I Wonder Where Edward Lives..?

London needs more housing, agrees (almost) everyone. So when the old Mount Pleasant sorting office was shut down, here was a chance to build some.

Who could object?

Edward Denison of the Mount Pleasant Association and University College London’s Bartlett School of Architecture damned RMG’s proposal for ten buildings, some as a high as 15 storeys, containing 681 housing units along with office space and shops with a pedestrian street running through it, as an architectural manifestation of the same mentality that informed the Royal Mail sell-off.

The plans would, in Denison’s view, result in an “exclusively inward-looking fortress-like development” accompanied by a misnamed “public realm”, which would, in reality, be controlled by and for private interests to create “malls without walls”.

Like a cancer, he wrote, this would eventually kill the neighbourhood around it.

How..?

The two councils were unhappy too, in particular with the amount of affordable homes being offered in the plans...

Oh, I see! He means there won't be enough of the sort of people you need a fortress to protect yourselves from.