What a waste. Although considering the amount of corner cutting on the building’s appearance and features, I’m not sure I’d trust the structural integrity either.

The apartments are occupied too so demolishing them is could leave people homeless.

I would hope lessons will be learned from this, plenty more rogue developments could slip through if we are ever going to ramp up house building to the needed levels without proper oversight.

A fun game of spot the difference, but apparently there's more going on that you can't see -- eg the planned underground carpark just not being built at all, and them building a carpark over the garden instead.

I don't know anything about planning / building, but does the planning office not inspect sites periodically to make sure the plans are being followed?

Send in Dibnah!

Obligatory:

https://youtu.be/e2PyeXRwhCE#t=33s

This is the best summary I could come up with:

Extra sharp highlights, implausibly blue skies and deeper colours are all part of the dark arts of the computer-generated rendering.

But the gulf between what was proposed for an apartment complex rising 23 storeys above the Thames in south-east London and what was actually built has finally proved too much.

The visualisations before planning permission was granted over a decade ago showed a standard piece of contemporary residential architecture with details intended to render an otherwise blocky project easier on the eye.

Asked why it did not act sooner, Greenwich said it was not until 2022, when building work was finally finished, that it became clear that the breaches to the planning permission were more than just external.

“The council believes that the only reasonable and proportionate way to rectify the harm created by the finished Mast Quay Phase II development to the local area, and the tenants living there, because of the changes made during its construction, is the complete demolition and the restoration of the land to its former condition.”

Greenwich’s statement said the developer had argued that it needed to make changes to the originally permitted design owing to alterations to the building regulation.

The original article contains 621 words, the summary contains 197 words. Saved 68%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

My northern town can't even afford to rebuild the broken down ill-repair buildings it already has and London are building them to tear them down, even if they went off plan they could be fined instead of spending more by pulling it all down. What a waste.

People get outraged about wasting a fine building. But do you have any idea how much effort it takes to make a good plan?