I hope the 18 year old of today has somewhere as grotty, decrepit & awesome to hang out a those dirty arches & the gentrification hasn’t ruined their formative experiences.
May they find somewhere for sweat to drip off the ceiling & to get seven shades of fucked up in the city as we did back then.

Considering how many weekends I spent in the arches under these railway lines off my nut, it’s strange to have not been back here for the best part of a decade and 90% of it having been erased as it existed. But its current version is way more useful to me today than before.

Had flashbacks to the vanished escalators up form the colonnade - themselves quite new compared to the decrepit version I first remember now replaced by little more than a shopping mall, then out in to the vast concourse, through ticket gates and up an escalator to the new platforms.

Very aware walking through it was different and part of it was a club I got far too fucked up in a couple decades ago - part of me felt disappointment at the loss of the dirty dingy club that gave me so much joy, most of me was happy to just catch my train to the airport on time.

I think reducing migration numbers dramatically by the time of the next election will. I do t think anyone will remember today’s statement by then so it won’t matter but the numbers will.

Cool, so an easy victory for the government to crow about and spank the Tories with, while also undercutting some of the Reform narrative.
Win/win.

It’s not unreasonable to say net migration hitting almost a million after Brexit was unsustainable & lowering that is a good idea.

But addressing things like dental deserts where services don’t meet need of current populous will do more to assuage concern than any specific migration reduction.

Nah, the Spanish golf resorts have special protected status from ‘eating all that foreign muck’

Yup.
The unwillingness of the media to separate immigration from asylum, while whipping the reform types in to a frenzy is more of a problem than any immigrant.

The economic destruction of Brexit stole more jobs than any immigrant.

Covid fraud by tories impoverished more people than any immigrant.

I feel like I’m taking crazy pills this morning reading all the hot takes.

Maybe I am genuinely out of touch, but the government tackling net migration which 5x’d under the last lot doesn’t seem like that big of a deal. I’d go as far as to say it’s sensible, even to push back to pre-Brexit levels.

Or, ya know we could just look at dumb historical planning like Fairlop Station in the middle of a bunch of fields & say, you know what it’d be a great place to plonk 5,000 homes instead of 18 trains an hour serving only football pitches & a farm shop, & still have acres of green space left over.

Nonsense.
That plot is in Tottenham Hale, next to a tube station, in an area with primary schools closing due to a lack of pupils, next to a retail park and a bunch of brownfield developments which delivered new supermarkets, shops, cafe’s & doctors surgeries already over the past decade already.

Can you explain why you think it’d be a bad thing to explore building on ‘greenbelt’ land, when in London those sites are often not actually green anyway, like this former petrol station.

Why is this worthy of ideological protection from development to residential use?