Greater London Authority Bill

I declare a hereditary interest in relation to what my noble friend Lord Jenkin said about the sight line to St Paul’s, in that my late noble kinsman was the Minister of Housing and Local Government—then an appointment made by the Secretary of State—when the application was received as regards the buildings around St Paul’s. He instructed his civil servants to go to the Whitestone Pond on top of Hampstead Heath to discover whether St Paul’s could be seen from there. The answer was that it could not be seen and that had a profound effect on sight-line legislation thereafter. I am conscious that the charge might be made against me that I am making a Second Reading point, to which I plead that I did not take part at Second Reading, because, first, as the Minister may recall, I was preoccupied with Part 4 of another London local Bill—a Private Bill. Secondly, no one then seemed to make my point in the way that I shall do now. I am drawing on my experience as a Member of Parliament for central London and—this affects my observations—in the first edition of Pevsner, not the second, the first volume on the buildings of London was devoted only to my constituency, with a small edition on Holborn. The second volume was devoted to all the other constituencies and local authorities in London. London is a city that has developed as a series of villages and we have been spared what Baron Hausmann did in terms of Paris, which has perhaps made London a more attractive city. Perhaps I may list the villages in my former constituency. I shall not dwell on the City of London, to which my noble friend Lord Jenkin referred, but there was a moment when it was the fastest-growing area in London. The villages included Belgravia, Millbank, Victoria, Knightsbridge, St James’s and Mayfair. Mayfair was turned into offices in 1941, after being a residential area. An opportunity was provided for it to come back in 1991—and quite a lot of it did, but not all. It is now, despite hedge funds, substantially going back to being residential as a result of straightforward market forces. There is also Bayswater, the Hyde Park estates, St Marylebone and Covent Garden. For reasons to which the noble Lord, Lord Campbell-Savours, drew attention, I said in the general debate on Kate Barker’s housing review in the Chamber a year or so ago that Soho and Pimlico were the ideal inner-city communities. They were ideal for two reasons: Soho was a marvellous mix of commercial and residential; and, in Pimlico, dukes lived next door to dustmen. If the Mayor is going to intervene in every decision that he believes to be strategic, without that being defined, the hazard is that we will get a citywide uniformity rather than the individualist flavour that has made London what it is. If we are to preserve that individualism, it is extremely important that the powers should not all be held in one pair of hands.