Social cleansing? Maybe it is .....

Many of these boats are literally across the park from me. I always think to myself that the people there have a great set up - genuinely living in a different way to most of us and usually, as far as I can see, having a good time doing it. I'm not sure I could live on a boat, but I can certainly see the attraction of waking up on the water every morning - in inner-city London, mind - to nothing more than the sound of waterbirds and wind in the trees. OK, so the birds might grate after a while .....

Now it seems that the little niche they've carved out for themselves is to be taken away, in a move that must be linked to the area's proximity to the Olympic site. Just another step down the financially/commercially ordained homogenization and, frankly, mundanization(1), of all our lives. It seems to me difference that involves not buying into the dominant tropes of work/consumption/mortgage-holiding is increasingly intolerable to commercial and indeed governmental interests. Who, naturally, have the whip hand in almost all cases. So a group of people who weren't doing anyone any harm and in fact improving the nature and fabric of the area in which they live are to be moved on, for no other reason, it seems, that they may look a bit scruffy and had found a way to live on the cheap.

(1) Hideous neologism, I know.