That phrase is not mine but The Gentle Author’s, writing in 2014. This has been a long story. His words are an accurate summary of what is now, yet again, being proposed for the publicly-owned site of the old Bishopsgate Goods Yard, whose superstructure burned down in 1964.

These two photographs of the undercroft of the Goods Yard are from a handful I took in 1999 (we were looking for a place to stage a local art fair). It was before the Overground trains arrived, and only a few years on from the early 1990s property slump, which as a benign side-effect enabled a variety of small-scale makers and doers to edge their way into abandoned spaces on the edge of the plutocratic City of London, and set themselves up in business. If they were not already locals they became so.

No camera-phones then, just a small basic digital camera, and the pictures were only wanted for reference. But I could envisage that resonant vaulted space as, perhaps, a museum of working London life and Londoners, full of  inexplicable machines and voices. Perhaps someone would make it happen. Twenty years on, an installation by Mike Nelson in the Duveen Galleries at Tate Britain evoked something of that sense of past lives and half-heard voices, except that his show was brutal, silent and devastating. It was called The Asset Strippers.

The streets on the eastern edge of the City have always been populated by incomers. They arrived, settled, made a living, moved on, over countless generations but at accelerating pace. The workshops and studios of 1990s Shoreditch became galleries, the galleries became fashion shops, then they were chain stores and restaurants, now it was a ‘destination’. The profits were extracted. The latest proposal for the 10-acre Bishopsgate Goods Yard site aims to win over the Greater London Authority’s planners with brick arches and a pacifier of just 90 low-cost homes, out of 500 altogether.

The galloping tide of shopping, faked-up heritage and nowhere to live might yet turn. Nothing is permanent. If this scheme were to get the go-ahead, and then crash in the rocky, unknowable landscape of our new post-2020 world, what then?

Objections to the planning application must be in by 7 September 2020. Details here: http://www.goodsyard.org/pdf/howtoobject.pdf)