Thursday 11 October 2018

THE CONCRETE AND THE CLAY

On the Road

An unpleasant accident on the Harrow Road yesterday evening caused traffic chaos. It was clear that a car had struck a motorcycle.  It didn't look good for the motorcyclist. not least because the police were still doing their investigations two hours later. If it's only a collision they are keen to get the traffic moving again, but here a large section of road (and pavement) was taped off for a long time, and people in high-vis were using cameras and surveying equipment. What I couldn't understand was how the car came to be sideways on  across the road, nowhere near a junction. That appeared to be the place where the accident had happened, as the motorbike was there under his front wing. The natural conclusion is that the car was executing some strange manoeuvre when the collision happened. In truth, it is surprising that there are not more accidents with motorcycles and mopeds, given how rashly many are ridden along the Harrow Road.


Fall of an Emperor

Councillor Robert Davis has resigned. Robert Davis has been a towering figure in Westminster for years, a councillor for more than twenty years, Deputy Leader for years, a past Lord Mayor, but most significantly, Chair of Planning for seventeen years. An enquiry has found that while he did not do anything illegal, he breached the councillors' code of conduct. This was after he referred himself to the City Council's monitoring officer back in February, after the scale of the gifts that he had received from property developers had been revealed. He had registered receiving more than five hundred gifts (or instances of hospitality) over the past three years, some of which were of the scale of trips to five-star resorts. Why were  property developers (admittedly not a rare breed in Westminster) so keen to lavish gifts on Councillor Davis? Perhaps because he had been chair of the Westminster Planning Committee for seventeen years. It should be pointed out that the laws against corruption in local government are very strict, and the enquiry has found that Councillor Davis did not break the law, but the monitoring officer makes reference to the impression that was given being a bad one. Because the sense was that you needed Councillor Davis to look kindly on your planning application if it was at all controversial; he did not sit on every panel, but as chair he chose which applications went to which panel, and the belief was that if he liked your application he would see that it came to his panel. In my (very limited) experience, Councillor Davis seemed a pleasant man, though rather grand, but anyone who made planning applications to Westminster (as we had to for our extension) was conscious of his shadow over the whole process. It did all feel a bit imperial. I see that the current Council  Leader has "welcomed" his decision to resign, "Et tu, Brute?"


Concrete

Wherever you look in London there are tower cranes, and then there are all the building sites (like ours) where it is impossible to install a crane. Building is constant. As well as cranes, the indicator of construction activity round here is the scale of traffic generated by the concrete batching plant at Westbourne Park. It's not an aesthetically pleasing building, but it's inconspicuously placed between the main railway line and the Westway. Now when it was built all its raw materials were clearly transported by rail, so it made perfect sense, next to Paddington New Yard, but now it appears that the cement no longer arrives by rail. You never see freight trains of bulk powder wagons on the sidings. In fact, I'm not sure that there even are any sidings any more; I suspect that they may have got in the way of Crossrail. So now, not only do we have constant movements of concrete mixers taking the concrete to building sites, but we have the "goods inwards" as well, huge lorries carrying cement and aggregate. I constantly grumble to myself about what these exceptionally heavy trucks are doing to our roads (and how dangerous they are to cyclists) but I have to remind myself that you are obliged to have batching plants like this reasonably close to construction sites, because the concrete only has a limited lifespan once it has been mixed, so no-one is going to close one down that is so convenient for the builders' promised land, which is central London.


The Benefits of Landfill

There are, however, no waste disposal sites in central London. Rubbish has to be transported out. Historically, the Dust Wharf on the Grand Union Canal (just behind Paddington Station) was where the street sweepings were collected before being shipped out on barges. There is still a very big waste disposal contractor based right next to the canal at Willesden Junction, though nothing now travels by barge, certainly not from the Dust Wharf. "Dust" is a Victorian euphemism for faecal matter, which used to be piled up, higher than a house, on the Dust Wharf. The "dust" was carried out into Middlesex and spread on the vegetable fields. Yum, yum! Now, of course, we produce mountains of waste that can't be spread on the fields, and that generally goes into landfill sites, which are mostly old worked-out gravel pits, located in a ring around London (it's one of the useful things the Green Belt accommodates). If you think that's not very nice, try visiting a city in the developing world where nothing has been planned, and the housing has encircled the landfill (which wasn't even in a pit to start with, and so has become a mountain). The landfill sites are at places like Thurrock (where the new Thames tunnel will start) and Sipson, where the third Heathrow runway may eventually be built. A few years ago the government imposed a landfill tax to discourage the use of these sites, and the resulting money is meant to be applied to projects of public benefit. So, we have been after it for years. When we were first planning the project landfill money seemed like a good bet, but you couldn't apply that early, and by the time we were at the right stage, the rules had changed. Finally, we have managed to qualify for some, and the diligence of our fundraisers has been rewarded. So, benefits can come from landfill.      

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