Levelling-up

There is a new exit at Knightsbridge tube station, levelling-up as it were.

Not really new as there was a small exit at the junction of Sloane Street and Brompton Road. Now it has been re-engineered and is bigger and better.

Doddery old drunks are catered for by a proliferation of bannisters and hand rails on which to cling, like the ancient mariner with his skinny hand and glittering eye. In more than seven years I have only used “fulminate” once so I feel entitled to use it again this morning. (You may not be aware that I try to introduce new words for the edification and education of anyone alighting here by accident.) I have fulminated about urban planning for decades; in the City and Hammersmith. Developers could fob off local authorities by commissioning crappy bits of sculpture – take a walk around Fulham Reach (pronounced Retch).

I lived in Singapore in 1989 and the underground (Mass Rapid Transport) was new so could start with a clean sheet. In the Central Business District, the financial hub, stations have exits that emerge into skyscrapers – jolly good in a hot, humid, wet country. It beggars belief that this has not happened in the City. When the first Heron Tower was built it should have had an underground passage to Liverpool Street Station; likewise subsequent unsightly, high-rise glasshouses that disfigure ( a word that has not been used here since 2016) the Square Mile.

The Knightsbridge exit, Knexit, is you may think a complete waste of tax payers’ money, pandering to people with enough moolah to shop on Brompton Road and Sloane Street. As a lot of them are tourists they should be channelled swiftly into the shops and parted from their money is another aspect. What is simply splendid is that the developer who re-built this corner site was required to pay for the new exit.

On my doorstep, the developer of the sprouting concrete towers at 181 Talgarth Road should have been required to build an underground link to Hammersmith Station. Instead they were required to contribute to the (Labour) council’s begging bowl. A bowl that will be emptied to pay for a temporary double-decker bridge at Hammersmith Bridge.

Barons Court, especially if you have a beagle, is a village. So I wasn’t surprised to see the owners of Daphne and Akiko on the Talgarth Road. Just Stop Oil protestors had glued their middle-class bums to the tarmac and we went along to gawk and admire the West London College basking in autumnal sunshine and architectural excellence.