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Lord Rogers blasts Thames Gateway as 'toy town slum'
Jason Beattie, Chief Political Correspondent28.03.08
Labour's favourite architect today launched a blistering attack on the "shoddy, toy town" buildings of the Thames Gateway scheme.
Richard Rogers, the former head of Labour's Urban Task Force, said he feared that some of the estates "could be the slums of tomorrow".
Lord Rogers, whose buildings include the Pompidou Centre in Paris, the Millennium Dome and the new Terminal 5 at Heathrow, said nearly a decade after the Urban Task Force report the Government was still failing to provide decently designed communities.
"We still have no examples of regenerated neighbourhoods and cities in the UK that compare with the best in the world.
"There is something wrong when the Thames Gateway - Europe's biggest regeneration project - is still peppering the banks of the beautiful River Thames with shoddy, toy town houses, and Dan Dare glass towers," he told the House of Lords.
He continued: "I fear that we are building the slums of tomorrow."
His criticisms are the latest blow to the £9billion Thames Gateway scheme.
The Government wants to build 160,000 homes and create up to 225,000 jobs along a 40-mile corridor from the Docklands to Southend and Lewisham to the Isle of Sheppey.
Despite its cost and importance to the Government, the Gateway is still being overseen by a temporary chief executive following the departure of Judith Armitt in December.
An Evening Standard investigation last year found the scheme had so far swallowed £7 billion in taxpayers' money but there has been no proper audit on how it has been spent.
There is also no record of how many homes were built in the project's first four years.
Criticism has focused on the multiple agencies and organisations involved - often with overlapping responsibilities - charged with pushing through the developments.
Lord Rogers said it was time for a single delivery body to take control. He is not the first major figure to criticise the Gateway over the standard of the architecture and design.
Property developer Sir Stuart Lipton, deputy chairman of Chelsfield Partners, recently said the plans would create "cheap" and "isolated" estates lacking community facilities. MPs on the Commons public accounts committee have also attacked the scheme for having "grandiose" vision but "little achievement".
Derek Wyatt, whose Sittingbourne and Sheppey constituency is covered by the project, said they were planning an unwanted "housing theme park".
A spokesman for the Department for Communities and Local Government said: "We are committed to good design and there is plenty of activity across the Thames Gateway aimed at ensuring we have the best design standards possible-We are also working with the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment to develop standards for the whole Gateway."
He added: "The Gateway has already delivered results, with real changes across the area in the last year, including the opening of two international stations on the High Speed Rail Link, agreement on Crossrail, major progress on the Olympic Developments and the new deep- water port at London Gateway."
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Reader views (7)
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Yet another new labour project that's become a financial black hole wasting billions of taxpayers money.
- Stuart, London
An indictment indeed from the man who should know.
He has built more than most.
- Minnie Ovens, USA
This is no surprise - New Labour is the 22 carat hallmark of incompetence in everything it touched in the last 10 years. Hopefully this will end soon, as people have seen through the expensive rhetoric to the wastelands of post Labour reality.
- Stephen, Hampton, England
