I thought I had read that the city have given permission to James Sellar to build two office blocks on top of the Great Eastern Hotel, but now realise that they have given permission to a different scheme. 

I fear that the Liverpool Street scheme may indeed be given permission because the City is so heavily invested in the idea of endless growth. It feels as if it has found it difficult, if not impossible, to adapt itself to a new environment post-Covid when fewer people are working in mega-office developments and when the City needs to change its policies to be more environmentally friendly.

The great villains in the proposed Liverpool Street Station development are not so much the City authorities as Herzog and de Meuron who are being used by the developer to give a spurious glamour to a hideous project which they are presumably embarrassed by because it is nowhere advertised on their website and for which there can be no possible architectural justification.

If it is indeed given permission, we will need Michael Gove to call it in for proper and systematic evaluation as to whether it is truly needed.

This is a picture of the station as it used to be:-

This is a picture of the train sheds as they still are – so beautiful, a cathedral of Victorian engineering:-