When dereliction is better: despite Rogers, Farrell and Grimshaw, West London reinvents itself as a pale shadow of Berlin. 1/5

There's a lot to be said for poignant dereliction. I love it: the old, now silent, factories and wharfs, the rusting railway sidings, the buddleia sprouting from the walls and the birches shouldering through the pavements. For me, London's Docklands were at their best in the hiatus between the ships leaving in the 1970s and the real-estate developers arriving in the 1980s. Briefly, they were a magical, forgotten domain. Now I have to face up to the removal of another rich patch of dereliction. This time, it's Paddington.

Paddington is of course a station, one of the greatest of all stations, the terminus of the Great Western and the showcase of the talents of Isambard Kingdom Brunel and his chums. But Paddington, as seen by developers, is something rather different. It is a huge triangle of post-industrial land in West London that just happens to have the station at its apex. Another corner of the triangle used to be a railway goods yard while the third corner still is Paddington Basin, a broad rectangular terminus for the Grand Union Canal. On the south side of the basin squats the unlovely hulk of St. Mary's Hospital. Everything else is being rebuilt, and there are plans even for the hospital. A new city district is being created. 80 acres, the size of Soho.