A full investigation is required to find out why so much public money was wasted and make sure it never happens again but while the Garden Bridge is dead in the water, the need for bridges in East London is set to continue.

Let us be quite clear London needs more bridges. You just have to look at the movement of cars from South East London into Central London via Blackwall or Rotherhithe tunnel and you can appreciate it. Just as critically it is also needed to stem the isolation of places like Thamesmead, a town created within London by the GLC.

But any new bridge in London needs to be East of Tower Bridge linking East London with South-East London but certainly not in Central or in West London where you can be going on & off the bridges by car and you lose any sense of which side of London you are actually on!

Indeed at the end of Ken Livingstone time at City Hall, we had a proposed Thames Gateway bridge linking Beckton in East London with the remote area of Thamesmead and putting them on the map for the first time. But this half a billion project immediately died a death with Boris Johnson new administration even though it had all the approvals to let the contract and would have been operational in 2013.

Little was heard of bridge proposals in the rest of Boris Johnson time till the Garden Bridge came up towards the end of his second term at City Hall. With a concerted media campaign and influential backers like the Chancellor of Exchequer of the day Gideon ( George ) Osborne it suddenly drew a lot of attention not dissimilar to other projects like the Emirate cable cars and Arcelormittal Orbit slide which caught the eye of the Mayor. Illustrating well again Boris Johnson as Mayor of London complete incompetence to strategically look at London while pursuing media generated hyped projects at huge expense to the public purse.

Not only did they want tens of millions subsidy for the construction of the Garden Bridge but they also tried to get the running costs of the bridge subsided by public purse and Westminster council did well to put a stop to it, as owners of the landing at the Temple.

The Garden Bridge ultimately was completely in the wrong place, essentially a tourist attraction and was not adding to the transport infrastructure of London, so it did not warrant any public monies. So quite how Transport for London (TfL) signed up to it, is quite beyond me and they do need to explain themselves. Along with their senior staff, we should also add all the construction consultants from firms like Arup who appear to have been paid handsomely for professional services which has not produced anything at all for the public realm.

How a pair of Bullingdon Club boys wasted tens of million pounds public money for their pet projects the Garden Bridge is beyond many while in public office needs through investigating as well. Joanna Lumley role in it all needs looking into as well. She appears to cast a spell on politicians particularly those who she’s had on sitting on her knees! It all adds to the feel that some can get away with murder or at least spending our money without accounting for themselves. Heads must roll but I doubt it will with them.

So while an investigative inquiry is imperative, let us not allow the final legacy of the Garden Bridge to be the death of any other bridge proposals across the Thames, as we will no doubt need them. Oddly enough TfL at the end of Boris’s time returned to bridge proposals in East London.

The charred and burnt Grenfell Tower looms over Kensington’s affluent landscape as a disturbing and painfully appropriate symbol of austerity.

The inferno is not dissimilar to fires in shanty towns of developing world. Yet it happened in one of richest boroughs in U.K, Royal Borough of Kensington & Chelsea. Which has reserves of hundreds of millions and can spend £25 million refurbishing Exhibition Road. Illustrating well their prioirities. Daily Mirror cited that the use of plastic cladding in favour of non-flammable panels saved the regeneration process over £5000. So £5000 was the price they put on those hundreds of lives lost. Why? To make the building more aesthetically pleasing for the rich neighbour of Kensington and Chelsea to look upon, a thin veneer of glossy paint to hide the bruised and blistered community that lived within it.

It towers as a symbol of poverty. It rises over its surroundings as a symbol of a community marginalised and forgotten. It shall remain forever as a symbol of systematic and continuous failure of government and the local council. 

Now this isn’t a terror attack, an outsider committing a crime out of hate and anger and jealousy of our community. Nor is it a natural disaster, an unavoidable accident or act of God. Rather, this was an act that came from within, a mark of how obnoxious and distant this government is from working class people.

These Londoners from many corners of the world that are likely to have perished in that building had nothing to begin with in the first place. Those who survived have nothing to continue with as well. 

It is worth mentioning too that the response from the whole community of all faiths, nationalities, ages and colour has been heart warming. However, the fact remains that this is one of the most atrocious and catastrophic failures of government and council we have seen in recent years. The people of that community are right to be angry and right to demand responsibility be taken. The responsibility HAS to be taken by someone whether that be by the council, the government or those responsible for the regeneration of Grenfell tower. Whether that responsibility will ever be taken by a government who have so consistently shown ignorance and negligence to the poor is another question altogether.

Grenfell Tower represents the worst of our current society and will forever mark the vast chasm between the rich and the poor, the upper class and the lower class, and will symbolise those who have and those who do not.

My thoughts are of course with those who have perished and those who now go on to live life scarred forever.

As Manchester unites in grief over the appalling attack on young concert goers at MEN arena on Monday night, it added a whole lot more emotion to the Europa League final in Stockholm involving Manchester United.                 

It has been said that the assailant to the appalling attack Salman Abedi was a United fan but l don’t know any United fans that go around killing young girls, so let’s drop any notion that he was a United fan at all.                     

The great Bill Shankly once said that “Some people believe football is a matter of life and death…… I can assure you it is much, much more important than that.”  Well maybe on this occasion he’s just got it plain wrong. It was undoubtedly going to be a much more emotion charged game for fans and the team and it be interesting to see how Jose Mourinho briefed his players for this game and whether it was too much of a weight for the players to have on their shoulders or did it give them an extra incentive to play to their ultimate limits.           

One thing for sure there will be new chants on the terraces of Old Trafford during next season like ” You can stick your f….king ISIS up your arse” 

In the same weekend that the Iranian elections returned Hassan Rouhani with an agenda to reform and negotiate further peace with the West, President Donald Trump goes to Riyadh to sign massive arms deal of $100 billion with Saudi Arabia while lecturing to Sunni leaders of the terrorist threat. In short turning the war on terror officially into a Sunni-Shia sectarian one where the US clearly back the Sunnis.

With his speech blaming the Iranians for causing most of the instability, his intervention spells even more trouble for the Middle East as many of the conflicts increasingly take a sectarian nature. Its as though he has intentionally poured petrol on the fire on this first trip aboard for the US President. 

Lisson Gallery successfully bring us larger than life cartoon characters to London, NW1 by hosting an exhibition of Joyce Pensato FORGETTABOUT IT between 19th May to 24th June 2017 via their 67 Lisson Street entrance into their premises. 

Joyce Pensato’s exhibitions prima facie subject matter are cartoon characters like Batman, Donald Duck and Homer Simpson with her on-going experimentation with techniques, as well as the positioning and fragmentation of figures through frenzied and sustained assaults on the canvas. Giving us some very over sized images of our cartoon heroes using coloured pastels and several lays of industrial grade enamel paint. 

Certainly worth going to see, if only to recognise the cartoon characters! 

Yesterday there was an astonishing admission from Andrea Leadsom MP on the floor of the Commons about delaying DEFRA’s application of its NO2 plan, something many had been waiting several years for now including the EU. 

Ministers are now also accused of bullying judges over delay to toxic air curbs. So we have the government of the day delaying putting a plan into place that legal action had been taken against them and won twice before. It was finally meant to have been lodged with the Supreme Court on monday but the government appealed for postponement till after the election itself when these plans should have been in place in 2010! 

Since 2010 our knowledge of air pollution adverse impact to our lives in our cities particularly the young, old and sick has increased substantially. The governments lack of action and abandonment of their responsibilities had now made sure it has become a major issue in the General Election 2017. Seven year delay in responding to the requirements of having a NO2 plan is not good enough. By not getting on with the business of government, it will now become a General Election issue, thats for sure. 

I noticed the old buses on No 2 bus route are being replaced by new hybrid buses in my neighbourhood at their turning point on Hayes Place when they head back down to South London. This is of course welcomed in the fight to reduce air pollution from the emissions from the buses as the logo Hybrid CleanAir for London (HV 297 ) indicates but why are all the hybrids diesel? 

So far all the new hydrids on this route l have seen are run on diesel as the cap on the HV 297 illustrates well in the photo below but we do know hydrids can also be run on other sources like CNG ( concentrated national gas ) as in Barcelona, hydrogen in Tokyo or even RNG ( renewable bio-methane ) resourced potential from London’s food waste. Whatever else, maybe even petrol would be better than diesel now that its well established it contributes much more to NOx than other energy sources on the road. 

Some go further and suggest that many in the business know that these diesel hybrids end up running on diesel more often than not. So Transport for London (TfL) need to explain to us why the over reliance on diesel hybrids when other well trodden paths exist with other energy sources in the hybrids, to help us with London’s air pollution crisis. 

Appropriate graffiti at Lisson Gallery for Council consultation on Building Height in the City

Westminster City Council has started its consultation on skyline of the City via the launching of its document Building Height: Getting the right kind of growth for Westminster.  It is worth bearing in mind a major consideration it doesn’t acknowledge at all in the consultation documentation, what the population density within the borough of the city is already when the population of the City is projected to grow from 226,000 to 262,000 by 2036 requiring some 21,000 homes. 

We should thus not make these particular wards anymore dense then they are already certainly unless fully compensated with a lot more open space and better management of communal space ( both private and public ) by the council and developers in line with the rest of London, at least. For example in the most dense ward of the City it has only one bit of public space, Broadley St Gardens in Church St Ward. Are we really going to make that ward more dense without at least some more open space?  

We should be also mindful of the pattern within the City as well as the list of most dense words looks like below;

It is noticeable that the wards with the lowest population density in the City are St James and Knightsbridge & Belgravia, with densities quite a bit lower that the London average of 51.3 per hectare. While wards like Church St & Harrow Road have almost five times their population density. So its quite clear on the basis of population density where the skyline and thus the population density of Westminster should be increased, without actually affecting the skyline unduly and accommodating the further growth of the City.  

Existing population density should be an important considerable in determining the building height of the City and getting the right kind of growth for Westminster yet in its consultation document its not a major consideration at all. Indeed it is a major admission of the consultation. 

Its all very well Boris Johnson arguing for tough new sanctions at his G7 meeting against Assad & Putin now that he is Secretary of State for Foreign & Commonwealth Office but as Mayor of London, he didn’t give money laundering and sanction against it much attention when l raised it with him at the London Assembly as a lot of it in recent time would have involved Middle East & Russia monies going into London property market. Please see attached link showing how much of the time he and his office were in denial about the matter.  

The recently released update on the situation in London from Transparency International UK called Spring Cleaning, refers to the Assad regime in Syrian and their assets in London. It suggests that the personal wealth of Bashar Al-Assad and his associates are estimated at £4.4-5.2 billion, with no corrupt Syrian assets ever being seized in the UK, illustrating a very poor UK-Syrian asset recovery record. 

Can we now expect the Boris Johnson to act on the issue now that he’s creditability as Secretary of State is up rather than when he had been in denial about it initially as Mayor of London?