Samuel Hughes

One of the things that all visitors to London notice is the contrast between Oxford Street and Regent Street. Oxford Street is riddled with tacky little shops selling vapes, tat and ‘American candy’. It has the usual plasticky mess of signage and the architecture is noisy and chaotic. By contrast, Regent Street has an unbroken sequence of prestige brands, tasteful and subdued shop signage, and coherent, stately architecture. The government is giving councils powers to block new vape shops, betting shops and 24-hour slot machine shops – three classic blights on high streets There is one simple reason for this: the whole of Regent Street is owned by one organisation, the Crown Estate.

Every so often, something unexpected happens in the Westminster village which disturbs the usual run of malicious gossip and misleading polling. This happened yesterday, when the whole village began buzzing about, of all things, infrastructure planning. The cause of this was a draft ‘National Priority Infrastructure Bill’, which you can read here, an oven-ready piece of legislation aimed at drastically liberalising infrastructure planning, released by Dr Lawrence Newport of the Looking for Growth campaign. Newport has form on attracting media attention. A young legal scholar, he sprang to national prominence in 2023 with his campaign to ban the Bully XL, an extremely violent dog that had been intentionally bred to pass through a loophole in the Dangerous Dogs Act.