Pope Alexander VII, that great urbanist and patron of Bernini, built the colonnade around St Peter's Square in Rome, improved the setting of the Pantheon and created the Via del Corso. It cannot be said that the works in our Pimlico street are quite on that scale, but to those of us living there, they seem to have taken almost as long.
At one end is the market, repaved with a surface that's supposed to be chewing-gum resistant; at the other, a public convenience, installed at Easter and then abandoned due to a missing electricity connection. The lavatory has now emerged resplendent from its hoarding. In time, we'll get used to the changes and forget that the street ever looked different.
There are, however, other changes afoot. When the rebuilding of Pimlico Comprehensive (award-winning Modernist structure of the late 1960s) is complete, our public library on the corner of the street will move there and that will free up the old library building. Ideas are being sought for a new use. Police station seems to be a popular suggestion. I don't expect anything to happen soon. In the Age of Austerity, we may look back on public works as being as remote as 17th-century Rome.
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Chelsea Flower Show 2025: What else to do in SW3 if you're coming to the world's greatest flower showThere's more to Chelsea than just the Flower Show so we've rounded up some of the best places to eat, stay and shop.
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Uniquely unique? The Yorkshire grain silos transformed into a home that's a symphony in glass, steel and curvesAmid the beautiful countryside of North Yorkshire, on the edge of the Castle Howard Estate, The Silos is a property for which the word 'house' simply doesn't cut it. And that's not the only way in which it's made us throw out the dictionary.
