Destroying London's skyline

Thursday, 4th October 2007

Thanks to my usual lack of organization, I completely forgot to link to Simon Jenkins' warning about the rash of high-rise buildings about to be unleashed in the capital:

Londoners worldwide have no idea what is about to hit them. They have not been shown. They have not been told......The effect will be to render the banks of the Thames a wall of glass. Richard Rogers, Livingstone's partisan adviser... professed to want a "string of pearls" along the water. Moscow's Yuri Luzhkov, no less ambitious a building mayor than Livingstone, has some respect for his city's style and heritage. Livingstone and Rogers are erecting merely a wall of profit...
None of this is planned. It is urban anarchy. Paris, Rome, Amsterdam, even capitalist New York, have published policies on highbuildings, with bans, height limits and zoning regulations. There are no towers in Greenwich Village or SoHo, and none in the historic quarters of other European cities. The closest parallel to what is happening to London is Shanghai and various banana republics, to which the mayor's office bears more than a passing resemblance....

I wonder what Boris Johnson thinks about it all? A quick spin around his website didn't enlighten me, but perhaps it's still early days.

[Photo: Chris Young/AFP/Getty Images]