Vauxhall's bridge that never was: the Crystal Span

The Crystal Span was a concept dreamed up by the Glass Age Development Committee in 1963 to replace Vauxhall Bridge.

Consisting of seven stories enclosed in glass, it would have featured a hotel, art gallery, shopping arcade, open air theatre and roof gardens. And traffic.

Eric de Mare in Bridges of Britain (from where the photo above is scanned, hence the dark stripe where the pages meet) describes it as "a clumsy affair without gaiety but interesting as a development of the ancient housed bridges such as Old London Bridge."

The Glass Age Development Committee is worth knowing about. This is from Wikipedia:

The Glass Age Development Committee was established in 1937 by Pilkington to promote the use of glass as a building material in the United Kingdom. It commissioned designs for many large-scale schemes, none of which were ever built. Notable schemes included a proposal in 1955 to demolish the entire area of Soho and rebuild it entirely in glass; a 1957 proposal for the replacement of St Giles Circus in London with a 150-foot (46 m) tall glass heliport;[3] and the 1963 "Crystal Span" proposal for the replacement of London's Vauxhall Bridge with a seven-story glass building straddling the River Thames, which was to have contained a shopping mall, luxury hotel, residential development and a museum to house the modern art collection now housed at Tate Modern.

The Glass Age Development Committee is best known for its ambitious 1971 proposal for a glass and concrete offshore city housing 21,000 people, to be anchored off the coast near Great Yarmouth and accessed from the mainland by hovercraft. The development was to have been called Sea City. The structure would have been 4,700 feet (1,400 m) long and 3,300 feet (1,000 m) wide, and would have rested on concrete islands supported by piers. It was intended that the development would have been economically self-sufficient thanks to boatbuilding workshops, fish farming, and the export of fresh water from an onboard desalination plant, while a lagoon in the centre of the development would support a tourist industry based on skin diving and water skiing.

Meanwhile, thanks to Peter for digging up this similarly barmy scheme just a bit further downstream...