Vauxhall on sea

[Apartment buildings at Evergrande’s Life in Venice real estate and tourism development in Qidong, Jiangsu province, China © Qilai Shen/Bloomberg]

Or to be more precise, a development called Venice on the China Sea, just the other side of the river from Shanghai. Complete with its own arrangements for generating the power it needs. At least I think it is an actual development, rather than an architect's mock-up. Street View doesn't seem to work in this part of China, so hard to be sure.

A development which is a cause for concern for the developers and speculators concerned. With some explanation to be found at reference 1.

In any event, a veritable forest of tower blocks, which makes what is going on at Vauxhall look very modest. And I associate to the giant council estates put up in this country in the middle of the last century, some of which became rather shabby. For example, the Great Cambridge estate in Tottenham in the borough of Haringey. BH used to teach there and we used to live a few miles up the road in Wood Green. Now, we learned yesterday, the part of London with the very worst mail service for some reason.

PS 1: it would have been funny if Secretary Truss had stepped off her private jet in Australia to be informed by a stroppy immigration official that there seemed to be something wrong with the batch numbers on her plague certificate and asked to step back onto her jet and leave the country. Or go to the quarantine desert island if that was what she preferred.

PS 2: we are not told about the quality of the wash room fittings of the jet. Silver plate for mere secretaries but solid gold for prime ministers? Designed by Lala Little?

References

Reference 1: Oaktree risks showdown with Beijing over Evergrande debt: LA-based asset manager has a secured loan to one of ailing Chinese developer’s star projects - Tabby Kinder, Robert Smith, Naomi Rovnick, Financial Times - 2022.