There are two very different views about the redevelopment of one of London’s most famous creative clusters : Rebirth opportunity or dystopian hell?

On a building site gazed over by the latticed middle finger that is Centre Point, Amy Lamé, writer, entertainer, sometime Pink List National Treasure and recently appointed as London’s first “night tsar” by Sadiq Khan, explained to a hi-vised, hard-hatted showbiz camera crew why flattening a patch of a conservation area has been a good idea. “This is incredibly exciting,” she enthused: “We’ve got the infrastructure. London’s changing and having a night tsar is part of that. What a wonderful opportunity.”

That infrastructure is Crossrail. That opportunity is to be most conspicuously realised as what is shown in CGIs as a glass and gold-coloured construction to be called the NOW building: perhaps NOW as in POW and in WOW. It will grace what site developer Consolidated Developments has suggested will become “the equivalent of New York’s Times Square in London”, a cultural piazza at St Giles Circus, beckoning from the teeming, expanding Tottenham Court Road transport junction where Oxford Street and Charing Cross Road meet.

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