“Look at these very carefully. The exact plans have not yet been revealed but these visualisations are hugely misleading. The angle of vision is of a three-foot tall squirrel wearing wide-angle glasses.”

Since I discovered this, with a developer’s plans for Holly House on Chiswick roundabout, I’ve always called it a worm’s eye view. Lie on the ground and a shorter building nearer you will appear so tall that much taller buildings behind will appear to be only marginally taller. If you believe the developer’s images for Chiswick, the 90 metre (25 storeys) tall Holly House is roughly twice the height of a modest urban tree. It’s a con. Developers think we are too stupid to work out what they are doing.

In a previous age a similar redevelopment took place. It was considered that an old Victorian station needed to be replaced with a totally modern, fully functioning, 20th century building. And so we got Euston – easily the worst London (possibly British) terminal station of all – dark, dangerous, stressful, crowded, (add your own adjectives).

If Network Rail were seriously in doing this properly, they would have a public competition, and allow the public to meaningfully consider different proposals (including doing nothing at all), rather than trying to ram this huge commercial development through.

Here’s an idea that allows for substantial new development while respecting and enhancing the station. Will Network Rail even acknowledge alternative options exist? No, because all they care about is maximising development revenue https://www.loc.us.org/posts/liverpool-street-station-a-counterproposal

Someone has perhaps looked at the likes of Hong Kong MTR, seen what they have seen ‘towers soring ninety metres high’, and decided there’s money in them there skies – splash a bit of green in there for the appearance of aesthetics -having no sense whatsoever of ‘proportion’ nor the ‘difference’ between what they ‘see’ there in Hong Kong and what is the actually Liverpool St Station Conservation Area and its surrounds.

Hong Kong MTR has never planned for structures to “tower ninety metres over a Conservation Area” nor have they looked to dwarf and dominate by “building directly on top of a listed station concourse to demolish and expand much of the area below” … “radically altering the majority of protected views in the Conservation Area”.

Hong Kong MTR have looked to build atop stations, having no particular interest to the eye, buildings and structures with all the shops and eateries and infrastructure that goes with creating areas that are attractive and affordable for everyday working families and individuals, those who are the backbone of all that is London, to live and seamlessly commute to their work from fully integrated neighbourhood communities sat atop many of their MTR stations deep below ground.

I’m going to have to flush these images of planned development before they become indelibly imprinted in my mind destroying any sense of the will to continue to live.