The Thames is a big and long river. It has many riverside walks. However, they don't connect well.
So many constructions are going on along the south bank of the river, you have to walk in and out, sometimes join the traffic flow next to the river and breathe all the conbustion waste from the cars. It's ridiculous.
I don't know about the property laws in UK. It seems the riverside belongs to private hands and thus deprives the public of enjoying it. Although the more recent idea of open space for new constructions might give opportunities for visitors to walk throuth the ground, but so many new unban development projects are boosted, the construction sites spread all over the river bank and set up blockages like the decorative diamonds on a waist band, making my experience of walking there horrendous.
The commercial billboards try to paint an ideal (although this is in doubt) picture of life on the riverside, again they all deliver a hypothetical, monotonous capitalist dream which probably promotes more vanity and greed then need.
Those towering buildings having been completed are either residential or for office use. From the windows facing to the river, I can see office workers staffing in there, each sitting in front of a computer. I don't know what's the value of yielding the riverside land use to these office buildings instead of public use for citizens or the river with its own virtue?
River has many functions benefitting people, not just being a scenic view like a landscape painting on the wall. However, modern unban planners have only treated it as an added value of their commodity and sometimes even regarded it as a source of problem with flood which stifled the many voices of the river. This reminds me of the talk a week ago in Bristol with PLATFORM artist James. One of their earlier works is dealing with a buried river in London - the Walbrook, amongst the main branches of Thames in London -- with a clinical psychologist.
James told me that in psychiatry, there is a term "dysphasia" describing the loss of ability to speech because of trauma. Applying the metaphor from psychiatry to the present damages on urban water systems, while the psychologist deals with children or adults who developed dysphasia after trauma, PLATFORM dealt with the buried Walbrook as it is dysphasic.
