Cloud racing

When I first worked in Romford forty years ago Sainsburys (where I'd shop on the way home on a Thursday evening) was on the first floor of a building in South Street.

In the lobby on the ground floor was a large aerial photo of the marketplace taken either just before or just after the war.

It showed a nice little market town with lots of pleasant buildings and you could imagine enjoying walking around it.

It wasn't a great place to be in the seventies, and things have only got worse since then. Now Romford could be used as a teaching aid to show planners what not to do, how to make streets unpleasant to live in, how to leave whole sections of the population either because of their age or location unable to get around the town because you've put a great big ring road round whole chunks it which you can't get across except by walking miles out of your way and which even the drivers it's supposed to be built for avoid because it's so badly designed that it's hell to drive round