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UPDATE 1/11/12 I am sorry this article is so out of date.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.
Thames Tideway Tunnel
September 25th, 2010
UPDATE: 10/1/2013 I’m a big fan of the tunnel, I think it needs to be built but I won’t be following the details week by week, for that see the links below.
For anyone with a keen interest in London and its infrastructure, and in engineering and industrial archaeology as I have, the advent of the Thames Tideway Tunnel is a matter of great interest.
Mixed tenure estates
September 24th, 2010
My thinking on this has been coloured by the analysis of Nicky Gavron. For example if I skim my blog I can find the following quotation . . .
‘Mixed and balanced communities are rightly one of the shibboleths of the London Plan. But under Mr Johnson’s this means ‘a mix of tenure should be sought, particularly in neighbourhoods where social renting predominates’. Where, one might ask, are displaced residents to go? Crucially, there is no reciprocal policy for social rented housing to be introduced into areas where private housing predominates.
On the one hand the right wing London boroughs want to clear their council estates and build private flats for sale to overseas investors and on the other hand they don’t want new “social” tenants moving in anywhere, the polarisation of London will continue.
Now turning for a moment to the interview Dave Hill conducted with Karen Buck MP we can find the following transcript:-
DH: In terms of security of tenure isn’t there an ongoing debate in the world of housing assocations social housing in the broader sense about whether you need to change the rules I mean it’s because you have situations where people they get themselves into a nice social rented home of one type or another they stay there for ever sometimes they start to earn a lot more money than they earned when they moved into it. It’s that kind of conversation that’s going on. Is there no kind of argument for changing the rules as they stand at the moment?
Go away you’re poor
August 16th, 2010
Following the report from the Cambridge Centre for Housing and Planning Research entitled “High Density Housing – The Impact on tenants” I have come to the conclusion, along with other indicators, that the current attitude of developers and some housing associations to their tenants is “go away you’re poor”.
HIGH DENSITY HOUSING – THE IMPACT ON TENANTS:
From Building Design 14/6/13
Cassie O’Keyboard | 12 June 2013 1:54 pm
Another interesting thing about this typology of having maisonettes over flats is that there isn’t any shared circulation space so the residents don’t have to pay a service charge. Particularly for social housing this can make a big difference to how affordable it actually is to live there.
The second article in the series linked below:-
Hope VI – or go away you’re poor II
Monitoring blogs – RSS feeds
July 20th, 2010
If you regularly follow several blogs and want to know if they have changed lately or updated their posts, there is a much easier way than viewing them from bookmarks. In your email client there will be a section for “News & Blogs” and this will enable you to add what are called RSS feeds which are marked on most blogs with an icon like this:-
Click the image above for a “howto” on RSS
All you have to do to monitor or follow a blog is to click the icon in the address bar and then copy the link to which you are taken into the appropriate place on your mail reader and you will then be automatically advised each time the blog changes.
Or do it the easy way and sign up with https://www.bloglines.com/
Maria Bethania – Royal Festival Hall
July 17th, 2010
Cathy Come Home – reviewed
July 16th, 2010
“Now I was pregnant again, some would say it was wrong to have another kiddy when you’re overcrowded as it is. But I don’t think so, I think kiddies are God’s gift, you don’t do right to deprive anyone of the chance of life, love’s what’s important in a child’s life, love is more important to a child than nice surroundings, I know, because I lived in what they call a respectable home, and I didn’t have it”.