There are people who like the cranes. They're here in Halifax too. They look at the cranes and they hook their thumbs in the belt around their portly middles and they speak grandly about “progress” and “prosperity.”
It might result in prosperity for some but rarely for the community where the cranes are working. More often it’s a story of politics and power and business and corruption and the result will often be less-than-beautiful.
London is, without doubt, one of the great cities of the world. When I look at parts of it, I have to pinch myself to believe I’m there.
It also has some of the most beautiful buildings and gardens in the world.
Houses of Parliament
This is the Queen's backyard -- behind Buckingham Palace
But London has some ugly buildings too. I’ve often given it the benefit of the doubt because it had to do a lot of rebuilding after the war and it’s likely that buildings had to be thrown up quickly and on the cheap.
Some though, I have no doubt, are the result of developer-driven architecture that took no account of the surroundings and made no attempt to show respect for history, heritage, neighbourhood scale and the environment. It’s not the only time I’ve agreed with the Prince of Wales.
Cities large and small around the world are so often at the mercy of money. London is now one of the most expensive cities in the world, so expensive that many people will never be able to afford to live anywhere near the neighbourhoods where they grew up -- even neighbourhoods that were quite modest. Many neighbourhoods are being bought up by people from outside the country and are left vacant until they lose their appeal as neighbourhoods but become real estate that is very valuable to develop.
It's a problem that denies the humanity of the city-dwellers and draws a sharp and forbidding line between the people who have the power and the people who have been shut out. It's not a problem that's exclusive to London. London is just the one I've seen most recently.
Well said. Fortunately some cities like Paris have held out against that, with a few eye-sore exceptions like Pompidou Centre and Montparnasse Tower -- though the former is the work of misguided arty types.
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