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When so much of London lies empty, writes Paul Finch
I read with increasing disbelief the claims being made about the impossibility of housing London's growing population within its own borders. Anyone flying over the capital will have noticed vast areas, mainly on the east side of town, which await building of any description. There are thousands of hectares of land which could be brought into residential use to the advantage of everyone, so why are we pretending otherwise?
The estimable Tony Travers and his London School of Economics researchers have interesting statistics on this point. Were available land to be built out to the densities currently prevailing in the Royal Borough of Kensington & Chelsea, the capital could accommodate 18 million people. Were we to go the whole hog, and built out to Haussman densities (and we love old Paris, don't we?), the figure rises to approaching 30 million.
You will notice that...