COSTLY LONDON LAND.

North Otago Times, 21 October 1905, Page 2 (Supplement)

COSTLY LONDON LAND.

LONDON, August 25th. It is the fashion for visitors to London from newer lands to gird at our authorities over the slowness with which street improvements in the heart of tlio metropolis are effected. To those of us whß pay rates and taxes in the London County Council's dominions and have to foot the bills for the improvements now being carried out, what seems to the outsider snail-like progress seems to us extravagant haste, The L.C.O. has every reason to look before leaping at new schemes for "beautifying" tho inner circle of London, especially where such schemes involve throwing more land into unproductive widonings of existing thoroughfares, The price which a jury lias decided that the L.C.C. must pay for a small strip of land—l,2lo squaro feet by the St. James's street corner of Piccadilly is £41,000, or about £3-1 per foot. This works out at something over a million pd a quarter sterling per acre. This sum, of course, includes compensation' for disturbance, hut the valuers for tho plaintiffs estimated the ground rent value at 21s (kl per foot, and valuers for tho Council at IBs. Talcing the mean between these figures, this, at the usual thirty yews' purchase, represents a value of approximately £1,200,000 per acre, This is probably the highest prico ever paid for land in London west of Temple Bar, and it may bo doubted whether even in tho area round tho Bank of England sites havo changed hands at a higher liguro. Tho County Council, ho it said, has quite as big notions of the value of land ill London as tho ownors from which it lias to buy. For the "island" site which at present disfigures, with its brickstrewn nakedness, the widened Strand, tho Council is asking £1 a square foot for ground rent for a term of only 80 years.

For years lias the site been empty, and unless the Council comes down in its terms, it is likely to remain so for the higlie&t ollor maJJo as yet has been 15s a foot per annum, Four years even at this figure means a serious loss to the ratepayers, oven if no account is taken of tlio loss of income from tho taxation of tho buildings that cro now should have appeared on this splendid central site.