'And this also', said Marlow suddenly, 'has been one of the dark places of the Earth'

The perils of gloating, first in what will I expect prove to be a fairly regular series. I, and one suspects many other Londoners, have, with varying degrees of guilt or glee, rather enjoyed the property crash. Whether it's the manner in which the spirit of A Clockwork Orange returned to haunt a complex of speculative riverside flats in Thamesmead, or the catalogue of doomed or already shelved schemes leaving vast, gaping holes where yuppiedromes or 'iconic' office blocks were once to rise - the site of Rogers' Cheesegrater is one, Homo Ludens lists a couple more, and I mentioned another very close to home a little while ago. Yet alongside this, as noted at Boris Watch, the new city administration has been imposing upon Transport for London all manner of swingeing cuts, in one of the few areas where Livingstone didn't entirely say a radical thing and do a decidedly non-radical thing. And what they all seem to have in common is that the area non-planned as the 'Thames Gateway' is becoming more and more obviously a deadzone bereft of any infrastructure whatsoever. No bridge between Thamesmead and Dagenham, no DLR extension to the latter, the cancellation of the riverside link from Greenwich through to the aforementioned benighted New Town - all seemingly designed to make this already poor and isolated area even more inclined towards their current state of incipient Nazism.