Pedestrian and Cycle Bridge

Between two parks

Volodymyrska Hill and Khreshchatyi Park are two halves of the same Dnipro slope, cut apart by Volodymyrskyi Uzviz. The idea of bridging the gap kept coming back. In 1934, when the capital returned to Kyiv, Vasyl Krychevskyi included a viaduct over the descent in his competition design for a government centre; the design was rejected. In 2006 a bridge featured in plans for a shopping complex on Volodymyrskyi Uzviz, and in 2013 the city held an international competition with entries from the Netherlands, Britain, Switzerland, Spain and Ukraine, but the public vote and the jury never agreed on a winner.

Five months of building

The final decision came in 2017. The design was by Project Systems LTD with architect Andrii Myrhorodskyi, and the contractor was Spetsavtobud. Work began in December 2018; the piers went up in February 2019, the spans were lifted into place in March and April, and the glass was laid in May. The steel came from Azovstal in Mariupol and the Okean shipyard in Mykolaiv. On 25 May 2019, on the eve of Kyiv Day, Vitali and Wladimir Klitschko opened the bridge and jumped on the glass panels to show how strong they were. According to the mayor, the bridge itself cost 275 million hryvnias, with about another 145 million spent on a fountain, utilities, landscaping and shoring up the slopes.

The project was dogged by controversy. The Ministry of Culture asked for work to stop because of the nearby buffer zone of St Sophia Cathedral, the Swiss practice Leuppi & Schafroth accused the designers of borrowing its 2013 competition entry, and prosecutors examined the costs. Several glass panels cracked in the summer of 2019, some of them damaged by vandals, and had to be replaced.

The structure

The bridge is a three-span steel girder more than 210 metres long, resting on two mirror-clad concrete piers and two abutments. It bends twice in plan to follow the slope, and at the bends there are viewing platforms with glass floors covering about 70 square metres. The railings are steel and glass. The deck is divided into walking and cycling lanes. At the Volodymyrska Hill end it meets the stairs down to the Magdeburg Rights monument; at the Khreshchatyi Park end it comes out by the viewing terrace at the Arch of Freedom of the Ukrainian People.

10 October 2022

On the morning of 10 October 2022, during a massive Russian missile attack on Ukraine, a Kh-101 cruise missile came down by one of the bridge's piers at 08:18 and exploded on the slope above Volodymyrskyi Uzviz. CCTV cameras caught the blast while people were on the bridge; none of them was hurt. The blast shattered glass panels and covered the deck with debris, leaving a deep crater below, but the structure held. Repairs began the next day, and on 17 December 2022 the bridge reopened with 18 glass floor panels and 143 side panels replaced.

The bridge that survived a missile quickly became a symbol of resilience for Kyivans, who contrasted it with the Crimean Bridge, damaged two days earlier. The city sold pieces of the broken glass at charity auctions to raise money for defence.

The bridge and the Arch

The eastern end of the bridge leads to the former Peoples' Friendship Arch of 1982. In April 2022 the bronze figures of a Ukrainian and a Russian worker were removed from beneath it; on 14 May that year it was renamed the Arch of Freedom of the Ukrainian People, and on 30 April 2024 the granite stele commemorating the Pereiaslav Council was taken down too. From here, as from the bridge itself, you get one of the widest views in Kyiv: the Dnipro, Trukhaniv Island, the Park Bridge and the left bank.