E-Mail from John Bryant, 6th July 2015

This e-mail was a reaction to an article by Rowan Moore (in the Observer) that was circulated to all addressees of the Friends of Regent's Canal.

Dear Ian

I look forward to seeing you at tonight's meeting.

But I wanted to email because I feel the need to respond to the article you circulated by Rowan Moore.

I had actually read this article before you circulated, and I have to say I profoundly disagree with it. It allows itself the briefest of lip-service to London's positive qualities, but this is only by way of preliminary to what is essentially a litany of complaint about all the factors that make modern London the stunning success that it is: its attractiveness to wealth, its burgeoning population, its physical expansion (especially upwards), its energy, its dynamism, its youth.

Look at all the trends that Rowan Moore deplores: the property prices, the new building, the recycling and reusing of existing structures and places, the startling gentrification of districts that not so long ago were bywords for poverty and decay. All these things can be traced back to one single cause: London's extraordinary reinvention of itself as a global city - the 'capital of the world' as Boris Johnson (somewhat hyperbolically) described it. And if you agree with Rowan Moore's complaint, the good news is that the remedy is easy (but he dare not suggest it): it is to ramp up tax and regulation until capital chooses to go elsewhere and take everything new and dynamic with it. Then we can revert to the London I remember from my youth (I'm 59 now): still a great city but one with its best years apparently behind it, full of the fading relics of its former role as capital of a now-vanished Empire, its housing affordable but its population in decline, its infrastructure gently crumbling and the world passing it by.

Is that really what we want? Just one example to underline my point: I can remember, as recently as the late 1960s, there were still, in the heart of the City of London, substantial plots of empty and derelict land that had formerly been occupied by buildings destroyed by German bombing in a War that had ended over twenty years previously. Think of it - empty bomb sites with EC postcodes left undeveloped for over 20 years, simply because it was not worth anyone's while to build on them. Compare that with the City of today and ask yourself frankly: which do you prefer?

I don't deny that modern London has its problems, of course; perhaps the most pressing of which is the chronic shortage of housing at all levels of the market - top, middle and bottom. And you and I have engaged in correspondence before about the important contribution that has been made, and continues to be made, by the provision in recent times of waterside apartments along the Regent's Canal in place of the underused and semi-derelict warehousing and light industrial buildings that formerly lined the Canal. But for all these recent developments, our housing supply is still falling hopelessly behind the growth in population, so there remains a pressing need for large amounts of further housing of all kinds, especially in central London.

See you tonight.

JB