Google Earth historic images
December 29th, 2010
Utopia London – Tom Cordell
December 15th, 2010
Destroy these vertical slums – Phibbs
December 13th, 2010
The Guardian article linked below and published last year, by Harry Phibbs, is in my opinion, ill informed and inflammatory rubbish. However I have chosen to select quotes from it and comment on them along with selected comments that followed the publication of the article, owing to the light they shed on the present public housing situation and the extent to which the Conservative policies have been responsible for it, and not in a good way.
https://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/jul/11/tower-block-vertical-slums
Summit House, St Katherine’s Way, E1
December 12th, 2010
This is a building I like, featured in an article for Building Design magazine.
Click photo for location from Google Earth
A company has taken over the building in question and are going to convert it from flats into a single riverside house. I don’t have a take on this, I like the building. My complaints on this blog are about poorly designed and managed housing. This is a private house by the river, what’s not to like? I like the Art Deco reference of the semicircular staircase (think Bexhill). There is a similar one in Rotherhithe diagonally opposite about half a mile away.
Details here in the D&A downloaded from the Tower Hamlets planning department:-
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/
Dublin and St Paul’s Cathedral
December 10th, 2010
From the beginning of my search for information on who was building what and to what standard in these islands I came across the Dublin approach time and again. From Metwork who have several projects in Eiré and where I found this article:-
Today, as well as minimum room and apartment sizes, the Irish Department of the Environment (DoE) and Dublin City Council (DCC) require new developments to observe minimum room dimensions and rules on orientation. Single-aspect dwellings just be avoided where possible and no northern or eastern single-aspect dwellings are allowed, thereby requiring new apartments to be dual aspect and eliminating corridor developments at a stroke.Metwork_How-to-make-room-for-housing_AJ_080313.pdf
Another view on post war housing
December 4th, 2010
There’s always someone who sees things from a different point of view and while I may not agree with them I am prepared to take them on head to head so here’s the view from the “other side”.
newsed1
2 December 2010 6:10PM
Well, that’s what happens when the Left fiddles with everything.
As Family and Kinship in The East showed, the Left didn’t like working class housing being private and didn’t like it being handed – via the rent man – down through well-behaved working class families.
Many of the ‘slum’ clearances were nothing of the kind- ask Timothy Spall who used to live in a perfectly decent working class street in Battersea (from where I’m now writing) which was taken over by the local council and demolished never to be re-built.