As I keep saying on here, no doubt to some of your increasing irritation, I go up to Stratford fairly often these days. It has become kind of a default destination for my daily trundles. I can take a stroll through the Olympic park or, if the weather isn’t so good, wander through the massive Westfield shopping centre.  That area of London is now so built up and busy, it staggers me to think that, only twenty years ago, absolutely none of that was there: no shopping centre, no stadium, no riverside walks. It was all just a waste ground: deserted and rotting.

Yet that raises a question in my mind: are there currently any other areas, in London or beyond, in need of the attention which Stratford received? As I wrote here a few weeks ago, east London in particular is steadily becoming gentrified beyond recognition, and I have yet to come across an area larger than the occasional house which I would describe as derelict or neglected. Yet I’m sure that there will be areas of the country in need of the same kind of investment that that area of north east London got. I would now be interested to know where they are and what the prospects are for them. If we’re going to get serious about ‘levelling up’, Stratford and London in general cannot be the only places receiving such mind-boggling redevelopment.