In the Southwark Notes decompression chamber, we heard this pow-wow account of our visit to the Soundings/Lend Lease consultation on what they are going to do with that bit of public land where the Leisure Centre now stands.

Despite the pain of talking to consultancy mercenaries, I would always choose an employee of a developer above a touchy-feely consultant specialist for whom words are only useful means to shape the interlocutors' emotions rather than ideas attached to concrete objects, flat sizes, height
of buildings, cost-benefit analysis, things you can name and say ‘but you could do otherwise'. I prefer to be quoted statistics, if misleading, than adjectives.

It was a marathon of patience. A Soundings employee came out of the Leisure Centre and very very nicely explained that ‘they' inside do not mind us outside expressing dissent with regards to the consultation, but that they ‘had' to be out there too in the freezing cold to hand out their leaflets with their own in order to ‘balance' the accounts. Otherwise the passers-by would only see big ‘RIP OFF' elephants and our very poignant five simple questions on the Leisure centre redevelopment .

And this point I flipped, and just went on a rant "I am SORRY, but YOU are paid to be here, and I am not. You have the budget for full-colour printing of panels, and we have to pay for photocopying out of our own pockets. You have a whole shop on Walworth Road, the Elephant's high street, where you can show your designs and have as many meetings as you want, and we don't. You could mail the entire population of the whole borough twice a week if you wanted, while we rely on leaflets, word of mouth and a (free) blog. So, sorry, but I really can't bring myself to pity you if for five minutes we are stealing your visibility."

The (naïve? clueless?) consultautomaton replied "Oh, but you must understand, our role in this is to give equal space to both accounts, combining a top down..." "...and a bottom up approach, yeah." I finished the sentence, as we have heard this all before.

Once upon a time, consultation used to be run by the Councils in some pretence to accountability to us. Nowadays, consultation is a panda-suit exercise in getting the right answers to the right questions. It is run by agencies that employ mercenaries with a background in art and design, performance and public art, "who can take you places" and "who want to know what you know". Nothing wrong with any of the above, except when it's paid for by large corporate developers who are out to get maximum benefit from land speculation (they didn't teach you that at art school, did they?), the public land grab and a mono-culture of studio and 1-bed luxury flats.

Enough said.