A Bloomsbury Education

Between Marylebone and Gray's Inn, the river and the Euston Road, lies some very desirable London. In the west there are the squares of eighteenth century houses, with gardens at their centre, Bedford, Fitzroy, Queen's, Red Lion and, moving east Russell, Brunswick , Coram's Fields, to Gray's Inn. There is the Senate House, still headquarters of the University of London, University College and its hospital - the godless of Gower Street; from the river Bush House and the London School of Economics, Lincoln's Inn, the thriving Marchmont Street offering shops for everyday life , hardware stores, chemists, greengrocers, independent bakers, grocers, to the restored St Pancras standing like a mini houses of parliament, shoulder to surprisingly friendly shoulder with the new British Library. Lambs Conduit Street, Doughty Street, and the undamaged Mecklenburgh Square take to the Gray's Inn Road. There is every kind of housing from council estates to georgian grandeur, every kind of person living in this area - families settled for generations to the students there for their 3 years' at the London colleges, from every kind of background , and every level of income and type of occupation. There are lawyers, publishers, dons, writers, financiers, paupers, old money, new money, Quakers, Anglicans, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, as well as the godless, but all enjoy the very fine religious buildings and are welcome to the help offered by all these groups if they are in need.

This is the London that many think of when they think of London, and the power elites want it all. They want to centre a London University there integrating Imperial, UCL, LSE and King's, arguing that such an institution will be a power house of cutting edge research and attracting immense funding and resources; they want expansion from the financial districts to move there; they want Covent Garden's commercial and tourist development spreading in from the west; they want a bigger centre of London and that cannot go west because the palace and the parks are in the way.

So there will never be a secondary school in Holborn and St Pancras, (for shame Frank Dobson, MP for decades) and all the ordinary community services that are in the grasp of the local and national state will never be provided as they should be there. But the rich and powerful are faced by a settled community of ordinary people with coherence and many levels of skills to hand .