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.
The most shocking graph on housing I have ever seen
January 26th, 2011
This article started off as a comment on the need for prefab homes as a solution to the housing crisis brought about by the reluctance of Governments since 1979 to build council housing. In the process of reading the article I came across the graph below which shows the true state of housing for those who cannot afford to buy their own, and it is truly shocking.
Of course the idea of prefabs has been superceded now by Levitt Bernstein and their Beds in Sheds. https://www.singleaspect.org.uk/?p=11852 let’s hope somebody starts building proper housing before too long.
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.
Lynsey Hanley nails the Tories lies
November 30th, 2010
I thought this was a great article, and the comments that follow it. I don’t always agree with Lynsey Hanley but on this occasion she is spot on.
“That’s the paradox of conservatism: it celebrates the idea of individual freedom while making it incredibly difficult for some individuals – generally, those who lack power and money – to exercise that freedom.”
https://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/nov/26/tory-paradox-free-less-choice
ArseneKnows
26 November 2010 10:34AM
The usual right wing bull from some of the usual suspects.
The 1834 Poor Law Reform Act is what they seem to be arguing for. In this act, signed nto law incidentally by Cameron’s ancestor William IV, the driving force behind the reforms was the concept of ‘less eligibility’. This basically meant that noone in receipt of relief from poverty should be as well off as even the lowest paid labourer.