The Guardian: "London property goes through the roof again"

"From 'poor doors' to 'sky pools', it's clear that property developers in the capital are having a laugh when it comes to social housing"

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"Like stages of grief, the London housing market has come through denial and bargaining and has moved into the sixth stage: 'Armando Iannucci sketch'. The new £15bn housing project in Battersea, where flats start at £602,000, has planning permission for a 25-metre swimming pool that literally looks down on the rest of London. The 'sky pool' will be suspended between two tower blocks 10 storeys high, and will have a transparent floor, and will be the most expensive metaphor since that skyscraper melted a parked-up Jag.

"Something has changed in the housing crisis. The goalposts have not moved so much as exploded in small bombs of glitter. There's no point now in pointing out the disparities and the unfairnesses. The gap between us and them is so wide that the people paying cash unseen for new builds are in a different time zone, a gap so deep that it makes the Manchester sinkhole look like a pockmark.

"Instead of crying, the time has come to laugh. To light long fags on the embers of our burning cities and clink tea mugs, chuckling at the madness and obscenity we see from our window. To sit on the top deck of the bus and to look over first to the east, where Hackney council has been considering an order that would allow police to issue on-the-spot fines for rough sleepers, and then to the west and see a horizon, forming in spikes and towers, of apartment blocks being built solely from foie gras and glass."