Go to Paddington today, and you can see the similarities. Instead of the Berlin Wall, you have the canyon of the Great Western Railway tracks alongside the notorious elevated motorway of the Westway. Instead of the redundant docks on which Canary Wharf was built, you have a wasteland of former railway goods yards and - hidden from view for years behind the station - a huge acreage of land around the Georgian dock of Paddington canal basin. Put it all together, and you have a roughly triangular patch of prime land the size of Soho.

Only Soho never was and never will be a sky-high city like this one. And Soho, unlike Paddington, is not exactly handy for Heathrow Airport. Which makes Paddington such a potential goldmine that chunks of land there are already changing hands between developers for huge sums of money, even before anything much has been built. It has become London's golden triangle.

In the business, they call it "hope value". In other words, developers are gambling on the fact that lots of valuable real estate will be built there, even before many of them have full permission to build anything. But they know that plenty will be built, and this comes to the second, riskier part of the gamble: how high, and how dense, will they be allowed to build? And here they are pushing the limits. This is the only bit of the borough of Westminster where very tall buildings might possibly be allowed, though the council has not come out and said that: officially it is still finalising its "tall buildings policy".