Nearly the weekend

It’s been a busy week in City Towers. Not ‘exciting busy’ but ‘ho-hum busy’ as I’m sure some of you can relate to though in that time Mayor Boris has been off to New York to promote London however while he was away someone at TFL saw the opportunity to declutter the tube map of London, significantly by removing the river Thames.  As you can tell from the photo the Thames is a pretty integral part of London and although City dwellers may know where it is it’s still a good reference point to have on a map don’t you think? I can’t imagine how tourists would feel trying to find the London Eye having been told “it’s on the Thames” when the Thames didn’t appear on one of the most significant London travel maps.

Now TFL apparently saw this as an “operational decision” and didn’t see the need to consult anyone but the subsequent outcry and sound of BoJo hitting the roof has since persuaded them otherwise and they’ll now find themselves ranked alongside the State of Indiana’s who once considered a proposal to set the value of pi to 3 (or 3.2, or 4) for convenience sake…

In other news Land Securities is in process of partnering with Blackstone for the latter to take on half of Broadgate, by Liverpool Street station. Frequent home of lunchtime attractions Broadgate is home to a £2.1bn debt of which Blackstone will apparently take on half and although I don’t imagine it’ll have many, if any, implications in the short-term perhaps its long-term future may now be a bit rosier.