This was a bridge too far, even for Boris Johnson | Rowan Moore

His proposed link from Scotland to Northern Ireland has finally been sunk by cost. No surprise there

An architect who was invited to design a kitchen extension for a married couple spent an evening with them to discuss their (conflicting) needs and aspirations for the work. At the end, he gave them this valuable advice. You don't need a kitchen," he said, you need a divorce."

This story brings us to the announcement that Boris Johnson's idea of building a bridge between Northern Ireland and Scotland would be, at 335bn, absurdly expensive. Such was widely suspected as soon as the plan became public given, among other things, that it would have to cross the 300m-deep Beaufort's Dyke, which is filled with up to a million tonnes of dumped munitions. But it has required a government feasibility study by a team of world-renowned technical advisers" to conclude that bears do, after all, shit in the woods.