Incidentally, if Ken was a building, he'd be Wembley Stadium - over-designed and over budget, aggressive and hard to ignore.Instead of adopting the mantra "small is beautiful", both men are convinced that the only way to solve Britain's housing crisis is by building on a vast scale. Prescott is busy pulling down perfectly serviceable terraced housing in Liverpool, because it doesn't fit in with his "master plan". He wants to develop the whole region of the Thames Gateway, a bleak, featureless industrial landscape, a vast undertaking which will require a new transport system, and entirely new support system for the inhabitants, from roads to hospitals to schools.I'm all for clearing up the Thames Gateway of industrial detritus and turning it into a huge and wonderful leisure park, with plenty of marshland left untouched for wildlife, cleaned-up water for sailing, windsurfing and swimming. People need space like this in the South-east, not an extension of Bluewater or endless estates of little brick boxes.But if Mr Prescott's proposals weren't worrying enough, now Mr Livingstone has plenty of thoughts about how to turn the east side of London into the new metropolis. Futurism is so seductive, so exciting, isn't it? In 1965, the Archigram group created the "walking city", complete with outdoor moving escalators and thousands of living pods for its lucky inhabitants, which they published in an entertaining pamphlet, now a collector's item. If you want to see the work of another visionary, pop along to the Design Museum for the Cedric Price exhibition. A brilliant thinker and theorist, he hardly built anything during his lifetime. It's important to remember, however, that when writers and film-makers from Stanley Kubrick to Ridley Scott proposed visions of the future to entertain us, they didn't actually expect for one moment anyone would ever take them seriously as blueprints for future living.But in the Deputy Prime Minister and London mayor, it seems as if we have two would-be futurists; they're so full of their own self-importance, they constantly search for ways to build monuments to their own towering egos.
Before I'd enrolled to study architecture, I would collect comic books with drawings of gleaming cities inhabited by people with pointy ears or huge domed foreheads. It takes a rock star to legitimise the provision of aid to Africa. It takes the Olympics to justify the provision of decent public services and a willingness to pay for them. Let us hope that the next time we put in a bid to stage a major international event we will deserve to win.s.richards independent.co.uk More from Steve Richards. I'm planning a trip to the nearest cinema to see the latest version of War of the Worlds.
There's something utterly captivating about a fully realised fantasy world, even if it stars Tom Cruise and has mixed reviews As a child, I adored HG Wells, then Arthur C Clarke. We should on humane grounds alone find it unacceptable that some people live in slum conditions. More widely it should be a statement of the obvious that big cities benefit from strong political leadership.But we live in irrational times. We should insist on a high standard of transport because it is civilising and boosts business. We should demand that, living in the fourth richest economy in the world, our teenagers have the same sporting facilities as nearby countries. Surely we can now be more ambitious about the timescale.In a more rational political culture all these initiatives would happen without the prospect of the Olympics being staged in London. I would not be surprised if the private companies partially responsible for the Underground are twitching a little nervously.