Recruitment agencies
January 26th, 2011
https://careers.guardian.co.uk/careers-blog/recruitment-consultant
alternageek
26 January 2011 9:59AM
I would just like to know why agencies post jobs that don’t exist so people will feed them their CV? – I’ve had this happen to me numerous times since I first moved to the UK and makes job hunting so depressing. I actually stayed in a job that was making me ill, because it was better than having to weed through fake ads and being disappointed that the job never existed.
Also how come when you tell an agency I don’t want to do X, Y & Z – that’s all they offer you? Or they send you on interviews saying the role is what you want, but when you get there, its actually for the opposite of what you’re looking for.
I’m about to go back into the job market (Customer Admin/Service background) and totally petrified about finding real work and going on interviews where I’m not wasting anyone’s time.
Google Earth historic images
December 29th, 2010
Civic pride and the Common Good
December 12th, 2010
An article in Private Eye No.1274 dated 29/10-11/11 about the possible selling off of council assets (translation – buildings paid for by rate payers over the years) to developers, has prompted consideration of the way things used to be and how life for all of us might be better if they still were.
I was recently prompted into thinking about these things by a fellow blogger who pointed me to his take on the Big Society. After reading his thoughts here:-
https://ukregeneration.org.uk/2010/11/29/the-big-society-age-%E2%80%93-now-it%E2%80%99s-official/
Pathfinder – Owen Hatherley – Guardian
November 22nd, 2010
“Knocking stuff down does not increase supply, […] everything we knock down shrinks supply”
Prof Anne Power speaking to LB Camden
Pathfinder seems to have been in the news since the days of John Prescott and New Labour. Back in March this year, Karen Buck MP, a lady I respect, pointed out in a housing debate that. . .
. . . when the Pathfinder projects were starting they were dealing with the problem of excess supply and indeed many areas being blighted with huge numbers of homes that they could not rent or sell . . .
Pathfinder – Karen Buck blasts back March 4th, 2010 https://www.singleaspect.org.uk/?p=86
I confess that I never did understand the true reason for it especially since it quickly resulted in groups of home owners banding together and taking their local council to court, and often winning, in order to avoid demolition.
At the height of the Pathfinder demolitions I can remember BBC news reports showing people saying that they were going to lose their homes with a compensation figure that would come nowhere near the cost of a new flat built to replace it.
New Royal London Hospital – Yuk!
November 14th, 2010
What a mess. I don’t often take an instinctive dislike to a building but this thing is on such a gargantuan scale that you can’t ignore it, unfortunately, you have to have a view on it. It is out of scale with its surroundings to an alarming degree, ugly, with few windows and a most unattractive finish on the parts that aren’t blue panels.
Out of keeping, out of place, out of scale, I wish it was out of sight.
Housing Benefit cuts – in a nutshell
November 1st, 2010
Allied against Osborne’s housing benefit cuts
Boris Johnson, Simon Hughes and Karen Buck – allies against housing benefit cuts. Photo of Hughes by Keith Edkins
The public have a way of bringing common sense and experience to complex issues and I have great faith in the ability of Joe Public to explain things in straightforward terms that anyone can understand. So it is with the housing benefit cuts and the hyperbole that has gone with it in recent days. I was out last night and happened to glance through the Independent letters page, the first of which sums up for me the whole history of the problem in a few paragraphs.
Park Hill – Urban Splash
October 21st, 2010
UPDATE: 5/3/14 Park Hill today Utopian estate left to die
Color Me Goodd! Urban Splash brighten up Park Hill Phase One
For a larger version of this photograph click the image itself.
Design Research Unit: 1942 – 72
October 12th, 2010
UPDATE: 2/6/14 At last the photographs
Norwich University College of the Arts Gallery 30 Oct – 27 Nov 2010
Curated by Michelle Cotton
Cubitt announces a national touring exhibition about the history of the Design Research Unit.
Formed in London in 1942, the Unit was responsible for some of the most important design produced in post-war Britain. It pioneered a model for group practice, being the first consultancy in the country to bring together expertise in architecture, graphics and industrial design. By the 1970s it was one of the largest and most established design offices in Europe. This exhibition will be the first of its kind, mapping the history of the group and the currency of their designs. It will identify key examples of their work and document an approach that was shaped by inter-war developments in artistic discourse and post war trends in industry and communication; in particular the accelerated demand for corporate design.
UPDATE 1/11/12 I am sorry this article is so out of date. There was an travelling exhibition at the time of which I caught the last day in Norwich on a wintry afternoon in the snow. It was a fascinating glimpse into a past when design was considered more important than it is now, and a walk down memory lane to the days when Watneys owned pubs and produced plastic barrels with which to decorate their beer pumps and branded ashtrays, not to mention the 1970s plastic lettering on the pubs. Here are some photographs from the exhibition:-
My Flickr set from the exhibition:-
Design Research Unit Exhibition – Norwich
Here’s a link to the Guardian article about the exhibition:-
https://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2010/oct/12/design-research-unit-branding-britain
The British Rail design guide is online here:-
https://www.doublearrow.co.uk/manual.htm
Heard through @jacobsamwillson
Why We Need a Fair Society – Will Hutton
September 26th, 2010
“Ever more sophisticated CCTV policing the fortresses of the rich and the desolate housing estates of the disadvantaged has become the iconic social intervention of the age.”
This phrase jumped out at me today while reading the Observer and Will Hutton’s long and accurate portrayal of broken Britain and the reasons why https://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/sep/26/them-and-us-will-hutton
Within this blog I have written about housing estates with obtrusive CCTV – Maiden Lane for a start – and mentioned gated communities but it wasn’t until I read Will Hutton’s article that I saw how these two were related and in the worst possible way, both symptoms of a widely separated and decaying society ill at ease with itself.
This is clearly part of the problem that regenerating the Modernist estates is only going to partly solve. So long as the disparities of wealth and shortage of subsidised housing persist then so will the cameras. They are not here to stay. Unlike others I do believe there will come a time when we as a society will be able to do away with the “surveillance state”. But that time is not yet, not even close.
bernardcrofton -> Bellerephon
16 November 2013 11:42am
Of course not, but you can often blame architect for problem estates. Here’s a little anecdote.
As the most junior lettings officer, I was given the task of filling the empty block in the Stevenage town centre. It had one benefit to the locals: instead of being let to people moving out of London I was allowed to let them to local couples who “fell pregnant” with no other prospect of their own home. I was told to promise them they would be high-priority transfers when the child was three. Then Heath won the 1970 election, budgets were cut, and many of them were still there a decade later, but with more kids. Older couples suited to the estate moved out because of the noise.
The Chief Architect planned a tower block in each neighbourhood:”like a church spire in a traditional village”. My response that people don’t have to live in a church spire fell on cloth ears.
And an anecdote on architects in general. I attended a course on residential densities at the Architectural Association. One of our test exercises was a disused dock backing onto a 1930s LCC estate. Apart from mine and a planner’s from Islington, every design submitted included a big wall between the older council estate and the new homes.
https://discussion.theguardian.com/comment-permalink/28933440
Is the big society big enough for homeless people?
bernardcrofton’s comment 4 July 2011 12:03PM
It was deliberate policy of the Thatcher government to remove full security of tenure and allow rents to rise in the private sector,and to force council and housing association rents to rise in the public.
The result was that Housing Benefit “took the hit”. (I would say see my evidence to the commons social security committee 1996 but I can’t find the link for the moment). This was seen as an inevitable cost of forcing up rents. The neo-cons believed that eventually there would be a resurgence of the private landlord.
The same belief underpins the current coalition plans for “near-market rents”. The problem is that this time all the family sized dwellings are going to be above the benefits cap etc..
And the “flood of immigrants” around the millennium was a temporary phenomenon caused by the accession of the eastern block to the EU with full rights to live and work anywhere within the EU. I make no comment on the rights and wrongs, or losses and gains to the UK, involved in that treaty. I simply observe that the Accession Act 1996 put into UK law the Maastricht Treaty which gave those countries equal rights with other EU citizens to enter the UK. 1996 was the seventeenth year of a Conservative Government.
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