Look across the London skyline from any one of its bridges and you’ll notice a invasive prevalence of something that you do not see to the same extent in other European cities: cranes. Even the sound of London is changing – the clanging of steel girders and the hum of JCBs is increasingly becoming the sonic backdrop to a place that’s moving up.

Cranes are being used to build enormous apartment complexes for people to own but not live in, they’re being used to create more hyperreal shopping centres and they’re going to be used to build a 25 metre swimming pool to link two blocks of flats in Battersea.

The 115-ft high "Sky Pool" will be entirely transparent and, according to its designers, offer swimmers a "truly unique" experience. People considerably richer than you will actually be able to look down on you, while you look up at the backstroking barons of Battersea all screaming into Blackberries at 7am, a bundle of airborne Batemans bollocking people at ground level.

Or let’s consider another scenario – that this prospective human aquarium will be sold to investors who have no intention of ever living there and it will lie empty, sun shining through it in summer, refracting light onto the ground the same way you burn ants with a magnifying glass. If no-one is there to Instagram the "Sky Pool", did it really happen?

The idea reportedly came from Sean Mulyan, CEO of Ballymore Group and the pool is said to be the first of its kind in the world. Mulyan hopes that it will replicate the feeling of floating through the air in London.

"The Sky Pool’s transparent structure is the result of significant advancements in technologies over the last decade," he told Sky News. Along with significant advancements in London’s inability to resist the allure of development – no matter who’s doing it, why they’re doing it, or how they’re doing it.