The housing association proposing the scheme put the proposals to a vote of existing residents, which would have guaranteed everyone who was displaced a new home in the redeveloped estate, plus cash compensating them for their trouble. With 91% turnout, 93% of voting residents voted in favour of the plan.

But the borough’s “strategic planning committee” objected, so the proposals have been put on ice. There’s a good discussion of why here – the reasons range from objecting to repurposing a road for pedestrian and cyclist use to ideological opposition to building privately rented housing among the Labour- and Lutfur Rahman-aligned members of the committee.

Well, whatever. There’s always something. A few years ago, a Tory-led campaign managed to stop 2,000 homes from being built on the site of a petrol station in Mudchute, 20 minutes’ walk from Canary Wharf, because the petrol station was just so important. (There’s another one six minutes’ drive away.)

What intrigues me here is how stark the divide is between the people most directly affected, who overwhelmingly supported the scheme, and the much further removed people who have been able to block it on the basis of not very much.