Another “Planning” disaster underway in Britain
This is appalling. Our only hope is that the Prince of Wales may be able to do something. When I was in Glasgow in the 70s I could not believe that the beautiful old stone buildings of “slum” suburbs like the Gorbals had been bulldozed. When I was there, there were enough of them left to see what had been lost. The same buildings in Australia would have been snapped up for gentrification and sold at an enormous profit. The former workingmen’s terrace houses of Paddington in Sydney and Carlton in Melbourne are now regarded as enormously desirable and change hands for enormous sums. And the present British government wants to bulldoze hundreds of thousands of the same sort of houses!
John Prescott has had a busy month. Ten days ago, at a symposium in a hotel near Accrington, his department reaffirmed its determination to flatten thousands of Victorian houses in northern England. On Monday Prescott announced changes to the planning system that would nullify local democracy and accelerate the building of 1.1m homes in London and the southeast. On Wednesday, against the opposition of his own advisers, he gave permission for the tallest block of flats in Europe to be built over shadowing Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament.
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