Notting Hill Gate
The worthlessness of much of the building going up around the Council's extensive traffic redevelopment of Notting Hill Gate is largely due to the fact that the Council adopted none of these expedients there. For despite all the restric- tions with which the LCC's ability to redevelop London is hedged around, the biggest difficulty is inside County Hall. The Valuer, Mr. J. E. Toole, has many of the functions, most of the power, and all the familiar attributes of the most tight-fisted and unimaginative Treasury official. He has set his face resolutely against large-scale public de- velopment by the Council (at one point the largest Socialist municipal authority in the world found itself in the position of ruling that public enter- prise of this kind was in principle not the sort of thing it should do, and although under pressure this extreme position has been abandoned, the result is much the same), displaying an excessive timidity at, for instance, Notting Hill Gate (he declared that it might prove impossible for the Council to let all the space when• it had been built, which has not been the experience of the private speculators to whom the extremely profit- able building finally went). And the Council's Engineer is, of course, only interested, so far as redevelopment plans are concerned, with questions of traffic-flow and the like. So the Architect's Department has found itself engaged in a pro- longed, and generally unsuccessful, struggle with the County Hall bureaucracy, backed as it is by the caucus dictatorship by which London is ruled.
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