While we were at the NLA exhibition the other day we managed to grab a few minutes with Paul Finch chair of design council CABE. Paul had some pretty controversial views on how the City should look during the breakfast debate.For starters he believes that Stansted airport will eventually end up with four runways, "much smarter place than going out to Shenfield" and that a Crossrail extension would really make this work. We're talking 2050 here but in the near term a second runway is a very real possibility says Paul. The added bonus of this is that it would circumvent a huge headache at Boris's (Bird) Island and Finch says that Boris has already given some encouraging noises to expansion at Stansted.
Long term the City will get a bit taller, he says but in the medium term there will be more retrofitting of buildings and probably a bit less knocking down and starting again. The biggest threat to the City, he says is mental laziness and big ideas don't have to mean
Click below to hear Paul explain why. By clicking on the tiny pictures of me in sound wave below you can dip in and out at key points, just look at the text underneath the sound wave to see what's being discussed.
Picture by Ozan Huseyin on Flickr
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