But wait! There's more!

Turns out that merely ironing wasn't enough: I'm not done yet with Norwich's city planners, apparently. The focus of my ire? The riverside development.

Imagine that you have an extremely large plot of land on the edge of the centre of a city, next to one of the most desirable surburbs in the county. It's close to the railway centre and the football stadium. A river runs through it. Nothing occupies it other than a long-abandoned factory. You can do with it what you will. Think of the possibilities: Shall it be developed as a cultural centre, with theatres, concert halls, cinemas, and studios? Or perhaps a fabulously landscaped housing development, mixing low-income and yuppie townhouses and apartments, complete with a primary school, doctor's surgeries, and small local shops? Maybe a sports area, with playing fields, a decent swimming pool, gyms, and sports halls? Even -- radical thought, this -- putting the town's bus/coach station across from the railway station, thus creating an integrated transport network? What fun we could have!

If you're Norwich's town planners, you come up with this:
1. Vast warehouse stores in an unappealing shade of grey: Morrison's, The Big W, etc.
2. A giant car park that mixes wood cladding and brick to ill effect.
3. Large brick "super clubs" and bars, with faux cobbles to soak up the ensuing vomit and ensure that young ladies in towering white stilettos fall over.
4. A handful of apartment buildings, close to the bars for added noise -- all unrelieved by any form of open space or greenery.

Not only do you waste the greatest building opportunity since the cathedral was developed in the 11th century, but you then give permission for the moronic Norfolk builders to throw up blocks of "luxury" apartments between the football ground and the river. These are squeezed in so tightly that many of the flats have no view, and the flats are tiny and badly designed: Forget about storage space or indeed room for a double bed! Not only does form not follow function, but they are completely lacking in any kind of function -- or form. But hey, it's not like the environment influences the behaviour of those within it. People aren't going to have an utter disregard for the places in which they live, work and play if the people who built them didn't, right?

In fact, the Chapelfield Mall and the riverside area are merely symbolic of the British economy as a whole: Dancing on the ruins of manufacturing, they've bypassed the service economy -- now the preserve of Bangalore -- and jumped straight to one based on shopping, inflated property prices, and vast amounts of consumer debt. And if you can't afford to shop or buy a home? Well, screw you -- you don't deserve to be part of this brave new world.

Badly done, Norwich; badly done.