Surprisingly little news space has been given to the loss of the Stratford Sphere. In a journalistic world where you can ‘investigate’ a story for a good couple of issues before it becomes stale, particularly if it mixes entertainment with politics, there was but a brief spurt of strap-lined story on how the colossus of a venue and the equally large pot of overseas funding it attracted has been turned down by the Mayor of London.
What makes the story worthy of at least a couple of issues is how supportive Mr Khan had been up until then.
What makes the story worthy of at least a couple of issues is how supportive Mr Khan had been up until then.
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Khan’s refusal on Monday represented a change of attitude since the project was first announced in 2018, when the Labour mayor said: “It’s great to welcome another world-class venue to the capital, to confirm London’s position as a music powerhouse and to boost still further our city’s thriving night-time economy.”
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Guardian 20 November 2023
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On the back of this support the promoters had progressed, not with the evident design, for that remained largely unchanged to the naked eye, but with the seemingly interminable approvals processes that any vaguely out-of-the-ordinary proposal needs to undertake in this risk-averse, multi-hooped day and age.
Those of us that have been involved in such processes know the significant cost and effort to which the promoters and guardians are subjected, including in this case, the many departments of the Mayor’s own organisation.
Indeed, even my enabling and largely subterranean corner of the project, part of the Section 106 package that sought to expand the capacity of Stratford Station in readiness for the background growth and anticipated thrill-seekers, was a four-year slog through the machinations of ambition, contradiction and debate that causes such delay in the delivery of our infrastructure projects.
Indeed, even my enabling and largely subterranean corner of the project, part of the Section 106 package that sought to expand the capacity of Stratford Station in readiness for the background growth and anticipated thrill-seekers, was a four-year slog through the machinations of ambition, contradiction and debate that causes such delay in the delivery of our infrastructure projects.
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While the anticipated transport need was focused, the stakeholders' appetite for investigations were the usual widespread collection of unrelated demands, with solutions sought for growth clear across the station, multi-faceted management procedures for dealing with existing and new capacity constraints and, finally, succinctly, my proposition, a new station entrance in a comparatively lightly used corner of the station that it seems almost criminal not to progress.
But now it won’t progress, for the promoters have had enough of the process. Capped off by the flip-flopping of our Mayor in the run up to the election, they have turned their sights to more ‘forward- thinking cities’ in other parts of the world. Substantial improvements at Stratford station and in 'London’s thriving night time economy' will have to wait for another pot of private money to risk the vagaries of Mayoral decision making. |
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And as we all reflected on the broadside from the Mayor's office and the long term impact on the confidence for future proposal funding in a London planning context, we realised that the Mayor’s headline issues too are rather odd, for they each relate to design matters that did not change one iota since the proposal was first introduced. Only the script has changed:
… City Hall said the intensity of the external illumination would “cause significant light intrusion resulting in significant harm to the outlook of neighbouring properties, detriment to human health, and significant harm to the general amenity enjoyed by residents of their own homes”.
It would also be “a bulky, unduly dominant and incongruous form”, environmentally unsustainable given the amount of energy required to power its lighting rigs and would harm the setting of nearby listed buildings and conservation areas. Guardian 20 November 2023
I was thinking of these last justifications as I drove south through the Blackwall Tunnel on my way to the more forward-thinking continent, looking at the Mayor’s huge worksite at the entrance to the forthcoming Silvertown Tunnel, that mass of energy and embodied carbon forming and becoming the structures being built beneath and to either side of the Thames, only to enable more and more cars on our roads.
Very strange priorities these. |
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