‘Let’s melt down the railings to make bicycles’

Mary Wakefield

22 April 2009

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Boris Johnson talks to Mary Wakefield about being Mayor, playing God and beating David Cameron (at ping-pong)

I see a London where developers are no longer building rabbit hutches, but are obliged to make rooms according to the standard of Parker Morris plus 10 per cent, and where architects rediscover an interest in ornament, and beauty, and once again create domestic architecture with a distinctive London vernacular rather than all-purpose Euro-flats.

I see a London where green space is protected, the parks are improved and the sporting facilities expanded, and where the outdoors is so safe that we see a steady falling off not just in youth crime (which is already happening) but in obesity as well. I see a river made clean enough to swim in, thanks to the vast new Thames Tideway Tunnel which will at last deal with the unmentionable consequences of what happens when the Bazalgette interceptors overflow, and Crossrail, and air-con on the tube.

In short, I see a steady improvement in the quality of life offered by the greatest city on earth. And this is not Utopia, my friends. A lot of these things will be done in the next few years. 

What do you want for your birthday?

I want the government to agree a proper permit scheme for anyone who wants to dig a hole in the roads of London, so that if they take too long, or if they leave it unattended, we can hit them with serious fines.

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Thucydides

April 23rd, 2009 3:03pm Report this comment

Links to Pericles's speech:

http://www.wsu.edu/~dee/GREECE/PERICLES.HTM

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pericles'_Funeral_Oration

robert

April 23rd, 2009 8:13pm Report this comment

Boris talks a great campaign, but when events intrude - as the 1-day snowstorm earlier this year - he caves in to the health and safety lobby at the first push. Pericles? Not exactly.

Forlornehope

April 28th, 2009 12:09pm Report this comment

Nice to get some optimism from a politician for a change.

GK

May 5th, 2009 3:27pm Report this comment

Athens was like America, open generous, democratic — and Sparta was like the Soviet Union — nasty, closed, militaristic, totalitarian.

That is one way to view it. The Athenians dominated the Delian league and massacred the Melians
that defied them during the Peloponnesian war and great Pericles order the amputation of the thumb of all men of Aegina for the same reason, then sold them for slaves and colonised these islands.