Results tagged “wharf comment”

Perhaps it is too early to tell what kind of icon - if any - the Orbit will make for East London.

Maybe its epic scale will be the making of the complex structure. Perhaps its size will be its undoing, appearing like an gauche paperweight inflated, by cash and ego, beyond reason.

Diane Raphael, of Canning Town, appears to believe that the fact that her pit bulls played with her children was sufficient evidence that the dogs were not dangerous.

In fact, she inadvertently, and with precision, damned her case before Stratford magistrates.

No-one should underestimate the scale of the changes that are coming in east London.

The inevitable frustration is that it will be, in some cases, decades before they are fully realised - although there are some nifty quick wins in the pipeline.

The Audit Commission has roundly condemned the practice of councils parting with their chief executives for reasons that are personal and inconsequential in every respect bar the attendant six-figure pay-offs.

It shouldn't be forgotten that the chief executive of Tower Hamlets left in such circumstances and with a similar sum.

There is a school of thought which demands that public authorities divest themselves of all interests that could be considered peripheral, frivolous or beyond the ken of bureaucrats.

Anything from Christmas lights to Town Hall portraits should go in some kind of Cromwellian austerity drive, paring down council tax to fund just the routine basics.

The low spring tide this year exposed the banks of the Thames to the full glare of public view. It didn't present a pretty site.

Volunteers donned welly boots to trudge through the clammy mud at the Isle of Dogs and North Woolwich and found a range of unsavoury and unsightly items.

Sad but true - the gaffes and calamities of the winter Olympics in Canada will serve our own event well.

Without the money of the Chinese, managing expectations was always going to be tough but the Vancouver setbacks provide a more circumspect measure against which to place the London Games.

President Barack Obama's assault on Wall Street is driven more by political expediency than economic necessity.

His lack of tangible progress (job creation) in his first year has lost him much ground and the new round of bank bonuses has only served to rub his nose in his apparent impotency.

Evolution has no foresight. It doesn't know where it's going. It plods along mutating here and there in the hope that serendipity will give it a shot. Such is the path followed by The Dome.

The dark days of 2001 act as a reminder of the general cluelessness and lack of direction that dogged much of the millennium experience.