The boomers ate all the avocados

You are starting to sound like someone arguing against the idea of cities themselves.

On a more serious note than building on London's parks for housing you could far more conceivably reallocate road space. Something like the A12 gets up to four lanes wide in part, so could accommodate lots of blocks of flats, in prime central London locations, where you'd be nuts to use a car in the first place.

Fairly radical idea and I am sure it would never get past the "war on motorists" headlines but if you want density, that's how to do it, by smashing the idea that everyone needs a car.

Depends if you subscribe to Ricks wish of building them where people,e want them. Appears lots of people want them in London and the bits of the home counties close to London where there isn't always 'loads of space'.

Yes we shouldn't increase the population of a city while decreasing the recreational space.

Density is something the ex Tory MP Rory Stewart bangs on about. On his podcast he was arguing high rise isn't necessarily higher density than town houses and terraces built low and medium rise. He was actually arguing for the redevelopment of some low density areas of London with that kind of housing . Sounded quite persuasive but I've no background in planning/development.

less radical would be redeveloping some of the hundreds of acres of central london that are owned by the old estates - grosvenor, hdw, portman, cadogan etc., oh and there's the crown too

but they all seem happy with their long-term strategy, the money keeps rolling in over the centuries, no need to worry about density, and of course none of that pesky iht

It was not an entirely serious suggestion.

I've worked in construction on central london large scale projects for the last 20 odd years, it's surprising how they keep finding sites for new flats.

No issues with using Brownfield sites and it would be great if it was just space, but I suspect that a lot of that is just existing property that is less dense than you'd like it to be. Which brings us backs to the point about compulsory purchases/confiscation of private property that Rick seems to favour.

And Zone 5 is home counties - I used to live in Zone 4 in Beckenham and that was a mile or so outside the London postcodes.

Given that there appears to be continuous building of new properties in London - some of which I have worked for, and the idea that building more properties will bring prices down, can anyone provide any examples of property prices going down where these new developments have gone up?

Isn't Beckenham in the London Borough of Bromley? I would definitely class it as greater London.

i'd expect most have more diverse ownership of land and no leasehold system

differences in planning, regulation, tenant security, uk is pretty grim for the latter, which must drive the wish to own

it's an old city, if one were starting from scratch the result would be very different

much of central london is held by various estates, there's nothing in it for them to create higher-density housing, let alone cede control of land

a fair bit of suburban london grew as development followed transport links, creating a commuter belt of low density freehold housing outside the centre, seems pretty near impossible to change now and the sprawl continues to grow

By "free market" do you mean with or without councils and MPs stopping development?

Except it isn't

How do you think it should be done in London? RJS knows more than I do on the subject and he has already suggested the number of brown field sites that could be used.

With respect to other countries, traditionally old Italian towns always had high population density more centrally and most businesses were based further out. So rush hour was people leaving the town centre to get to work.

Don't understand your point.

I lived in Beckenham for over 20 years. It was in Kent and in the London Borough of Bromley. Clear enough to me.

Kent and Surrey both have ceremonial and postal boundaries that are very different from the administrative boundaries. The Local Authorities are the relevant bodies as they deal with planning.