

With the Government committed to the NLE and monorails being mostly the stuff of Buckminster Fuller cityscapes and chronically catchy jingles, there's little chance this idea will ever get off the ground, though it's not the only quixotic transport scheme for south London we've heard of recently: see last year's plan for a tram between London Bridge and Denmark Hill.

See also:

Unbuilt London: The Transport Schemes That Never Were