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Farewell then, Olympians.  Leave us then. Leave us in this mess.  
 
What to say about planning reform today? Oh why bother? It's almost not worth commenting. Just let 'em all get on with it. It's all mad. And at this rate it's going to become even madder than last summer's exhausting and ill-informed furore over the NPPF. It's just a total free-for-all isn't it?  Why didn't they listen? And as ever, with planning issues, it's an all-out competition to see who can be the most self-interested. Honestly. Makes you yearn for a benevolent dictator (and I am a democrat, honest guv).
 

We may well be experiencing tectonic shifts (and I'm not just talking about my head this morning, after yet more Christmas partying yesterday!).  No, the major shifts to which I refer are in property investment trends. 
 
First, there was widespread reporting this week on the trend towards less investment in house-building firms. Citigroup revised its "buy" recommendation in both Barratt Developments and Bovis Homes, prompting share prices in both companies to fall.

An eminent journalist called me this week to inquire as to my view of new-build-densities now that the Coalition Government has done away with it all.

I did my best to respond but, you know, I've never really engaged with the concept of numerical density. I take the view that that way madness lies.

I care not for density. Fish fiddle de dee to density (as the Pobble-who-has-no-toes might say).

When I was first engaging with the local community at Paddington, I was at some pains to avoid discussing any issues of massing or density. When I started the project in mid 1997, the land was worth £11m an acre (I dread to think what we'd be looking at now) and it was clear that, whatever my developer partners were going to bring forward, it was going to be seriously dense (and so it proved).

There was just no point in talking to the local community about quantum or planning metrics; these were a given (and it was an island site, nobody's residential amenity was being threatened, nobody's back garden impinged upon) so we talked instead about the community's aspirations for the place, the crucial connecting through from north to south, the opening up of the waterways, the provision of amenities, support for the hospital and - most crucially - the wholesale delivery of jobs and training opportunities.