The price of progress

Being my father’s son, I am cursed with a fascination for construction and civil engineering projects. Recently this has taken the form of studying planning applications on the council website, a habit acquired whilst waiting for ours to appear. But I've also studied many projects from the train these past 12 years, as every available parcel of land between here and London gets swallowed up for development. Rochester Riverside, the Silwood Estate in Bermondsey, a high-rise near Millwall's old stadium, a huge shed near their new one, the More London sprawl blocking views of Tower Bridge, the ultra-trendy award-winning Palestra (which achieved the unlikely feat of being as ugly as the 60s office block demolished by JCB to make way) and the adjacent Travelodge, even the London Eye - all these have given me reason to stay awake.

I mention this because in the past couple of days the scaffolding has reached the very top of the Southwark Towers, rising 100m above London Bridge station. Like a racehorse with a broken leg, the building is being shrouded to hide its impending doom from hapless spectators. Yet despite my interest in such things, I am indisputably sad at this turn of events. Although the interior apparently needs an overhaul, the building is only 32 years old and there is nothing fundamentally wrong with it. Indeed I would go so far as to say that with its three brown-brick wings and outhung glass panels it is quite elegant, especially in comparison to its neighbours. (The adjacent New London Bridge House is also up for demolition and will not be missed, but Guy’s Hospital is incontrivertibly ugly.) Its misfortune is to be situated on prime development land required for the 305m-high Shard of Glass.

Quite why we as a society should countenance the demolition of a usable, attractive, relatively recent building, to accommodate a £350m vanity project, is beyond me. We are supposed to be reducing our use of scarce resources, not producing thousands of tons of rubble and erecting another several thousand tons of steel and glass. And who is one of the leading advocates of this hugely wasteful project? Surely not the architect of "green initiatives" like the low emissions zone and £25 congestion charge? Yes, the one and only Ken Livingstone, London’s hypocrite-in-chief.

One way I can cheer myself up is to watch progress at the Kingswood Hotel in Gillingham, derelict for as long as I’ve been travelling past it, but now being renovated and converted for residential use. The structural engineers’ report recommended demolition but it appears that somewhere in the local area is someone who prefers making the most of what we have to building something bigger and brasher. A quiet work in Tyrant Ken’s ear wouldn’t go amiss.