Delight.

ONE OF THE MOST ELEGANT AND DRAMATIC OF THE SMALL WORKS SUPPORTED BY THE MILLENNIUM COMMISSION, THIS NEW PEDESTRIAN BRIDGE LINKING THE CITY AND SOUTHWARK WILL HAVE A MAJOR EFFECT ON LONDON.

Since Wordsworth stood on Westminster Bridge one sunny morning in the dawn of the nineteenth century, looked towards St Paul's Cathedral and declared 'earth has not anything to show more fair', the Thames has not been lucky. Delicately scaled Georgian buildings were replaced by Victorian and even more gross modern hulks, coarse utilitarian rail bridges crashed across the water, and, for all the well meaning '50s and '60s attempts to improve the South Bank, the river has become one of the least impressive in any European capital. Now, again, there are attempts to make it the proper and dignified main artery of Europe's greatest city. Among the new initiatives, two of the most impressive promise to be bridges, the first crossings in the centre since Tower Bridge in 1894.

The Millennium Bridge is intended to be complete in June. In a dramatic gesture, it links the City, and Wren's great cathedral with Southwark, where Giles Gilbert Scott's massive Bankside power station has been converted into Tate Modern by Herzog & de Meuron (p54). For pedestrians only, the bridge will make a hitherto unimaginable connection between two sides of the capital that have often seemed to be separate cities. It is funded by the Millennium Commission (though not to the extent of being one of the 25 projects shown elsewhere in this issue).

Designed by Foster & Partners, sculptor Anthony Caro and engineers Ove Arup & Partners, the simplicity of the span belies its complex generation. Light loadings allow it to become a very gentle curve supported on pre-stressed cables anchored on each side and propped by two slender Y-shaped concrete piers, elliptical in section. Ten or 20 years ago, such a structure would have been all advertisement: proud erections of masts and cables emphasizing their functions. Five years ago, in the wrong hands, it could have had the dumb aggressive dullness of cable-staying. Now, it promises to be as light as a leaf, with structure and cast aluminium deck integrated as far as possible and swooping over the water, illuminated at night by continuous fibre optics to make a delicate luminous suture between the two halves of the severed city.