Most properties get a "for sale" sign put on them when they go on the market. Not so at Quay Point on Bristol's Harbourside, however.

This recently built block has been painted all over with red lettering advertising flats available through a part-buy, part-rent scheme, and details of the company website.

It look likes a cheap, even desperate, attempt to attract buyers – although many people might actually be put off taking a look inside something with such a tacky exterior.

It must seem curious to anyone travelling into Bristol on the main A4 road that all these stencilled words have been allowed to remain on the building, which is in the City Docks Conservation Area.

But surely it's even more curious that so many big, bland blocks of flats have been built on the north bank of Bristol's Floating Harbour in the first place.

Robert del Naja – otherwise known as 3D – of the Bristol group Massive Attack, recently criticised the new developments on the waterfront for looking like "eastern Europe in the Sixties".

Del Naja has, of course, dismissed architecture in Bristol before, once describing the Cabot Circus shopping centre as having "that gripping Eighties' shopping mall look of mid-America slash the Midlands".

Not everyone agrees with that opinion, judging by the crowds that can be seen at Cabot Circus most weekends

Yet his observation about new developments on the waterfront seems to reflect a sense of unease felt by many Bristolians, judging by the emptiness around Millennium Square most days.

The Canon's Marsh area is ideally located within walking distance of the city centre, and set between two of Bristol's most iconic sights – the waterfront and the cathedral.

It could have been Bristol's own Venice, or as lively as the klongs of Bangkok. It could even have been the West's mini Puerto Banus.

And what have we got? Something that looks like London's former Elephant and Castle shopping centre meets the infamous blocks of concrete flats constructed during the regime of the Romanian dictator Ceaucescu.

The result has been Bristol's answer to the Berlin Wall on the A4 – an uninviting presence that conceals much of the Floating Harbour and creates a wind tunnel effect, even on calm days.

So much concrete. So many magnolia-coloured flats which, together with the former Imax building, seem to turn their backs on the road. And, alas, so few people.

True, Bristol's waterfront throngs with crowds during events such as the Harbour Festival and the Organic Food Festival.

But that should make the emptiness for so much of the rest of the year even more of a cause for concern.

Just across the water are The Matthew and Brunel's ss Great Britain – both symbols of the imagination and spirit of adventure that helped to make Bristol what it is today.

Sadly, new development on the northern side of the harbour has been characterised largely by failure of imagination – and the closure of businesses such as the Marks & Spencer Simply Food store, the Carpe Diem restaurant, and the Imax cinema.

Maybe the area will be revitalised by the opening later this year of the Blue Reef Aquarium in the former Imax building.

Until then, however, it is likely to continue to be a challenge to sell flats in the big, bland blocks. Even if one of them has been painted all over with sales information.