Work to repair a collapsed path and road along the River Avon embankment that has been closed for years will take another three months, because the contractor doing the work has been hampered by high tides.
Cumberland Road, the harbour railway and the Chocolate Path alongside the New Cut was supposed to be repaired and reopened this May, but now Bristol City Council said it won’t be fully open until the end of July because of ‘unavoidable delays’.
Issues with the Chocolate Path and the embankment wall began in December 2016 - some six and a half years ago - and the path and the railway were closed off in December 2017, but nothing was done to fix the problems before the entire embankment collapsed into the river in early 2020, taking half the road with it as well.
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Only then was an £11m project to rebuild the embankment, reinstate the Chocolate Path and the road begun, and that work has taken another couple of years. In January this year, the council said hopes it would be fixed by the end of February were dashed by more delays, but it would be open by the end of May. Now it’s the end of May and there’s another three months of delays.
Council chief Cllr Don Alexander described the delays as ‘disappointing’. A council spokesperson said that high spring tides meant workers trying to rebuild the final sections of the river wall had ‘struggled to gain access’. In a statement from the council posted on its website, a council spokesperson said the work had been ‘extended by up to three months’, which would take the completion date to the end of August, but in the same statement, the council spokesperson said contractors Griffiths were now ‘working towards finishing the project by the end of July’ - which is two months away.
“Having installed the concrete piling to hold the ground in place under the Chocolate Path and a section of the Harbour Railway, Griffiths has been working to rebuild the final sections of river wall but has struggled to gain access with the high spring tides,” the council said.
“Griffiths has also been working to install the approach slabs and reinstate the highway wall and railway wall. However, as they have uncovered the railway wall, workers found large sections of it had much more substantial foundations than documented, with large lumps of dense rock and concrete that needed to be excavated, which has slowed progress,” they added.
Cllr Don Alexander, the man responsible for transport and roads in Bristol, said they couldn’t ‘cut corners’ in rebuilding the embankment. “It’s disappointing that the repairs will carry on into the summer when we had been expecting to reopen the Chocolate Path in the spring.
“As with any complex engineering project, we can’t cut corners. Repairing our Victorian infrastructure often needs bespoke solutions, as in this case.
“We’ll keep the pressure up to reopen the Chocolate Path as soon as possible and I’d like to thank everyone once again for bearing with us while we restore this important piece of our city’s harbourside infrastructure, as part of our ongoing multi-million-pound investment,” he added.
The latest delays could explain why a proposal to reopen Avon Crescent to traffic was pulled from a council meeting at the last minute, earlier this month.
What happened to the Chocolate Path?
* The Chocolate Path is so named because its small paving slabs look like blocks of chocolate, and not because of Bristol's role in developing the mass-produced chocolate industry. The pedestrian and cycle way along the south bank of Spike Island began to crumble way back in July 2017 and was eventually closed due to safety fears as it started slipping into the high tides in December 2017. But it wasn’t fixed for a couple of years and, sure enough, the road followed in January 2020, meaning the entire project to fix it cost millions more than it would have done
At the start of this year, Bristol Live reported that there was still 'no date' for the reopening of the Chocolate Path, despite the 'early 2023' forecast last year. Then, in the middle of January, an opening date of 'the end of May' was announced, only for that date now to pass with work still needing to be completed.
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