– The London Plan, Section 8.8 ‘Okay,’ said Felix. ‘What we’ve got to do now is put them all together.’ Art, recreational drugs, anonymous sexual encounters, high-end shopping, financial irresponsibility, alcohol free at the point of purchase. It was what cities were for, it’s what they were – an agglomeration of reckless promises. And it was what London did better than any other city. It was still the capital of possibilities and unsustainable desires, the place where you could commit an unlimited number of mistakes and moral atrocities. That was, if you thought about it, what planning was all about: to let liberty flourish, to design a place in which people from all around the world could come and make themselves unhappy in as many ways as possible. And nothing, absolutely nothing he could think of, better exemplified this than where he was now. For James was at the opening of a visual art show in East London. He was at a private view – an event attended exclusively by trendsetters, opinion formers, thought leaders and, unusually, a town planner from Southwark Council.
