No one knows the exact terms of their lease. My second post should have been showing quoting another post I meant to reply to. My point was that if the post office were mid lease they would be in a strong negotiating position to get the space that suited them.. if their lease was ending they could have moved anywhere they wanted, they weren’t forced into the new space. This is the post office, a major lease holding business who regularly negotiate leases.
I expect that the Post Office was in a position to get a good deal on the new lease and the consequence that users would end up having to queue in the rain was of no significance to the PO’s property department.
In my post #360 I was trying to move away from the argumentative posting about Squires to non personalised post of the overall problem. Something I was hoping most posters could agree on. For Urban75 it's not that contentious. I'm assuming you can agree with it? Im not saying my post is offering solutions it's positing the problem in non personalised way.
Or, indeed, of any concern to Squire "we want to be part of Brixton's community" & Partners. But it does piss me off to see all that vast empty space in their vast showcase offices while customers are packed into the new PO or queuing in the rain. But yes, that'as capitalism for you. Money first, people second.
Is the post office in that strong a position since privatisation? Quote from Labour MP from a couple of years back. Three Years On From Its Sale, The Privatisation Of Royal Mail Is A Story Of Our Times This isn't to blame Squires. Its all part of the last thirty plus years of "free" market capitalist economics.
Those luxury contracts targeting foreign investors keep on rolling in for Squire: Currently on exhibition in Hong Kong. West End Gate: classic London living reimagined with exclusive amenities
Sorry what is your point here? Do you agree with the multi millionaire architect who thinks people should be "less obsessed with overlooking and rights to light", while he - of course - has plenty of light and space in his luxury house?
I want people to have decent housing at affordable prices, and I don't like stinking rich architects in massive houses telling poor people that they should put up with dark shitholes overlooked by everyone else.
He’s saying dense housing is cheaper, which isn’t rocket science. More houses per acre less cost per house, especially in urban areas. Alex
Fact is that once you get to a certain density you really do have to start compromising on stuff like privacy and access to daylight. Agreeing the point at which this starts to become a significant issue *is* something akin to rocket science. Especially when you're not building a whole city anew.
Of course, one contributing factor to the housing crisis is space-hogging, rent-escalating upmarket developments being built and directly marketed to foreign investors, many of whom are quite happy to leave them empty while they accrue value. Squire & Partners are very much complicit in this trade.
depends what you are comparing it to.... "Lambeth is one of the most densely populated areas in the country with an average of 12,020 residents per square kilometre; this compares to an average of 5,600 for London, and just 366 for England as a whole" https://www.lambeth.gov.uk/sites/default/files/ssh-demography-factsheet-2017.pdf Berlin.....3,944 inhabitants per km². Manhattan......10,194/km² E2a Mexico City........9,800 per square kilometre Manila.....41,515 per square km Reykjavik.....600 per square kilometer
Well, that crushes his 'argument' into tiny little pieces then. What's more, with all the new high rise blocks being built in and around Brixton, the housing density is going to go even higher.
Yes it does depend what you compare it to. Lambeth average 12,000. Central Paris measures around 25,000 per km2. But one km2 part of that reaches 50,000. The most densely populated km2 of London gets to 20,000. Outside of zone 2 there are large swathes of housing that are really quite low density (can't find the stats that compare that to outer Paris off hand). It's quite complicated. Good article here Think your country is crowded? These maps reveal the truth about population density across Europe
However you spin it, Lambeth is very densely populated. Things aren't so densely populated around Mr Squire's house however, where he has a lovely big garden to himself, or in the super-luxury properties he designs for the super rich. Lambeth is one of the most densely populated places in the country. There are eight boroughs with more than 100 residents per hectare – all in inner London. Lambeth is the fifth most densely populated borough in the country, with 113 residents per hectare.
London, Berlin, Paris compared. EU Population 2011 by 1km grid v3 These don't really capture what happens above 10k in the yellow areas though.
High density central london vs high density central paris - dramatic difference more visible here (numbers indicate population in each square km). EU Population 2011 by 1km grid v4
Deep down, we are all NIMBYers. I'm all for a bit of density and tonnes of house building, but /you know/ somewhere else....... No one in London wants a huge towerblock built next to them, blocking out light, peeps fighting for (already) stretched local services (bus, GP etc.) etc. Move the pull of jobs away from London to brand new towns and e.g. B'ham, Leeds, Coventry (amongst others), and build some fucking low rise houses near there - on brown field. Not complicated.
Here's a good source for comparisons: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/supp...13.764830/suppl_file/tjom_a_764830_sm0418.pdf Scale tops out at 25,000 ppl/km² 12 year old data though Berlin was being compared earlier and what stands out is the uniformity. Mid-level density all the way through.
These I think are more useful than the ones I posted...which I now realise use a kind of logarithmic scale for the colours which disguises the sharpness or otherwise of dropoff as you move out from the centre.
For me it's just the notion of some super rich multi-millionaire in a massive house designing massive houses for others super rich multi-millionaires telling poor people they'll just have to suck up overlooked small properties with poor light that offends.
England is one of the most densely populated countries in the world. London is also densely populated. You claimed that "London does have very low density housing". You were wrong by any measure. High-density London: past, present and future
London sprawls. If more homes of any kind are to be built, they must be quite a bit denser than those that already exist, to avoid further sprawl. Population density figures that ignore the actual dispersement of that density are not very useful.
