Woods House correspondent?
February 28th, 2012
From time to time I get comments posted to the blog from somebody calling themselves Grosvernor Waterside resident of which this is the latest, below. I’m not allowing it into the normal comments space because I disagree with a lot of it, in fact some of it is simply untrue.
Not really, its a really nice area to live in, the nearest station is [S]loan[e] square. Quite nice. The concie[r]ge offers taxi service, drying cleaning. There is also a spa downstairs. You can also make use of the nice balcony. The noise from the railways, you cannot rea[l]ly hear it and it has a nice soft noise. For living in SW1, prime location, [W]oods house is quite cool, considering if you look at other places. Its a new development, so everything you get is brand new. christineli2007@googlemail.com
St Paul’s Cathedral sightlines
February 25th, 2012
29/11/16 – This article is rather out of date. If the sightlines are important to you please keep an eye on this webpage:-
London View Management Framework
UPDATE: 25/11/16 – and another one Manhattan Lofts Stratford
If the following is the result of the present building restrictions supposedly preventing visual clutter obscuring or degrading the views of St Paul’s Cathedral from well known landmarks around London then why bother? They have clearly been watered down to the point of no return. I thought they were intended to PROTECT the views of St Pauls from a set of established points around London including Primrose Hill. Who is responsible for this change? Ken or Boris? How is this protecting the view of St Pauls from Parliament Hill? I am horrified.
The best exposition I have seen on TV about the St Pauls sightlines has been from Andrew Marr in his series Britain from Above when he devoted a whole section of the programme to the Abercrombie plan for London and to the subject of sightlines.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/britainfromabove/stories/buildingbritain/3dmodelling.shtml
Squatters – Tanya Gold – Guardian
February 21st, 2012
I know that in the 1970s squatting was popular. I’ve got a book on my shelves entitled Alternative London which tells you how to get up to all manner of things to do with accommodation of dubious legality but those times are past. Owing to comprehensive redevelopment and “twilight areas” rows of perfectly good houses were being emptied by thoughtless councils intent on demolition and with new build council housing not keeping up the result was, perhaps, coupled with the lassez faire attitude of the times, inevitable.
RIBA Home Season 16th Feb – 28th April 2012
February 14th, 2012
With thanks to Front Row on BBC Radio 4 this evening I am pleased to note that the RIBA are holding a season about the home with a number of events including exhibitions, film and talks. Details below.
Home Season
Explore the past, present and future of the home with a brand new RIBA exhibition accompanied by a series of talks, screenings and events at 66 Portland Place and elsewhere. The season compliments HomeWise, the RIBA’s national campaign to improve the quality of the nation’s newbuild housing.
The exhibition is reviewed here by a fellow blogger:-
A place to call home exhibition
UPDATE: I wandered along there the other day stealing time off from more serious matters in order to browse the library and see the exhibition. I quite enjoyed it. Some good reminders of well known housing schemes. I enjoyed the “five classes of Victorian terrace”. Ours is third class I’m happy to report, which could be worse.
They are in fact graded rather than classed, depending on the number of bedrooms and amount of garden (if any). Some nice models of streets borrowed from Northumbria University helped to liven it up, and all the usual suspects are represented including a shot of Southmere Lake in Thamesmead.
Sarah Beeny takes us through the history of housing from several hundred years ago to the present day, by no means concentrating on the modernist estates. They are given their due place in history but not made the main event. Well worth a look if you’re in the area.
The Realities of Housing in the ‘Big Society’ – Corporate Watch
February 14th, 2012
Reproduced with kind permission of Corporate Watch
On 21 November 2011 the ConDems finally unveiled their so-called ‘Housing Strategy for England’ with the fingerprints of free market think tanks all over it. According to the Coalition, the housing crisis is really the crisis facing aspiring home owners and those who want to move to where new jobs are being created, which is in turn blamed on the state’s stranglehold on house building from the “central planning, top-down targets and bureaucratic structures” of the previous Labour government.
The solution is thus simple – liberate the housing market from these obstacles and Adam Smith’s famous invisible hand of competition will work its magic. But of course we’ve seen and heard it all before and we know only too well what freeing the market really means: a new round of public bailouts for the big corporate banks and builders, pushing more people into a lifetime of debt just for the illusion of home ownership and a new wave of housing privatisation.
Apprenticeships
February 10th, 2012
dgriz
Apprenticeship’s modern day definition is a way to get someone to take a job for far less money than the person they are replacing. Nothing to do with the merits of the scheme, merely for companies and institutions to get around minimum wages and top up the shareholders/ board directors profits and bonuses.
https://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/feb/09/apprenticeship-schemes-fail-young
Rosebury Avenue – former Metropolitan Water Board HQ
February 1st, 2012
On my Lubetkin visit to the capital last year, across the road from LSE Rosebury Hall where I was staying, I noticed this magnificent building, origin unknown to me until serendipity played a hand while going through some old Look and Learn magazines from the 1960s I came across this article (large graphic) showing it to have been the headquarters of the Metropolitan Water Board.
Nurses face eviction from staff housing – Guardian
February 1st, 2012
UPDATE: 25/5/18 Royal Free sells Queen Mary House
UPDATE: 9/1/18 Now a report from the NEF No Homes for Nurses
UPDATE: 11/06/17 Better late than never. Pity they sold them off in the first place. Thank goodness the NHS still owns most of the land.
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2017/jun/10/nurses-homes-nhs-staff-shortfall
https://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2012/jan/31/nurses-face-eviction-staff-housing
This makes me very angry, comment to Guardian below:-
1 February 2012 2:07PM
This is absolutely appalling news but sadly only too predictable. When the police section houses (behind police stations) started to go I seem to remember being told that the police preferred to live with their families (wives and children) and that demand for bachelor (of either gender) accommodation had fallen away.
Dual aspect flats – Pitman Tozer – Bethnal Green
December 2nd, 2011
UPDATE: 18/4/14 They’re built and occupied now. I went past on the train recently and very nice they look too.
With planning approved this development includes a majority of dual aspect flats (42:25), something that can’t be said for many new housing developments in London, which seem to include them only on the corners of rectangular blocks whereas here are 42 dwellings that span the block width.
Planning reference PA/11/829
“Set back to create street”? Possibly. More likely to allow light into the ground floor otherwise blocked by the viaduct.
Rebuilding Britain for the Baby Boomers
November 26th, 2011
Maxwell Hutchinson analyses the rebuilding of post-war Britain through unique and exclusive archive interviews on the 50th anniversary of the emblematic Parkhill Flats.
An excellent programme from the series Archive on 4 of which the history of Park Hill flats in Sheffield formed the backbone, while finding time to branch off and talk about Robin Hood Gardens in East London, and the World’s End Chelsea, all against a background of the whole post war reconstruction effort.