Property developers are trying to reimagine the town as some kind of Middlesex Manhattan – but they don’t have it all their own way
What’s going for it? Yes, there is a town, a whole universe, beyond the hallowed stadium. The 1920s Metroland, for starters, built by property developers on hilly Middlesex fields along the Metropolitan line. The landscape is still dominated by Acacia Avenues of semis and Tudorbethans and art deco stations. For some, the ghost of stadium mark one, with its stubby twin towers, haunts the streets around its successor, rebuilt in a Blairite makeover. These days, the property developers are trying to reimagine the town as some kind of Middlesex Manhattan, cardboard Novotels, Prezzos and high rises selling lifestyles and luxuries, flush with the future prospects promised by Crossrail and HS2 – if they do eventually pass by. But the developers do not have it all their own way. Wem-ber-ley’s Metroland is a hub of London’s British Asian community, its High Road a mix of Greggs and dosas, saree shops and Poundlands, and perhaps the most fitting place imaginable to host the Borough of Culture in London next year, featuring none other than Zadie Smith; as well as a little thing called, I believe, Euro 2020. May it thrive.
The case against Not, in the main, a beauty, although it has its moments. Heavily sliced by infrastructure: the North Circular, spaghetti clusters of mainline railways, the Grand Union canal.
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