I wonder what happens when we run out of things to sell off. It must be getting close.

Is the Thames also racist and misogynist? I think we should be told.

A much better article than the one last week about Mormons – an actual point (even though I disagree with it). I know a couple of people who have bought flats in these high-rise flats on the river, an aussie and a young couple, who seem to be very happy with their purchases. Just because others (including myself) thinks they are awful would it really be better to have crumbling dockyards or industrial zones that were previously there (like Liverpool)? I’m not sure the article knows where it stands on that point. The writer is wrong to say that brutalism was only decried in the late 20th century – it was at the time by the majority of people who weren’t architects. The writer at least acknowledges his own suggestion (central planning) would probably be a recipe for even greater sterility.
As an ex-north londoner I never really felt an affinity with the river in a way that I am told by others that Parisians feel about the Seine or Hamburgers about the Elbe. The centre of London has always appeared as a place of work rather than leisure but as a place of work there is nowhere better. Hyde Park is a poor substitute for Richmond or Hampstead Heath. Compare the jobs market in London to anywhere else outside of West/East coast USA and you would be hard pressed to find somewhere better for a bright, driven individual. Would the UK be better or worse off without the magnet of London drawing in expertise, investment and innovation from the home nations as well as Europe? I would suggest the UK would be relegated to a par with Spain or Poland if we didn’t have the second largest financial centre in the world with all the loss to tax revenue which would ensue if it were to decline. You don’t have to look far for a comparison: Birmingham is desperate for foreign investment but can’t get it and has been in managed decline for decades. Average house prices are a third of those in London but does that mean that young people can afford them?
The writer does well to point out the churn that is part of London’s nature but then goes on to decry the current trends. That is the way of an organic city, much more so than centrally planned ones in which parks are gridded and more sterile even than Hyde Park. London (and by extension the Thames) has its own rhythm, just not the rhythm that the author (or I) might like. At least the river is cleaner than it used to be – an unusual omission in an article on the river though perhaps not the thrust of the proposition. Why shouldn’t private landowners place fencing/gates/cameras to make their tenants feel safe? It is what any sane person does in a large city nowadays if they have enough money.
In short, as most people get the government they deserve, Londoners get the river they deserve.

Strange – my experience is the exact opposite. Over the last 40 years I’ve been up and down the Thames both sides, country (where most of it is) and city, on/in water and land. As far as London is concerned, access has opened up enormously. For at least a couple of decades it has been a legal requirement for developments to install/maintain the river path (even where there was none before). Now that the rehab of Fulham stadium is restoring the path, one of the last holdouts is the Hurlingham Club – that bastion of modernity.

Moreover, the super-sewer is being built, in a few years all the effluence will be carried away, and it may be healthily possible to swim centrally.

To the well travelled person, it is clear that access to the river Thames, in London or outside, is extraordinarily broad – a minor miracle of openess. The longest, best maintained, best protected public path in the country. Many many places to launch your boat, sit, swim if you dare. All I take from this article is that the author doesn’t like modern high rises along the river – in the case of St George’s Wharf he is 100% correct – complaints about most of the others will fade in time (part of the long tradition of bemoaning modernity, and then loving it when it’s older).

Earlier this year I stumbled across an interesting video from 1982 with Bob Hoskins’ talking about the sterilisation of the Thames on Omnibus. A good watch if you are also interested in what has happened to the land around the Thames. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oTgqHsJ4410&t=330s

It is possible to walk from the South Bank, to Battersea and to the end of Battersea Park, almost entirely along the left bank of the Thames, save for short detours at Vauxhall Bridge and the Nine Elms sewage plant near Riverlight. (And much the same on the opposite bank). I think much of the new development in this area is rather good, and that the area is being progressively revitalised, even if the flow of investment has been bumpy. I’m not sure who would want to preserve a post-industrial wasteland of broken down warehouses and contaminated mud, which was here before? I know it is fashionable to decry ‘gentrification’, but this part of London desperately needed the investment it has received, and is generally the better for it (although I do wish that the Gehry buildings at Battersea had been more radical).

I went to Esfahan a few years ago. Noticeably the riversides are accessible to all. We have to pay to see the sea from a council car park.
London is City One in the ‘Hunger Games’.

I’m puzzled by “the bucolic neighbourhoods of Kingston”.

Personally I think the Thames ought to be lined with skyscrapers on both banks. The general character of low-rise development isn’t attractive at all in my opinion: you only have to look east down the river from Canary Wharf to appreciate how barren and uninspiring it can be.

High rise buildings can be extremely beautiful, they can be neither brutalist nor tackily opulent if done well, and there are many examples of how they can be done well. I don’t envisage turning the whole Thames into a skyscraper alley by any means, but there are still huge lengths of riverside that could be turned high rise, and this is, let’s remember, a time when we have never been so short of homes where people actually want to live, namely London.