I couldn’t help laughing when they opened the Marble Arch Mound to the public last week. I wasn’t, I’m afraid, laughing with. I was laughing at.

I couldn’t help laughing when they opened the Marble Arch Mound to the public last week. I wasn’t, I’m afraid, laughing with. I was laughing at.

People were invited to pay £4.50 to climb 130 metal steps to the top of an 80ft scaffolding frame covered with parched grass, said by some wag to resemble badly laid carpet tiles. From the top, they were promised a view. On a clear day they might see the local Starbucks in the Edgware Road. Within two days, Westminster council had suspended bookings.

This is no parochial affair – though I love parish pumps – for it is at the heart of the capital, never more populous than now, nor more impossible as a place to afford to live. The Mound, costing £2 million, was not just ludicrous, though ludicrous it was, with browning sedum (stonecrop) matting, installed because real grass turf was too heavy, and spindly saplings above a cutoff corner like a derelict pedestrian underpass. It was an insult to its neighbours.

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