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Hundred billion plan for new look London

by Victor Jayanetti ; Our London Correspondent

The Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, last Friday laid out his much anticipated 15 year plan to turn the capital into a 24 hour multicultural city, to an audience of finest town planners consultants and media people.

The 400 page plan calls for several new rail lines, 130 new schools and 460,000 new homes, at a cost of one hundred billion pounds. It also proposes a new airport in the Thames area. Nearly 80% of the predicted 516,000 increase in the working age population is expected to come from black and minority communities, underlining the growth of labour mobility within the European Union. Ken Livingstone's solution is to put high-density and preferably low-cost housing on every corner of unused land, and spend a fortune on improving public transport. East London would begin to look like Manhattan, with skyscrapers like Canary Wharf's celebrated Canada Tower springing up everywhere. He believes the plan can produce a compact, viable and environmental city, despite the predicted boom in jobs and growth. He said, "This is a hugely ambitious blueprint for a fast-growing city. London has gained the equivalent of the entire population of Sheffield in the past 13 years, and is expected to increase by the equivalent of the population of Leeds in the next 13 years." Confidently predicting the proposals would get government backing, he said his plans would create a "greener, accessible and compact city" with new buildings, including some high rises, on brownfield sites.

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