Developer greed puts our capital at risk big time

I was in London for a couple of days earlier this week. I still think it’s the best city in the world. Diverse, rumbustious, surprising, a breath-taking mix of the old and new. Few can match its sheer rush at life. I lived there in the 80s when it was none of these things apart from rumbustious in a bad way. But I have to confess I'm worried for our capital. It was always the Dark Star of the UK, soaking up resources and drawing in the country's young on the promise, often false, of a better, more exciting, life. It accounts for about a seventh of our population and more of our GDP. But it hasn’t learnt its lesson after the crash of 2008. Property prices are obscene again. Developers are moving in, chucking up ever more densely packed and expensive retail and apartment complexes. The rich are making hay, digging deeper under their “iceberg” homes to add swimming pools and cinema rooms. Those wonderful little pockets of entrepreneurial businesses, in places such as railway arches and old warehouses, are being squeezed out to make way for more houses and flats, very little of them qualifying as “affordable” housing. There’s just no overall plan and vision in BoJo's London. Meanwhile the relatively poor, and by this I include the middle classes, are fleeing in ever greater numbers. Travellers from Brighton need look no further for evidence of what is going wrong than out of the window of their train as it labours into Victoria. Much hullabaloo was made when a developer finally took over Battersea Power Station a couple of years back promising to preserve the four iconic towers and bring the derelict site back to life. George Osborne turned up to cut the first sod and extol the virtues of London to overseas investors. But look at it now. It is a rapidly emerging monstrosity. Sure the power station itself is being preserved but the flats and offices are beginning to tower around it. Hideous and boring blocks of glass stretch as far as the eye can see. In fact at some points you can barely see the magnificent towers as the worker ant builders rapidly encase them in dull modernity. And of course once again the wonderful sightlines of the Thames are going to be lost except for the few who can afford the river facing apartments that have probably already been bought off plan purely as a quick return on investment. One fears for the retail and restaurant units which are supposed to fill the station itself. Will there be quirky outlets and characterful eateries? I doubt it. It will be filled with the same sort of lifeless stuff, the fashion emporiums and superstar chef backed mediocrities masquerading as fine dining, that have infested other high end parts of London. Should we on the South Coast care about what is happening? Well yes. Firstly because London is for us all. We want to remain proud of it. And secondly that flight from the capital I was talking about is increasingly heading here bringing with it the same sort of problems from which it is fleeing.