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But the fact that they had been there for decades exasperated me; when I returned from other more coherent cities I could only reflect that in Paris, say, anomalies like this would have been cleared away at the flourish of a pen in the Hotel de Ville. But then, as Peter Hall says in Cities in Civilization:
"London was (or we can say is) "in thrall to Benthamite utilitarianism; Paris adhered to an absolutist, centralist tradition that went back to Louis X1V " Indeed it hardly needs pointing out that here until very recently there has been no Hotel de Ville, no one in charge, by and large no one to give a damn.

But then again…. Sitting in an upstairs window at Burgerking I look out on this corner and watch, one hot afternoon, a cluster of gorgeously tu-tued men, pink tulle, pistachio frou frou, wielding bright yellow waterpistols, waiting at the stop to bus up to Finsbury Park for the Gay Mardi Gras; and I think do I want Tottenham Court Road to be some bloody Champs Elysees? No thanks!

I have sort of given up; London is precisely the city that an endemically unurban people, a terminally unurban people (the English) are doomed to have. At intervals there are moments, opportunities for grand and essentially urban gestures. They are almost always fudged; now there is the Millennium Village. A development east of the Millennium site. Need it be said? It will not (of course) be a splendid glittering range of daring condominiums flanking the Thames. No, it appears (from the rather wispy drawings I have seen) to be a low rise spread of very modest blocks and an excess of garden. (Millennium Village; what is this thing about villages? You want village life? Go and live in a village!).

This takes us to the fact of the house. The major feature of London is the house. It is by and large a city of houses which makes it distinctly different from most other European cities. This is above all a feature of English (as opposed to Scottish) cities. The Scottish are different; like other Europeans they have from very early on built tenement.

Fundamentally the fact is this; the English are an unmetropolitan people and build the least metropolitan cities in the world. This has its attractions. London has always been seen as a kind of garden city. Rasmussen's enthusiasm for the scattered as opposed to the concentrated city focuses on the house and its garden.

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