STOCK MARKET WATCH -- Friday, 21 June 2013

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57. Disunited Kingdom: Crisis Leaves Britain Deeply Fractured

http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/economic-crisis-and-ukip-leave-britain-deeply-divided-a-906600.html


A boy rides his bike down an alleyway in Grimethorpe, one of the main battle sites during the miners strike in South Yorkshire in April. Since the global financial crisis erupted in 2008, things have been going downhill in England. Unemployment is now at almost 8 percent, and 27 percent of children in Britain live in relative poverty.


Property developer Irvine Sellar with a model of his tower, The Shard, completed in 2012. He bagan the project in the late 1990s, during the most eupohoric phase of Britain's construction boom. Now, post-crash, some 60,000 square meters (646,000 square feet) are still empty.

From this vantage point, London seems almost innocent. Irvine Sellar, a real estate developer, points to a gray dome down near the Thames River.

It is St. Paul's Cathedral, which was the tallest structure in the city for a quarter of a millennium, until other, taller buildings were erected in the late 20th century. First there was Tower 42 (formerly NatWest Tower), straight ahead, and later, off to the right, the skyscrapers of Canary Wharf, London's defiant answer to Wall Street. And now Sellar is gazing at the city from his tower, which looks like the 310-meter (1,017-foot) tip of a cocktail skewer, and which he named "The Shard." From there, St. Paul's is nothing but a gray spot in the midst of a view for which Sellar expects his tenants to pay a lot of money.

Sellar didn't want to build an ordinary office tower, he says: "I gave the city a sculpture," the tallest building in Western Europe. The island stretches into the distance below his feet, and above him is nothing but the sky.

The view of the rooftops of the British capital shows how quickly and radically the country has changed. London's silhouette is a reflection of two decades of growth, decadence and hubris.