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• Question by: Graham Tope
• Meeting date: 11 July 2001

Are you still intending to look for five? Or are you looking now for more than that, or is it no particular number?

• Question by: Graham Tope
• Meeting date: 11 July 2001

You are looking for a small number of sites for projects, where you can have definite influence and where we all will see tangible achievements within a period of time?

• Question by: Graham Tope
• Meeting date: 11 July 2001

No, that is why I deliberately said "a period of time". It depends obviously on the nature of what is being done there and various other things. How far are you advanced in your discussions in those areas with local authorities particularly, but other potential partners?

• Question by: Graham Tope
• Meeting date: 11 July 2001

Obviously still at early stages. Is your interest generally welcomed or are people generally wary of it? What will be your view if there is even something verging on opposition to your interest?

• Question by: Andrew Pelling
• Meeting date: 11 July 2001

I think you share the Mayor's view of the efficacy of tall buildings particularly in the key transport nodal points. Obviously there is great sensitivity for those developments in Central London. What role to you think some outer London venues have in terms of acting as host to those type of tall buildings? I represent a constituency in South London where virtually the amount of development has been very limited during the 1990s but there is a great deal of space for that type of development. What role would you see perhaps for South London in fulfilling that Mayoral desire...

• Question by: Andrew Pelling
• Meeting date: 11 July 2001

I suppose it will be an argument for sustainable development if you can get people to commute out in the morning and in the evening to some of these key suburban office sites. I represent Croydon which as you say perhaps has a false pride in terms of its tall buildings, desire for tall buildings, but it is perhaps in many ways a good opportunity to put some of the tall buildings that might fit in within a Manhattan style skyline in Croydon which might not suit necessarily next to St Paul's Cathedral.

• Question by: Eric Ollerenshaw
• Meeting date: 11 July 2001

If I can explain my prejudice in terms of this. First of all the Georgian density, are people talking about density in Georgian times with all those servants crammed into the cellars or are they talking about Georgian density now? But my real prejudice is that the real high densities I have seen are system-built, architect-designed estates, where certain categories of people were ghettoised, and are still ghettoised, in buildings, which when people have got a choice, they get out of as rapidly as possible. Now my worry is if we go down this high-density argument it is those people...

• Question by: Roger Evans
• Meeting date: 11 July 2001

I take your point about post war development but I also bear in mind the fact that no architect has ever said that the development they built was quantity led rather than quality led. Every development that has ever been built we have been told is beautiful in its time. The problem is it does not look so fashionable 30 years later. A lot of our densely populated areas are not pleasant to live in. How do you feel we can mitigate overcrowding in a poor environment with green space, particularly given the Mayor's demands that we also produce a...

• Question by: Sally Hamwee
• Meeting date: 11 July 2001

Would it be right, though I do not much like the word myself, to say that one needs to have a holistic approach then?

• Question by: Bob Neill
• Meeting date: 11 July 2001

An interesting point about quality and density, which obviously is relevant particularly to the spatial development policies and the proposals in the Towards the London Plan document. I would be interested to know to what extent you have been consulted by the Mayor on the proposals document that we have currently got, Towards the London Plan, what input you have had into that?