Alan Powers on Parliament Square
Does nobody love Parliament Square? Days before the Mayoral election, Tristram Hunt called it a ‘terrible place: inaccessible, ugly, polluted and grotty’ in the Guardian. When the Mayor of London cancelled the scheme for pedestrianising at least two of the roads around the square within days of his election, there was dismay that the still-unpublished plans for its improvement should be abandoned. If the proceedings within the Palace of Westminster are sometimes absurd, this parallel drama on the street outside was equal in sound and fury.
Could commentators distinguish between the square itself and the traffic that circulates around it? Hunt failed to look beyond the three-lane roadways, and, like the members of the ‘World Squares for All’ panel who first raised the question of remodelling in 1996, shifted the problem onto the trees, statues and grass without looking more closely at what is there.
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