bottom drawer

New company, new blog

2008-01-29T10:25:00.001Z

It's been a while - but I'm hoping that for those of you who haven't trashed me from your RSS feeder, this will pop up as a little surprise. I've been busy - new house, new baby, and a new practice, HAT Projects, set up from our studio here in Essex and currently working on lots of fun stuff, including the feasibility study for a new art gallery in Hastings. All of which means a new blog, which can be found here, so I hope you'll all migrate over and have a look, and sign up to a new feed!

Studio swallows

2007-07-31T10:16:00.001+01:00

Studio swallows
Originally uploaded by hanaloftus

The swallows have flying lessons and fluff themselves on the wire outside the studio window where I work. Distractingly lovely creatures.

Indian handwritten newspaper

2007-07-06T09:39:00.000+01:00

I thought this story was fascinating and strangely emotional. A team of Urdu calligraphers turn out a daily newspaper in Chennai that is first hand-written, then transferred to printing plates. It has a circulation of 20,000 and a staff of six, led by a 76-year-old editor whose son thinks it is all far too old-fashioned - "I understand Urdu, but have no interest in calligraphy."

"In the meantime, the office is a center for the South Indian Muslim community and hosts a stream of renowned poets, religious leaders and royalty who contribute to the pages, or just hang out, drink chai and recite their most recent works to the staff. The Musalman publishes Urdu poetry and messages on devotion to God and communal harmony daily."

There is something in this story about how newspapers perhaps should be - not just the endless churning out of barely re-written press releases but something more passionate and personal. It is perhaps how I imagine the offices of our earliest newspapers to be.

Rowley Leigh and Fergus Henderson

2007-05-28T22:44:00.000+01:00

A treat from the weekend newsround - two of my all-time favorite chefs talking about their cooking together. Going to Kensington Place was always a highlight of my childhood and growing into adulthood - little did I know, to start with, what a seminal restaurant it was but I always loved the buzz, the huge mural, and the quality of the food, consistently excellent and, especially for that era, innovative. I remember a baked tamarillo dessert that introduced us to the fruit (it seems so dated now, but it was so good!) and the signature scallops with pea puree will always be a dish for my fantasy 'best-of' menu. As a kid I loved the hot pink loo decor and still I fail to find its look dated, in the way that a much-loved place always seems just right and of itself. I'm excited about Rowley's new project that is due to open later this year.

And for the last seven years, since moving back to London, St John and its Spitalfields sister have been my absolute favorite, staple places to eat well, at any time of day. Whether slightly naughty lunches on a workday, of cold lamb sandwiches in a doorstep of good bread with mayonnaise, or bar suppers, or full-on suppers to celebrate something at the Smithfield original, or weekend breakfasts or weekday treat dinners or birthday suppers at the Spitalfields Bread and Wine, Henderson has deprived me of more money than any other restauranteur.

And I don't remember ever leaving unhappy - once, recently, a little pressed for time after a pudding mysteriously failed to appear for rather too long - but always joyful at the quality of the food, savouring each mouthful, and with faith restored by the relaxed atmosphere that both have. Never as expensive as people think, it's possible to eat ridiculously well for very little money in Spitalfields or at the Smithfield bar. I always wonder how other restaurants fail to produce such simple, good food at such utterly reasonable prices when Henderson makes it look so obvious.

And for both of them, that's what comes across in this conversation. Henderson talks about common sense - "I follow the seasons and basically the work’s done for you and nature writes the menu." And it is true - why can't others learn this?

Hungry House life

2007-05-20T21:28:00.003+01:00

I'm fairly sure that most of my friends think we're quite strange, suddenly deciding to get a house in the middle of green fields (and in much-maligned Essex, no less) when we should be living some crazy hedonistic London life. But right now life feels pretty crazy and hedonistic being here - much more so than the reality of many London weeks where the busy-ness becomes over-much, the difficulty of coordinating diaries with good friends or finding mental space or physical time to do half the things that the city tempts with, and the constant leaching of money become all that one remembers.

Currently, weeks seem to pass quickly as before, but contain so much. Things change fast. I've watched the weather and felt relieved when it rained though needing to scurry out and rescue the washing from the line; I've taken advantage of sunny spells to dig the garden and plant seeds and seedlings; we've ripped up carpets and scrubbed floors and moved furniture. We've gone from eating every meal on the floor in front of the log fire, with only one chair in the house, to having a dining table, studio desks, lamps, armchairs. And still we've both been working fully at our day jobs - in my case, coming through a busy spell - and I've played gigs, too.

I realise that we've not charted our first month at the house in nearly as much detail as we should have. My stock of photos is scarce and most of them are terrible. But we've had the end of daffodils and tulips, and the beginning of roses. I have tomato plants four foot high in the greenhouse, lettuces in the garden. We've eaten the first tender and delicious broad beans; and asparagus keeps poking up, albeit somewhat less profusely that I would wish. We've discovered local farm shops and garden centres (and become all too regular at the local Homebase, sadly) - we've had our first overnight house guest.

Today the brand new lawnmower mowed all the grass and I discovered that the apricot tree really does have some apricots on it. We put up the badminton net and played a few rounds. I did some more digging and sowed beetroot and turnips, and planted out my gherkin seedlings. I made rhubarb crumble and listened to the birdsong. I tied up the roses climbing on the walls. The day was really full - exciting, new and, contrived though it may sound, inspiring.

There are various photos on flickr but I will show you just the conservatory, first thing in the morning, and our first broad beans.

Global English

2007-05-16T18:37:00.000+01:00

I've been following the debate summarised in this article for a while. Fundamentally, it is about whether there exists a 'standard' and 'correct' form of English, whether standards of written and spoken English are slipping among young people and students, and what the impact or place of the new forms of English used in India and China, among other places, is or should be.

This is a debate that I got into when I lived in the USA too, where I once had a heated argument about the validity of what is strangely known as 'ebonics' over 'standard' English. Should African-American children be taught, or forced to use, 'classical' grammar and spelling in school or is a petition to government, say, equally valid if written in a colloquial African-American vernacular form? As you can imagine, this was a highly charged subject - taking my point of view (which was that a standard form of English provides a level playing field upon which social and political actors can interact, with a mutually understood set of meanings) laid me open to accusations of racism, no less.

In the UK I am more and more amazed by the poor grasp of spelling and syntax displayed in the multitude of documents that I read for work - from papers put out by local authority officers (even tender briefs) to job applications or even tender submissions by reputable companies. One recent example was from a marketing and design company - and their spelling was so incredibly poor that I would have rejected them for that alone even if their design was good (which it was not). To me, being able to articulate ideas clearly and logically is vitally important.

With new vernacular forms of English developing across the world, I always find an interesting parallel in Arabic. Each Arabic-speaking country has its own form of the spoken language, often wildly variant to the extent that Arabic learners choose whether to learn Egyptian Arabic, or Gulf Arabic, or Levantine Arabic, or another dialect. But Arabic also has a Modern Standard form that is used for all written communication. It is also used as a spoken language on formal occasions and in education - although many less educated Arabic speakers can't actually speak this language, they understand it.

Does this not provide a direct precedent for the development of English? A standard global English that obeys strict rules of spelling and grammar can provide the basis for international communication - online, in law, in business. What you choose to speak informally with your friends or community will vary and take on as much vibrancy and local colour as you wish. Some of those words or verbal forms may eventually make their way into the standard vocabulary over time.

But meanwhile, we should insist on high standards of written English. It forms the basis of our communication - an essential tool for public and political participation, and thus of more importance than those who dismiss it as needless dogmatism claim. If you can't write to your MP and clearly express your concerns; if you can't complain to your local council in terms that will be understood, your democratic capacity is limited. Learning only a vernacular that can only be understood by a closed group means you can't access jobs or opportunities that demand wider communication skills.

Every novelist or playwright knows that the kind of language they choose is intrinsic to characterisation and carries strong messages. I cherish vernaculars for their often wonderful use of words - but I would argue that their users must (and already often do) understand the distinctly different associations that these lingoes and standard English convey - and have the ability to switch between the two. This is not snobbery - it is the acknowledgement that a common language form enables communication as equals. We must make sure that all sections of the community can participate in social, political and economic life to the fullest extent, and that means making absolutely sure that, if nothing else, our schoolchildren learn English properly.

The Interweb mapped

2007-05-02T09:50:00.000+01:00

xkcd's daily sketches are always amusing but yesterday's was a stroke of nerd genius. Worth clicking on to view its full glory.

Where do you live? I can be found often adrift in the Blogipelago, with pied-a-terre's in the Myspace Bands peninsula, Delicious Island and Flickr...

Changes

2007-04-25T21:42:00.000+01:00

Isn't it ironic that, for me, the most exciting things in my life tend to stop me from blogging about them? Like, for example, the boy buying a house in Essex fields on his birthday, and our lives suddenly becoming bi-locational?

Because, of course, the new abode doesn't have internet (yet) and the whole affair has made me so busy that blogging on any of the various places I post my scribblings (apologies to the worldchanging crew and any developing news readers) has been impossible. Well, now I have a spare hour in the London abode to tell you about it all - and I don't even have any decent photos of it all.

But we are now proud and slightly dazed occupants of an eccentric house named Hungry House, complete with conservatory with vine and an inherited black cat. And an asparagus bed in the vegetable patch, and an apricot tree, and many other excitements. It looks like this. It is very exciting. Further installments of news will follow - including 'Why is it called Hungry House' and many other FAQs...

Schooling in the Falklands

2007-03-30T18:01:00.000+01:00

Sometimes the BBC does some wonderful bits of journalism - like this photo essay about the schooling of a seven-year-old boy in the remotest part of the Falklands, where he gets taught, in a class of one, by a travelling teacher for two weeks out of every six. Strangely alluring.

Interesting stuff about 24/7 media

2007-03-29T10:14:00.000+01:00

The Guardian is really embracing - and innovating - in the whole field of news and media across platforms. As Alan Rusbridger says, "The print-on-paper model [for newspapers] isn't making money and isn't going to make money. It's no longer sustainable. Though the future is unknowable, we are taking an educated guess about what we should be doing and where we should be going."

It is interesting to read about how they are tackling their new 24/7 model from the human perspective. As a feature writer apparently said, "I've already lost track of where my working week begins and ends... how do we begin to define what working week is, and what it will be?"

Some current projects

2007-03-27T19:21:00.000+01:00

A couple of big projects that I'm involved with are kicking off at the moment and might be of interest. I'm working with 5th Studio on this very exciting new park along the Lea River from above the Olympics down to the Thames. A Lower Lea Valley Park has been an idea on paper for a long time; now we will try to set a framework for it to become real over the next decades. It's a big and ambitious project and will certainly be an interesting process.

And I'm working in my home county of Suffolk on another ambitious initiative: Suffolk: Creating the Greenest County. A cross-cutting programme that is aiming high, we are just starting to figure out what making a 'greenest' county might mean. But with a group of very radical and committed local people who are already engaged in ground-breaking work from local food hubs to eco-schools, waste and serious amounts of renewables in the form of the Greater Gabbard wind farm among other projects, this is no hot air pledge. I'm helping them put together a conference in the autumn that will start the process of engaging local businesses and communities with how they can put this into practice, as well as with the development of a strong brand and web resource that will allow wide local engagement and debate.

All exciting stuff and not the only projects on the boil right now...keeping me busy!

Reyner Banham loves Los Angeles

2007-03-21T09:50:00.000Z

Found via cityofsound: an absolutely wonderful 1972 documentary wherein Reyner Banham - yes, he of all those architectural theory/history books - tours LA in a bushy beard, big sunglasses and hat. "I love the place in a way that goes beyond sense or reason" he declares. When did the BBC stop commissioning such works of genius?

Pimlico Opera in HMP Wandsworth

2007-03-11T23:02:00.000Z

I went last week to see the production of Les Miserables in Wandsworth Prison, by Pimlico Opera. It was a hugely moving experience, as twenty convicts and remand prisoners performed together with astonishing confidence and energy, not to mention real skill in many cases. While the singing may have been patchy here and there, for a six-week rehearsal period it was an extraordinary achievement. Beyond criticism, I was brought to tears.

The production held real power, with the subject matter of a hunted ex-prisoner transforming himself and proving more virtuous than most of the so-called 'authorities' resonating clearly enough without needing to be hammered home. The staging was direct, clear, authoritative and certainly not amateur. It was humbling to see the commitment and ability to learn that was demonstrated by the prisoners, who had to return to their cells after the adrenaline of the performance without so much as a celebratory drink. A worse or more depressing come-down I couldn't imagine, as we exited the prison and stared up at the barred, lit windows and into tall atria of stacked gangways and cells.

Two of the performers mentioned, in their brief biographies, that they had played football for the youth teams of high-ranking clubs. Several claimed to have enjoyed maths at school; one had been on remand for 190 days - ruining a life without even having been convicted. And most saddening of all is that, despite their evident capacity for positive work, when each of them leaves their prison record will probably mean that they fail to be even considered for a job as a stage hand or usher, let alone acting on stage. Wandsworth prison - a collection of terrifying Victorian buildings full of the symbolism of punishment - would have been recognisable to Victor Hugo and it is astonishing that for all our advances, the ways we deal with people who break laws is so medieval.

In Alabama I occasionally drove three convicted killers back from their day-release jobs with us to their prison ranch. After years of brutalising imprisonment - which they would never discuss with me - it is astonishing that they had managed not only to keep any humanity, but to be some of the gentlest, kindest people I have ever met. I'm not sure that I would manage to make myself that good after years inside; and I have no mental illness, addictions or major grudges in my worldview. While I would never claim that those who pose a danger to others should be allowed to roam free, surely there has to be a better way - the current system disgraces us all.

Lords reform

2007-03-11T21:53:00.000Z

I am, perhaps predictably, not in favour of the current proposals for reform of the House of Lords. I enjoyed the Lords before they threw out most of the hereditary peers, and as far as I am concerned, the more idiosyncratic and diverse voices that are heard in the process of government and lawmaking, the better.

It is interesting to me how sections of the left-wing press, whom one might have expected to rail against an appointed House and campaign for an elected one, have in fact run articles saying the opposite. I enjoyed this piece by a crossbench peer in the Guardian, as much as reading Tony Benn's inevitable plea. This evening I particularly appreciated Bruce Ackerman's piece in the LRB that cogently sets out the merits of the many forms of second house that exist and could exist.

I also have him to thank for articulating much of the detail of the current bill. I'm sure I'm not alone in not realising that the elected 'Lords' would, in current proposals, be elected for a single fifteen-year term and then not be allowed to stand for a second term? I'm also not at all convinced by the proposal for a partially open list system, which seems to be complicated and also overly political. I see the role of the Lords being to garner a broad selection of voices, not a second party-dominated house, which is the result of the semi-closed list system. Either these reforms should go the whole way, with shorter terms, re-election and open lists, or leave it as it is, perhaps getting rid of of all hereditary peers for the sake of consistency, and with a strengthened, statutory Appointments Commission to rid the system of the cash-for-honours taint.

But of course, these options would leave the Commons vulnerable, when the clear aim is to hobble the Lords so much that it become a mere rubber-stamp. Ironically, the damage done to this Labour administration through the cash-for-honours affair is boosting support for what may be its most significant legacy.

Handbags at dawn

2007-03-08T08:48:00.000Z

My latest WorldChanging post here is about Anya Hindmarch's non-plastic bag, and the organisation behind it We Are What We Do. I'm afraid, being me, I'm not that complimentary. Having said that, one of the guys behind it founded the truly fantastic Community Links project in Canning Town, so I didn't allow myself an all-out rant...

Switzerland

2007-03-05T23:19:00.000Z

I seem to remember Sybille Bedford writing most wonderfully about arriving in Switzerland by car, meeting a friend (I think Martha Gellhorn?) and how the two of them had such wonderful, if slightly disconcerting, times gallivanting around in the country where everything runs just perfectly and there are never any problems. How the hotel staff can do anything for you at any time of day or night; the trains and boats around the lakes run impeccably; food is reliable and solid; fresh air and mountains make you feel oddly sprightly.

It is all, still, quite true. This time we took the sleeper from Paris, arriving early in Zurich, which is of course by far the most civilised and lovely way of travelling. Leaving London after work, time for a croque or sandwich at the Gare de l'Est, a Kronenbourg on board the train brought to you by the charming steward and then arriving in Zurich with time for a coffee and croissant before catching the first of your impeccably punctual trains across country, ending up at the small village where we go to ski. [I say, we go; of course, I never ski-ed before the Boy and am still absolutely terrible at it all.]

We have a lovely apartment; the car starts; the Co-op sells organic veg, local cheese and decent wine; everything is great, but nature doesn't take after the national character in this age of global warming. There is barely an inch of snow anywhere - icy patches that terrify my amateur snow-ploughing legs and patches of grass all over the place. Yet still the whole place is, well, so civilised - no problems anywhere, everything easy and relaxed - that it doesn't matter. When the snow really ran out, we went walking along footpaths that were signed just enough that you are never lost, with the occasional moment where you play a satisfying game of I-Spy to spot the next yellow-painted triangle; not too taxing on the legs but not too easy either; and all planned so that you can walk to the next station or two along the valley and catch a train back after a beer or a meal in the station buffet. The mountains are beautiful and scattered with crocuses and primroses.

Ah, the station buffets, epitome of all the good things about Switzerland. The Boy, I sometimes suspect, would like to live in a Swiss station buffet, or at least next door to one. Hearty good food, rosti and steaks and emince de veau a la zurichoise, locally sourced and cooked simply but excellently - none of the disgusting limp sandwiches and crap coffee of an English station. Always open and welcoming and reliable; no arcade machines or garish lighting, just wood panelling and lace half-curtains. Busy-ish but not too so and right on the platform so you can just get up when you hear the train arrive.

The Boy would also like to have a Swiss woodpile. The tall, long ones where the logs are all exactly the same length and stacked perfectly with no gaps, and have cunning little patterns in them to provide stability. We watched a man tapping the ends of his logs with a hammer to make sure they were all exactly aligned. They are truly masterful pieces of construction that explain everything about why Swiss architects build the way they do.

It is a bit weird, how everything works and even getting a rural bus is completely painless and punctual. The people smile and the villages have facilities for everyone. I know that the Swiss are creepy and bank for those of dubious morals and worse. All that cheese and bourgeois values and plump women throwing back tanned faces as they laugh. But still, for a holiday - it is as relaxing as you could hope for and more. And I know it's a cliche, but I wish the Swiss could run our trains.

London's Climate Change Action Plan

2007-03-05T09:43:00.000Z

[Also something that I put up on DN.]

Last week, Ken launched his Climate Change Action Plan for London. Let's be clear right now, the 60% CO2 reduction by 2025 that has been widely quoted as the "target" is not, in this plan, put forward as an achievable figure without significant nationally implemented change. It is simply the milestone for what London would need to do, in order to reach a Contraction and Convergence-based quota of emissions. He's aiming for a still ambitious figure of 30% through London-only measures.

I still think it is a good plan and have written about it here on WC but, because of this issue about what is realistic to achieve, has also been causing some strong feelings elsewhere in blog-world. I appreciate these sentiments but fundamentally, I think Ken is doing the right thing. Plans like this need to be ambitious - what would the point be of a target that was only what was unambiguously, conservatively achievable? A challenge and a high bar needs to be set up in order to spur both individuals and businesses on and to make the policital case for tougher measures, more funding and tighter controls. It shows us all how small change isn't going to make big things happen. I know Ken is also self-serving in placing environmentalism at the heart of his political platform while not guaranteeing much, but I think it is also smart to challenge others to join him in making it happen, rather than guaranteeing something that either can't be met, or will come across as unambitious and tokenist.

Put more briefly, I can't think of a better way to tackle the issue given the limited powers Ken has. And I think that it behoves all of us who do take this issue seriously to band together around initiatives like this that do have integrity, rather than to shoot them down.

Chicago, Bruce Mau, David Adjaye

2007-03-05T09:25:00.000Z

[I posted this over at DN but thought it might be interesting to some people over here, too...]

I've been listening to the podcast of Bruce Mau talking to David Adjaye as part of Artangel's talks series around Longplayer. An interesting bit was about Chicago and Mayor Daley's fantastically interesting initiatives. Apparently Daley takes an artist to meetings with him where he has to make big decisions because "artists see things differently and see things that I don't." He's also insisting that from next year, all new buildings in the city have to be LEED (American equivalent of BREEAM) certified.

It has to be said that most of the talking is done by Mau, which pretty much figures, as Adjaye is a very good designer but doesn't have many verbally expressed opinions. I've met Mau (he even offered me a job although I didn't end up taking it) and one thing he is good at is talking. He is an excellent designer-thinker of, in a sense, the first generation of "designer" being a much broader term, and retains much more clear-sightedness than much of the design-based thinking that has come after him. He immediately picked up on the fact that the Idea Stores don't have bookshops: why? He isn't quite as blunt to Adjaye, but it is rather ridiculous. You could use the Idea Store computers to order online from Amazon but can't pick up a book or a magazine right there.

This isn't something that Adjaye had any potential to influence through the way that he interprets his position as a designer - he concentrates on physical typology and image. But Mau immediately leaps in on issues like that and puts them centre stage as part of what he sees as doing his job. Mau also says that he finds the idea of an 'architect' ridiculous. He calls design "an entrepreneurial model for thinking", when talking about the projects he does that aren't about objects, and cautions "if you are going to do that kind of work, your methodology has to be more robust than less". This is where a lot of the second-generation "broad designers" fall down, to me. Their methodologies become fantastically complex, which to me is the opposite of robustness. You can understand how Mau works in a sentence or two, but it is tested to a degree where it doesn't fall down.

In the kitchen

2007-02-15T20:41:00.000Z

Some of you might remember my sadly neglected food blog, which was initially titled 'Kitchen Fascist', a label that the boy had given me for my bossiness in the kitchen and insistence on very particular ways of doing things. So I read this and found a new label for myself - "alpha cook". Read and laugh, or weep, depending. I'm just glad I buck the trend in that article by being a female alpha, not a male one.

I'm off on holiday for a week. See y'all.

Joining the herd

2007-02-13T12:57:00.000Z

OK. I resisted it for a really long time. But now I've given in to myspace and can be found, currently looking like Billy No-Mates, here. I really hate having something owned by Murdoch owning stuff about me, but in pursuit of my alternative career path as a hillbillly fiddle player (someone, make me a star, please!) I've gone and done it. Please can you add me to your friends, though, so I don't look so sad and lonely...

Amish-built modular homes

2007-02-12T22:51:00.000Z

Sadly they are neither eighteenth-century in style, nor zippy modernist masterpieces, but nonetheless, I thought this article on how an Amish family makes ranch-style modular homes without using electricity, computers, phones or even billing customers until the house is done, was quite amazing.

London Pedestrian Map

2007-02-07T14:40:00.000Z

Via diamond geezer, I found this current Space Sytax project for a London pedestrian route map. AS DG says, London isn't always that hard to navigate on foot, and the Underground map means plenty of non-Londoners have a warped sense of geography and proximity, so at first sight this seems like a great idea. When I look at it, however, it struck me that this really isn't the answer. Well, an answer maybe - but what Space Syntax have produced - through an entirely logical methodology - is essentially just a very simplified version of a street map with only the main roads marked. There is the addition of some park paths and the riverside walkways, but apart from that, it implies that the easiest walking route from Marble Arch to Holborn is along Oxford Street, and so on.

These routes are indeed the most direct, and currently most people do walk along main roads, but that doesn't always make these the best routes. For a start, they aren't quicker, because they are so crowded, and if you are elderly, disabled, or with a pushchair, they are virtually unnavigable. You would be better to duck up and along Wigmore Street than go along Oxford St, for example. Secondly, the air pollution of all those cars isn't great, either. Thirdly, by only highlighting what are essentially the very simplest routes around town, the map isn't showing what you really want to know on foot - how to go diagonally from, say, Kings Cross to the British Museum. Sticking to the main roads is not the most time-efficient route for this. Space Syntax are right when they say that "people tend to choose simpler, more accessible routes"; but this only increases pedestrian congenstion along these routes. Couldn't we - like the cycle route maps - map the easy back routes (that, like Wigmore Street, are often almost as simple as the main roads), the pedestrian-only footpaths, the fume-free alternatives?

I love walking around London and go everywhere by foot if it is within a half-hour walk (and frequently, further.) During this I have found back-routes, short-cuts, alleys that do actually lead somewhere useful, flights of steps and useful tunnels. Like many similar striders, I walk fast and almost obsessively try to trace the shortest possible route from A to B. I would love to have a map that is maybe simpler than some of my tortuous routes but also allows people to find that neat route from, say, Liverpool Street to Farringdon via the Barbican and Charterhouse Square, Bloomsbury to Angel via Lloyd Baker St and the postmen's pub, or how, as in DG's example to get from Covent Garden to Temple. Well, I will have to wait until I make as much money as SS to have time for that project.

VAT rage

2007-02-03T16:31:00.000Z

For my sins, I have had to register myself for VAT as a self-employed person. All very well, except that it takes a hugely long time for the registration to process. Finally, yesterday I got it through and with it, a CD called 'Getting started in VAT for small businesses'. Great, I thought, that'll be really useful for me as I don't really know much about VAT accounting. So I put it into my laptop, and what do I find?

Our great government buereaucracy seems to have forgotten that some people use Macs. The damn thing just has a Windows-compatible .exe file. I can't really believe it: I live in a functioning democracy which discriminates against Mac users, and the people at HM Customs and Excise are smart enough to figure out all sorts of difficult math problems, yet hire ICT marketing guys who don't know about Macs. I pity all small businesses who work in design, media, music. Back to the unintelligible online guides it is; don't blame me if I get my accounting wrong.

Getting even

2007-01-31T15:29:00.000Z

Silvio Berlusconi's wife has written a public letter to the newspaper asking her husband to apologise to her for chatting up other women at a recent event, "not having received one privately". Go girl!

Though I'm not sure I would really advise marrying Berlusconi in the first place. But apparently in a recent interview he praised her for being "lenient"; I'm not sure he will now feel the same way.

WorldChanging posts

2007-01-30T10:29:00.000Z

I have a couple of new things on WC - belated, I know.

Here is the write-up of when I met Mark Shorrock, CEO of the Low Carbon Accelerator investment fund. I have to say I found his energy totally inspiring and had a bit of a reality distortion field moment. Luckily it's worn off and I can be a bit more measured!

And here's a quick piece on Zedfactory's Jubilee Wharf in Cornwall - an example of what every town probably needs.

Pallant House

2007-01-29T19:36:00.000Z

We went down to Pallant House in Chichester last weekend for the opening of their new exhibition of William Roberts paintings, and to snoop around their new wing, designed by Long & Kentish with MJ Long's life partner Colin St John Wilson as a collaborator. Sandy Wilson, as he is universally known, is best known as the architect of the British Library, a magum opus that took up virtually his whole working career. He recently donated his fantastic 20th century British art collection to Pallant House, and the new wing is great, with a lovely courtyard cafe.

Pallant House has a really interesting history, founded as a gallery when the Dean of the cathedral donated his collection to the city and demanded that they house it in a rather magnificent Queen Anne town house right in the centre. Now about three times larger than the original house, it has an impressively serious collection and programme, really positioning itself as a resource for the town and truthfully rivalling many more metropolitan institutions. It has a proper library and education programme and, in a lovely touch, the reserve collection is shown publicly, hung on utilitarian rails around the walls of the lecture room.

It is here that one finds the subject of my photo: a wonderfully eccentric series of architectural models of the gallery, filled with miniature works of art. Their history is peculiar: in 1934 an Sydney Burney, an art dealer and patron, wanted to raise funds for the blind, and decided to create a mini museum in which mini works of art by artists of the day should be exhibited. The result, a scale model interior stocked with little pictures and little sculptures, would be placed on public display. He managed to persuade the likes of Paul Nash, Henry Moore, Augustus John and Barbara Hepworth to contribute work and the end results are absolutely enchanting with some genuine miniature masterpieces.

What is particuarly sweet is that, to surprise St John Wilson, Pallant House commissioned new models, at the same scale, of some of the rooms in the new wing and stocked them with new miniature artworks from some of the artists in his collection. I can't really think of a more touching tribute to the man and his contribution to Chichester.

Play: The Atheist

2007-01-18T11:50:00.000Z

Last night I went to a preview of The Atheist, here on its UK premiere after having been performed off-Broadway. Excellent, rhythmic writing from Ronan Noone, excellent one-man performance from Ben Porter, directed by my old friend Ari Edelson. But despite the connection, definitely worth seeing.

It's the self-told story of a tabloid journalist in the States, whose fierce lust for fame and rejection of God bring - well, is it amorality? The post-show Q&A was good on this, topical in these days of the Big Brother controversy. Particularly when the writer (who lives in the States) told a great story of switching on the TV late at night in the friends' flat he is staying in here, to see grainy, dark pictures of two girls snuggling up together and thought his play had come to life. I won't tell you more in fear of spoilers.

Big Brother is watching us

2007-01-17T14:01:00.000Z

Every series of BB has impacted on the question of bullying, with claiming past bullying having been virtually a calling card of participants. Jade Goody even represented a bullying charity until they dropped her this week. But the real nature of bullying, discrimination and the group mentality that underlies them has never been examined in such detail as now, when white female contestants are accused of racist bullying of the Bollywood star Shilpa Shetty.

India's foreign ministry is probing the allegations and likely to make an official statement to the UK, while Gordon Brown is currently on an official visit to the country. There are reports of effigies being burnt on the streets and Bollywood filmmaker Mahesh Bhatt is quoted by Reuters as saying "What is happening on Big Brother is just holding the mirror to the western society. This is the real, discriminating face of the West you can see on the streets of London or New York." The racism row has boosted flagging ratings by a million viewers. Motions have been called in Parliament and Tony Blair has been forced to comment.

As the Guardian points out, racism in the infamous House is nothing new. But this systematic, group bullying has certainly taken it to a new level, and by doing nothing, Channel 4 are perceived to condone it as part of the goldfish bowl concept. Perhaps this is right: let it go far enough that on exit, guilty housemates can be hauled up in court on the Race Relations act? Teddy Sheringham's beauty queen lover? (It seems that C4 have now given her a warning, so this is now unlikely to happen.) I would like to see West Ham fans react to that: and they will probably defend her.

Because unfortunately it is true that a mirror is put up to our society. We are all a little bit racist, as the satirical musical Avenue Q put it. We are herd animals, grouping together, finding patterns, genetically programmed to notice differences and nurtured in a culture that can never become colour-blind, or class-blind. But unlike that song, which sent up our differences, and therefore sensitized us to them, we haven't learnt to deal with this fact of humanity in a positive way: by pretending it doesn't exist we repress it, and react with outrage if someone dares to suggest that it still exists.

I just wish that instead of manifesting itself in violence, threats and riots, we could, for once, have an honest examination of our racist feelings. But that is hoping too much of a country which creates celebrities out of monsters like the Goody mother and daughter, and that creates those monsters in the first place, through our appalling approach to sink estates, victim to our class 'racism', no matter what the political rhetoric says.

Serpentine 2007

2007-01-16T22:56:00.000Z

Apparently it is Frei Otto for the next pavilion. But I was a bit surprise by this as although technically it may be his first project in the UK (all the pavilions are done by those who have never built here before) he has actually done a building in Britain - the workshop at Hooke Park, formerly John Makepeace's wood research campus in Dorset and now belonging to the AA.

He collaborated with ABK and Buro Happold to create the Workshop, which experiments with bending greenwood and carrying loads across large spans on small-diameter roundwood beams, and the Refectory, which is meant as a prototype for a house, in which the structure hangs like a tent on four A-frames. But the Workshop is definitely considered one of his important works.

Still I'm a big fan of his experimental and construction-led approach, so I can't wait. Especially after the downer of Rem's attempt last year.

Singing

2007-01-16T22:49:00.000Z

Yet again, in band practice this evening I was asked if, really, wouldn't I sing just a bit? I answered, as I always do, that no, I have a voice like a crow and haven't sung in public since I was around 11 and in the school carol service.

But singing is in the news rather a lot at the moment, what with funding announced specifically to get kids in schools to sing more. And as this commentator says, why stop there? don't we all like singing, secretly, even if we think we are terrible at it? It is relaxing, cathartic, healthy.

I'm sure one of the reasons I love going to the Arsenal is because I get to sing at the top of my voice with lots of other people and no-one worries about their vocal qualities. As Liverpudlians will say there is no greater sound than the Kop choir singing 'You will never walk alone', I will claim there is nothing that equals the Arsenal 'library' suddenly roaring to life as a chant starts up and ripples round the ground until in seconds the whole place is magnetically alive with sound.

And even in my own home, if there is no-one around, I will attempt to pathetically sing a few notes along to the guitar I am currently trying to relearn or, even worse, to my guilty musical pleasure of early Britney Spears, to the torture of the boy. Yet put me in a karaoke-like situation and I run a mile, let alone on stage where I stubbornly stay mute.

There have already been threats by the band to force me to get over it. I'm terrified, but somehow secretly, I can't wait.

America's poverty

2007-01-16T10:01:00.000Z

This article (on the generally patchy Comment is free 'blog' - 5000 word pieces are NOT blog posts, guys) addresses the massive and hidden poverty of the USA, which I saw first-hand and was shocked by in Alabama.

Apparently around 25m Americans are dependent on charity food banks to stop them literally going hungry, and a further 13m are going hungry and aren't yet plugged into any support network. This being the States, of course there is no state help for the poor. The federal minimum wage is still stuck at $5.15 an hour, as it has been for the last ten years, meaning that if you worked full-time you would still end up with less than $10,000 a year.

The degrees of poverty that exist in the States are truly shocking - in Alabama, not only the traps of low wages, disability and ill health, but shanty town housing of shacks with no sewage systems, resembling more the photos of Africa than what you would expect of the world's richest nation. Indeed, at one point early on in The Last King of Scotland, when a packed, rickety bus pulled up in a small Ugandan town, I whispered to the boy that it looked just like Greensboro Depot St.

Soviet bus-stops

2007-01-15T09:22:00.000Z

As the author of this photo series says "The roadside bus stop serves a simple purpose – to show where the bus will stop and to provide some comfort and shelter for waiting passengers. One would think that the Soviets would have come up with one universal design for this community structure – simple, functional and cheap to mass produce." But no: he shows a series of fantastical, figurative and folly-like designs from all over the former Soviet Union, some of which look like first-year architecture projects, and some of which like small temples.

Proper Education

2007-01-15T09:13:00.000Z

This video of DJ Eric Prydz's remix of Pink Floyd's track Another Brick in the Wall is doing the rounds: chiefly because of its loud-and-clear environmental message. He says a bit about his ethics and ideas here in an interview.

Chinese single men

2007-01-12T15:24:00.000Z

Extraordinary to read today that by 2020 China will have around 30 million more men of marriageable age than women. According to the State Population and Family Planning Commission this may lead to social instability, which seems to be an understatement.

The mind only boggles at 30 million single men running around and what that will result in.

Around 118 boys are born for every 100 girls in China at the moment. And the number of 60-year-olds and over will jump from the current 143 million to 430 million by 2040, 30% of the total population.

Apple love/hate

2007-01-09T22:32:00.000Z

Of course, it had to happen this way - because it always does. Whenever I buy a new gadget, it always seems to be just before MacWorld, when Apple brings out something that makes me immediately want to throw all my money at them and buy another one.

So I bought a new iPod to replace my old broke one, and I went freelance and celebrated by getting myself a BlackBerry (ugh, I know). So this was therefore preordained to be the year when all those iPhone rumours really came true at MacWorld - and they did.

And I am a slave to Apple, but I love it and want it now. IT IS PERFECT. When can I give you my money, Steve? does it work in the UK?

Phew. It won't be out in Europe till the last quarter of this year. Gives me time to save up and, erm, enjoy my crap BlackBerry glitches and six-month contract lock-in...

Losing my (t)virginity

2007-01-08T23:51:00.000Z

I've never, ever had a functioning television set in a house I have lived in. Until tonight when a non-functioning one, that the boy brought with him when he moved in, finally got an aerial. I watched...a few minutes of a grim C4 Dispatches from Afghanistan (some macho reporter going out with the troops) and, of course, Celebrity Big Brother.

I am pleased to report that the latter was phenomenally boring, so there is no risk of me getting hooked. Unfortunately, my TV-less existence had already got me hooked on 'watching' BB on the internet, via the Channel 4 site and, of course, the forums on DigitalSpy, source of all good gossip, much funnier than watching it in real life, and with 'WHATM' (What's Happening At The Moment) threads that are kept up to date by some dangerously committed subscription viewers. Compared to the DS banter, the TV show (what? I can't fast-forward the adverts?) was dull. And generally, YouTube definitely wins out due to lack of adverts and capacity to press 'pause' or 'save' when you feel like it.

But YouTube doesn't have Match of the Day, and we love the Arsenal (we do!) so, to please the boy (and, alright, me too) we now have functioning TV.

RIP. Parents, I'm sorry.

Worth reading

2007-01-07T18:24:00.000Z

I've been intermittently pressing 'refresh' on the annual discussion at the Well between writer and self-styled "literal, no-kidding
'Visionary'" Bruce Sterling and Jon Lebkowsky (WorldChanging guru among other hats) about what the new year holds.

A bit like eavesdropping on a really interesting conversation at the table next to you, it is raising some provocative points.

Christmas thoughts

2006-12-26T11:53:00.000Z

This time last year, I made a resolution to blog more here. It didn't happen. This year I'm going to try a bit better, and hopefully this will be aided by my recent decision to go back to a freelance lifestyle, after a year of full-time work as GPA's deputy director. I'm still working 2 days a week with them, as an Associate, but also branching out to take on new projects and gain the flexibility to pursue my own interests a little more.

It definitely feels like the right decision so far, with already some interesting projects on the go, and more in the offing for the New Year. But most importantly, if I can spend a day a week in the London Library writing and reading, that would revolutionise my life.

Anyway, happy holidays to everyone, hope you all have full bellies, and see y'all in the New Year!

PS: Gig alert! We are playing at the Apple Tree in Clerkenwell on Jan 6th! come along...

Diarise: Ritzy Brixton, 22nd Dec

2006-12-05T17:49:00.000Z

I actually played another gig in Camden on Sunday but it was a bit late notice...however here's another golden opportunity to come hear the Coal Porters with twin fiddling action from their original and best fiddler Gemma, plus the rather amateur moi, at the lovely Ritzy Cinema bar on the 22nd December.

And in other related news, I gave in and ordered a new iPod...

Back fiddlin'

2006-11-24T11:17:00.000Z

Did my first bluegrass gig on English soil last night, stepping in at the last minute with the thoroughly excellent Coal Porters, headed up by Sid Griffin of Long Ryders fame, who I heard in London on St Patrick's Day last. Had to learn a whole load of their original material from scratch in a couple of days and one rehearsal...and last night we were down in Bristol at the Prom with me casting glances at my crib sheet (Idiot wind...f*** those chord changes...when does my break come...what, now?!? help!!) but nevertheless I did have the best time and I think we all had fun. They have an excellent fiddle player usually in Gemma White so it was truly a privilege to step in.

It felt so good to get back to playing some of that ol' lonesome sound music again...with a bit of ruckus thrown in at the end! Fingers crossed I may get a few more gigs with them in the future, so watch this space. And if any of you have the need for a fiddler, I'm getting back in the scene!

Hanified: iPod

2006-11-20T22:56:00.000Z

The damn thing died. Not immediately after I dropped it on the floor - oh no, it continued to play the track quite happily. But then I tried to skip to another track and a dreadful clicking noise started. It carried on clicking until it ran out of battery. Then if I tried to restart it, the clicking started again.

Hate gadgets. Desperately want a new one. Sod's law will have it die when I actually NEED it to work, when I'm desperately trying to learn a whole bunch of new songs for a last-minute gig I've been asked to play, bringing me onto stage for the first time in a year.

Well - I have resisted temptation only so far: it is on my wishlist, and my unchecked out shopping cart...

Jedi Knights ask for UN recognition

2006-11-15T14:55:00.000Z

In the last census, 390,000 people listed Jedi Knight as their religion, making it the UK's fourth largest belief system. Today they are marking the UN's International Day of Tolerance by asking for them to gain official recognition.

"Like the UN, the Jedi Knights are peacekeepers and we feel we have the basic right to express our religion through wearing our robes, and to be recognised by the national and international community.

"Tolerance is about respecting difference where ever it lies, including other galaxies. Please don't exclude us from your important work. May the Force be with you."

They want the day to be renamed Interstellar Day of Tolerance.

E-petitions

2006-11-15T14:52:00.000Z

The ever fantastic mysociety have come up with another genius project of the sort that you think 'how come no-one did this years ago?'

They've launched the beta of an e-petition site that enables you to launch a petition, email all your friend,s gather electronically verified signatures and then email it off to Downing St all in a few easy clicks. It's all done in partnership with the Prime Minister's office so super-legit and might actually work.

Now I've just got to think of something to petition about...

WorldChanging book

2006-11-08T16:34:00.000Z

Yesterday I received my contributor's copy of the eponymous book from worldchanging.com (where my latest post on on Google Sketch-up is up, btw) and it is humungously exciting. Beautifully designed, packed with authoritative, pithy articles on everything from nanotechnology to urbanism to lightbulbs, it really is the definitive "User's Guide to the 21st Century" as the strapline has it.

And all priced at a very reasonable £24.95 (£16.46 on Amazon, though please support your local bookshop...) so guys, you know what to get all your friends for Christmas! Shameless plug, I know - but with a foreword by Al Gore and rave reviews from the other side of the Atlantic where it is already released, the book speaks for itself. Out officially on the 24th November in the UK.

Kinsale Energy Descent Action Plan

2006-10-25T10:17:00.000+01:00

The story of the Kinsale Energy Descent Action Plan is quite amazing - how a tiny town in Ireland could do a groundbreaking piece of work and start weaning itself off oil. I posted about it on WorldChanging here today.

WorldChanging posts

2006-10-23T23:36:00.000+01:00

It occurred to me that I should really be posting up here when I have a piece go up on WorldChanging as y'all might be interested to read them...particularly as I have SO little time right now to blog here in any meaningful way.

So - here's a quick round-up of the stuff I've written up so far. I only post once a fortnight or so and the posts tend to be on the long side (surprise!) but still, I try to think of it as keeping up the journalistic side of the blogging spectrum...

I posted last on Ecoliteracy and the Edible Schoolyard.

Here's a book review of Mayer Hillman's fantastic How we can save the planet. I was surprised that no-one had written it up on WC before, so did the honours.

Here's one on low-carbon policies with reference to what our own dear Ken Livingstone is doing here in London.

And another political one, this time on the growing debate within British politics and how green issues have suddenly gone mainstream.

And finally, my first ever post, which celebrated my father's retirement, on his rather fab warehouse in Suffolk.

Worldchanging meetup

2006-09-22T13:32:00.000+01:00

Late notice I know, but executive editor of Worldchanging.com (where I write nearly as infrequently as here right now!) Alex Steffen is in London at the moment and we're having a meetup of readers, potential writers and anyone else who's curious this Sunday.

We'll be drinking-in-residence at the Crown on Clerkenwell Green from around 2-6, do do come along! Any questions, leave me a comment.

Thames traffic

2006-09-14T17:18:00.000+01:00

A lovely picture of all the boats to pass London Bridge in an hour, in one montage. Apparently the number of passengers transported on the river has gone up by 44% since 1999, to 2.4 million a year. Weirdly, the blogs are all linking to this via the Daily Mail (eugh).

In other news, (hello, sorry for not blogging) I went to Scotland for a week of gorgeous hermit-dom; sailing (into the Atlantic, no less! Needless to say I wasn't actually *doing* the sailing), walking, eating, reading (six books: intellectual nourishment.) I will be off to the Venice Biennale in a few weeks, trying to avoid the crowds and actually enjoy being in Venice. Autumn has come to London with an unexpected Indian summer punctuated by downpours. Arsenal win in Europe and not at home.

Planning in New Orleans, and volunteering in London

2006-08-17T19:49:00.000+01:00

A great post from my mate Lucy on planning post-Katrina and the farce of 'democracy' that it involves. Particularly good on the self-presentation skills of New Urbanist Andres Duany, who skilfully manages to seem like the good guy in comparison to all the rest, despite his backstory of designing pastiche developments exclusively for the white and rich. really worth reading for all interested in 'participation' - it is extreme, but weirdly not that far at all from what happens here in the name of 'community' involvement.

Which brings me onto another good post from Kevin Harris which continues his musings about the real nature of the 'neighbourhood governance' that our government is so keen on. Otherwise, if I was to be more cynical than I'm allowed to be normally, known as 'poor people should get off their asses and help themselves'. Volunteering is a measure of good citizenship, especially if you are a single mother on a sink estate.

"People are exhausted and disillusioned, they feel unsupported, and they can't see anyone coming through to take up the baton." And these are volunteers who choose to get involved, only to have the heft of huge responsibility thrust upon them. A new measure of success according to Gordon Brown is the proportion of local public services that are delivered by 'community' organisations rather than the state.

People with some energy (like myself, I have to say) choose NOT to get involved because they don't want their lives to be taken over by the responsibility. There's got to be a middle way between wanting to be able to influence the way things get run, and being told 'well, if you want it to be better, do it all yourself'.

Unsung landmarks

2006-08-17T19:39:00.000+01:00

I like things to do with identity: at GPA we work on this theme a lot; even to the point of saying maybe it is the basis of our whole approach.

therefore lovely to see the BBC's online survey of Britain's unsung landmarks, as nominated by readers. All the things that don't make it inot tourist brochures, that by some supposed measure of 'value' are 'ordinary', 'ugly' or 'boring' - yet which make us feel that a place is special. Cooling towers, pylons, and fantastic testimony from individuals:

"I love the Runcorn chemical works. When I was a kid we often used to drive past it at night (on our way back from a holiday in Wales). I asked my father what it was - then decided I wanted to be a chemist so that I could work there. Twenty years later I have a degree in chemistry and am on my way to a PhD - all I need now is the job."

Worldchanging posts

2006-07-29T11:32:00.000+01:00

I got asked a while back to start contributing to the fantastic blog WorldChanging - a source of cutting-edge reporting on practical ways to make a greener future, all over the world. Having been shamefully slow to get my act in gear, my first post is up (cheekily doing a bit of family promotion in the process), and keep reading for more to come!

And if anyone has things that they think should be covered on WorldChanging, please drop me a line. And don't forget to check out my other blog at Developing News which is getting updated way more often than this one...which I promise to get better at doing soon.

RIP Syd Barrett

2006-07-12T08:46:00.000+01:00

I only really knew (being the 80s baby that I am) about the story of Syd Barrett from going to see Tom Stoppard's play Rock'n'Roll a few weeks ago, where he plays a central role (although not appearing on stage). How very sad that he's now dead at the age of 60, reclusive in Cambridge as he was in the play. And how strange that he now lives in the play, every night, where two of the characters are almost protectresses of him, and one of them writes prying tabloid headlines about him in that usual heartless way. 'The Piper at the Gates of Dawn' opens the play, sung from the top of a wall in a Cambridge garden by a character presumed to be Syd before the big time hit and haunts the play throughout.

The play is excellent, by the way...

RIP Pimlico School

2006-06-15T13:30:00.000+01:00

The wonderful Pimlico School, the Brutalist building by John Bancroft and the GLC architects, is finally to be demolished. Amazingly, the iconic and seminal building was given a certificate of immunity from being listed by the goverment a few years ago.

It has numerous structural and environmental problems but it really is a superb piece of architecture and I only wish something could be done to save it and renovate it for another lifetime. The campus it creates, the sense of enclosure of the sunken playgrounds yet connection with the streetscape is fantastic. Go visit it now before it disappears.

English summer

2006-06-12T23:29:00.000+01:00

Finally the relaxation begins...a beautiful summer day lying in the long reeds. Why anyone leaves England in the summer I don't know.

RIP Shoreditch station

2006-06-09T14:32:00.000+01:00

My most local and least used tube station, the lovely little Shoreditch, shuts forever tonight. I won't try to pen my own paen to its loveliness, but highly recommend that you read Diamond Geezer's fantastic tribute here. I will miss the few times I would need to use the East London line - a tiny moment of weird tube peacefulness found nowhere else on the network.

Goodbye studenthood

2006-06-09T12:56:00.000+01:00

I'm groggy with sleep, a little sticky in the throat from beer last night, and I have the most humungous pile of domestic tasks to do that have been put off for about two months (cleaning....taking the recycling to the dump...paperwork...bills...answering letters...emails...changing the sheets...mending the missing button on that shirt...)

But it is all over - the anti-climax of my final viva presentation yesterday after too little sleep in a near-deserted department followed by ritual beer. Now, thank the heavens above, I am no longer a student - a position which I have always been terribly unsuited too. I can return to an un-schizophrenic life of 'real' work and rediscover things called Weekends, Evenings and Fun. And I never have to be a student again. Hooray!

For those of you who may be vaguely interested, my thesis project was about rural England (never picking a big subject, me) and railway stations and sustainable zero-carbon development and houses for the people. Community Land trusts farming biomass as the new medieval manors with the same relationship between population size and productivity of land, all with great access to public transport. Thereby reviving agriculture, solving the housing crisis and making a happy shiny green countryside...or something...Interesting lots of research however into land use in the countryside, energy production systems, and low-impact infrastructure design. When I've recovered from the stress, I will try to make a short pamphlet summarising it all and post it up. Right now, however, I'm going to make another cup of tea, enjoy the sunshine...and then take the recycling out.

New Year's Resolutions

2006-05-24T10:12:00.000+01:00

June 9th is my new Jan 1st. Until then as you may have noticed, I'm head down, struggling to breathe under the tide of stress that accompanies trying to finish a thesis project to get my diploma in architecture when I haven't really done any work all year.

After June 9th, I resolve:

To get direct sunlight on my skin every day
To find out if I still have any friends out there
To clean my flat regularly and not live like a pig
To go to art galleries and cultural events
To blog regularly again (isn't this the 21st century equivalent of saying 'this year I promise to write my diary every day'?)
To cook dinner at least three times a week
To eat breakfast at home rather than paying money for crap
To be nicer to my boyfriend
To read books
Never to go back to architecture school again.

Election day

2006-05-04T08:47:00.000+01:00

My fellow Tower Hamlets-blogger and Arsenal fan Diamond Geezer puts it much better than I can:

Who'd want to live in one of the poorest boroughs in the country? Well, me for a start. But there are deep-seated problems here regarding poverty, community services and unemployment, so any local council has its work cut out trying to give the poorest residents a leg-up. The Liberals ran the borough back in the early 90s, while more recently Labour has had overall control. But this may not be the case by tomorrow morning. Come daybreak tomorrow the Respect Party may have wrested power via the ballot box, rather like their party's leader managed in the General Election last year. Yet again Tower Hamlets risks a major electoral upset, and I face living in a political experiment.

I had to leave the house at 6am this morning so didn't get to vote then. Hopefully I'll be back in time to cast a vote against Galloway - but for whom? I'm not even sure I know who my local councillor is. I think they're Lib Dem. I have had a few desultory leaflets through my door but absolutely no-one has attempted to canvas me. Diamond Geezer says that a lot of effort has gone into canvassing Shadwell ward. Well, I can tell him that little ol' me in Weavers hasn't had a sniff of a pollster.

Is it because I don't have an Asian surname? I wonder - the battle for votes sees Respect trying to canvas the Muslim vote despite Galloway's repulsive semi-naked antics on Big Brother. They don't want me and I don't subscribe to the Socialist Worker, although my upstairs neighbour's father is a leader of the Stop the War coalition...in Yorkshire. But equally, you'd think that if Labour were trying to hang on for dear life, they might put a little bit of effort into making sure that I even get to the polling station rather than apathetically forgetting my polling card on the hall table.

I've said it before: I like to think of myself as an active citizen. I care about politics, and local politics in particular, and I even get together a petition every now and then. But if no-one cares about my opinions, keeps me informed about what's going on, does the bare minimum that every direct mail marketing company does (or even my own company, which sent out over 1000 newsletters with around 500 hand-written cards last week - for a company of five), then why should I care to keep them in a job by voting? Let the council go to the dogs: except no, I can't do that, as then my rubbish will get collected even less frequently, and if I try to claim my legal rights, I will get stuck in an even longer telephone tree.

Those politicos, they've got us conscientious types in a classic double bind: they don't have to bother engaging with us in the slightest, because no matter how badly we're treated by them, there's always someone worse that could take over, so we still trudge down to the polling station. But 'our' numbers get smaller by the year and there is absolutely no way that they can put the blame on us, the electorate. They are the ones who don't ever bother - don't give me 'voter apathy'.

I've never had a card to tell me who my local councillor is and how to contact them, which should be the first thing to arrive on your doormat when you move house. I have never had a single political party inform me of their activities or policies in anything other than a flyer through the door, not even for a general election. I've never had anyone, ever, canvas me or try to engage me in politics (and pub rants with my friends don't count). And then, they expect us to make an educated decision when we get to the voting booth?

COME ON YOU REDS!!!

2006-04-25T21:52:00.000+01:00

A pretty appalling performance, I gather - because I have been stuck at home listening to Five Live trying desperately to work in preparation for a crit rather than standing in the pub - but Arsenal are through to the finals of the Champions League! Apart from the fact that it nearly killed me from a heart attack at several moments - have ever ninety minutes seemed so long? I'm over the moon. Can't wait. Fate, somehow, was on our side tonight. Perhaps we didn't deserve it - but perhaps given our season, we did in the balance of the god of footballing justice.

Too long without a post here, I am aware - general news has been too much busy-ness before and after a glorious five days in Scotland over Easter picking mussels off the beach and walking the hills. Much to do too over the next month so don't expect too much banter happening on the blog. In the mean time - come on Paris!!

Democracy via daytime TV

2006-04-10T18:46:00.000+01:00

The outcome of the People's Millions was announced today. I blogged about it on the new blog here so go read, if you're interested.

Blair on pledgebank

2006-04-05T08:24:00.000+01:00

I saw this come through and thought it was a hoax. But apparently the pledgebank staff have confirmed with Downing Street that it is not. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, you didn't hear it first on the Today programme, you heard it here: Tony Blair is a pledgebank user (the same website as I used against George 'catlover' Galloway) and has pledged:

"I will become the patron of a London community sports club. I will work with the club over the years as the Olympics approaches in 2012 to support their development and raise their profile but only if 100 other public figures in London will join me in supporting other clubs."

There's something really weird about this, especially as he hasn't publicised it at all (or as far as I've heard - correct me if I'm wrong) so it almost seems destined to fail. Has the man who famously doesn't really have a grasp on email written (on paper or via the interweb) to all his 'public figure' friends to ask them to sign up? Is he trying to undermine pledgbank's street cred (as diamond geezer says the most successful pledge on the site is against ID cards)? What do people think about this?

Flying Egg competition

2006-03-29T18:38:00.000+01:00

Adnams have announced this years Flying Egg competition for Artistic Inventors and Creative Geniuses: The Alternative Clock.

"At Adnams we care about the environment and take pride in encouraging artistic endevour and a strong sense of community. We hold unusual al fresco competitions to explore the link between imagination and functionality and promote the use of recycled materials.

Our challenge is to find exciting and bizarre alternatives to mundance practical objects that no-one ever notices."

It all culminates in a wild town party in Southwold which the Telegraph (not that they would know) said 'rivals the Tate' and involves stilt walkers, lots of food and drink and all sorts of bands. You can also win quite serious prize money - there's £2,750 up for grabs altogether. They even make eggcups with wings that you can buy.

Previous competitions have included the alternative deckchair and weathervane, among others. It all started with a mad scarecrow competition a few years ago and has mushroomed ever since. You get some absolutely wild entries from all over the country and the event certainly deserves to become a much-loved part of a new British folk culture.

Adnams the cow

2006-03-29T18:04:00.000+01:00

Cow saved by beer - no really, Adnams beer (of which I am so proud to be associated by family) was responsible for saving the life of a cow, who has now given birth to a healthy calf named Adnams in honour of the occasion.

Tony Baskett and his wife Lavender, who are both in their seventies and live in Theberton, Suffolk, feared that their cow, Lottie, would die after she developed a stomach problem.

But a vet suggested treating Lottie with yeast - so Mr Baskett fed her Adnams beer from a bottle. "She was very ill and wouldn't eat or drink", said Mrs Baskett today. "The vet who was treating her said she thought that brewers yeast might help cure the problem. She said she had heard of it being used in other countries and in England many years ago. So Tony approached the local pub and they gave him a barrel of Adnams which just had the dregs of the beer in the bottom. We put it in a bottle and pushed the bottle into Lottie's mouth and got it down her that way. After a few months she made a full recovery and now to show how healthy she is she has given birth to a calf, which we have of course named Adnams.

"We've been farming for 48 years here and I have never heard of beer being used like this before. But apparently it was in the old days."

Fantastic. And how very nice of the pub to give away the beer for free. We always knew that Adnams was good stuff - no additives, the very best malt and yeast and Suffolk water - but now we've got proof for sure.

Miliband a gooner?

2006-03-29T14:55:00.000+01:00

Not sure about this revelation here that David Miliband shares my Arsenal faith. I know what the non-gooners will say: typical Arsenal, all establishment and wimpy middle class types. Well, whatever...

But on the same theme, what a result last night! And how frustrating was it for me to be stuck on a delayed plane circling London in one of those dreaded holding patterns, rather than in the pub watching the glorious rout. There was thick cloud and I kept trying to peer through it, knowing that normally you can see Highbury stadium from the sky and hoping that I might be able to glimpse a few coloured shirts on the pitch. No such chance.

Bucharest

2006-03-27T21:15:00.000+01:00

I'm in Bucharest with the British Council doing a regeneration seminar and workshop. We arrived this afternoon and had a fascinating tour around much of the central areas of the city. So many extraordinary and bizarre things, of which Ceaucescu's Palace of the People is perhaps the most grandiose and crazy but by no means the only one. The Palace is the largest buliding in the world after the Pentagon and is situated, alongside its park and associated housing projects designed to shield the older neighbourhoods from sight of a new ceremonial boulevard, on the site of what once housed 40,000 people and 26 churches, alongside two monasteries. The monasteries and a handful of the churches were moved elsewhere, but everything else was razed to the ground, including a football stadium whose remains are visible as the underground ruins of part of the park. The neo-classical Palace was never finished and still is in a state of derelict semi-construction, alongside the Academy building behind it that is also a strange unfinished ruin. Soane might have loved it.

Then there's the plans for the new cathedral, that have changed site five times over the last twenty years without anything having been started; the 'famine circuses' - massive domed food production and sale buildings that were also never finished, intended to placate the starving masses; beautiful tiny churches and delicately ornate Classical apartment buildings and houses; a super-ornate Neoclassical 1930's multi-storey car repair garage complete with moving ar-lifts; and some outstanding (to my eye) early modernist cinemas and apartment blocks. Not to mention what happens when after fifty years of Communist ownership, all sorts of major buildings get 'reclaimed' by their former 'legal' owner.

And much much more. But its now late in this time zone and I've got to be super-fresh for the day's work tomorrow, so I'll have to write more later.

Seen and heard

2006-03-26T17:26:00.000+01:00

Last night, walking home at around 11pm through Spitalfields, I felt particularly detached from the hordes of party-goers at that stage of leaving restuarants and pubs on their way to clubs and the next phase of the night. Turning down Hanbury street, I passed Rossi's cafe - a typical Italian greasy spoon, an institution locally, and normally full of builders from the nearby sites of new skyscrapers.

But last night it was magically lit up, and inside was a scene that could have been from New York or Naples in the 1930s. It must have been Mr Rossi's granddaughter, or niece's birthday - for there she was, aged perhaps thirteen, dressed in a timeless pale pink satin dress with flowered clips in her long dark hair and patent slippers, jumping up and down, playing with several white balloons that floated around her. Around her sat the family - men in jackets, women in colourful fitted dresses, and the children in miniature versions of their parents clothes, joining in their sister or cousin's game. The inside of the cafe glittered - the inlaid panelling and mirrors reflecting the light - and for a minute I certainly wasn't in Saturday-night Spitalfields.

Overheard today, walking down the market, a random yet strangely obvious new cry from the hawkers: 'Kember's home! Norman Kember's home! Anyone seen 'im? Come right along!'

The Man From Below

2006-03-23T17:30:00.000Z

Check out the insanely funny (and slightly worrying) new blog The Man from Below. Longer post on the subject over at the new blog here.

Walking over London Bridge

2006-03-15T21:42:00.000Z

Every day I walk down Bishopsgate and over London Bridge to work, against the tide of people walking the other way into the City. Especially this time of year, I think almost every day of TS Eliot:

Unreal City,
Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,
A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
I had not thought death had undone so many.
Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,
And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.
Flowed up the hill and down King William Street,

It is strange to see so many faces every day and not know any of them - it really is a tide, "so many" - eyes not just on the ground but also staring straight ahead, through me. The bowler hats of Eliot's time are replaced with iPod headphones. People are not so much suited and booted as they used to be - there is a variety in dress even of these City folks, even of the men who do not all have identical overcoats or shoes. Not everyone is going to a bank or legal office any more - I see bodies that betray other professions by their trainers, or jeans, or flower-print dresses.

I try to walk right by the balustrade of the bridge, making my own little left-hand lane against the flow. Everyone has their morning faces on - unspeaking, set yet slack, a state which allows you to see them exactly as they might have been at five years old, or thirteen, or how they may be at seventy-five. Behind the careful, too-fresh make-up and hair, the presentation of an outward face that can allow the person behind to sleep on the train, or battle a hangover or marital row, there is something quite extraordinary in these morning faces, eyes open yet not needing to look at anything along the familiar route. Sometimes someone's mind will be far away, still at home or already at the office, and they will practically walk into me as though I wasn't there.

I can understand why Eliot saw these people as ghosts - this habit of walking over or through me is very like the practice of a ghost, as are the set, motionless faces blank with the residue of sleep and the resignation of going to work.

Return to Akenfield?

2006-03-11T11:38:00.000Z

Our Poet Laureate writes "The faulty connection between town imperatives and country living remains one of the great national issues of our time." He is reviewing Return to Akenfield, the revisiting of the location of Ronald Blythe's seminal book published 35 years ago and documenting, in a precise and unemotional way, the massive changes brought upon the landscape and community of a pair of rural Suffolk villages by the post-war era.

Some of the new book, by the Canadian Craig Taylor, was reproduced in a recent issue of Granta entitled Country Life. I found it less affecting and stringently powerful than the original but to me, the interest was more in the fact that Granta was themed around the countryside, and it seems to me that these issues around the 'faulty connection' are becoming more and more evidently the national issue of our time. Yet the question of our countryside remains the elephant in the room in every discussion about, for example, planning policy, or immigration, or tax, or the aging population. We pretend that if we meet the aim of continuing much as we are, preserving hedgerows and allowing new housing estates to spring up in abandoned quarries where they are unseen and therefore almost do not exist, English life will be as arcadian as our national myths. 'Concreting over the countryside' - the much misused and misleading phrase - sums up all our worst national fears, equivalent to selling the family silver.

Yet as we all know, the arcadia does not exist, and possibly never did; and maybe never should. In rural Norfolk, social services are provided in English and Portuguese because of the number of migrant farm workers living there. The tragedy of the Morecambe cockle pickers was interpreted in the press as not a symptom of a countryside dystopia but in relation to global human trafficking and our immigration laws. No-one really stopped to ask why thirty Chinese were brought to a beautiful English county and asked to harvest our crops.

These issues are sort-of recognised, and mentioned, and made vague reference to in our metropolitan-centred press, but without real rigor or radicalism or the asking of visionary questions. At work, our proposal for the British Pavilion at this year's Venice Biennale was subtitled simply 'What is the countryside for?' - and we came down to the last two, but lost out to a proposal about Sheffield. Architecture schools stick to safe territory of the gritty inner-cities, not the architecture of villages or fields. One issue of Granta and an article by Andrew Motion do not make a national debate. It is almost as though it is too much to actually contemplate that this might be the big issue, that the national psyche-probing that might result would open up an abyss at our collective feet.

I was surprised, in the State of the Cities report that came out this week, to read that only 58% of our population live in cities, after years of reading that around 90% of us live in 'urban areas' - which are defined in a somewhat meaningless way that takes in almost every decent market town. I had thought that one of the justifications used by politicians and the media to dismiss 'rural issues' as irrelevant was this statistic that hardly anyone lived there, that these areas should by rights bow down to the needs of the urban majority. But actually it seems that the balance of rural to urban population is much more equal.

I doubt that this small statistic will suddenly make our political masters sit up and think about the 42% who live in rural areas - a sizeable part of the country, and the proportion would be even greater if the report included Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. But I continue to hope that the elephant in the room will eventually get the notice that it deserves; that the urbanites discover the real radicalism that is present in rural areas, and are forced to question their assumptions about the countryside.

King's Cross approved!

2006-03-10T09:26:00.000Z

After a total of nine hours of committee meetings, Argent's Kings Cross development (on which we have been involved) gained outline planning permission last night with no hitches. Of course this is the first hurdle crossed in the long process before actual buildings start getting built. It's now got to get the nod from Ken and all the section 106 (planning gain) agreements have to be finalised. But huge congratulations to Argent and Roger Madelin, who will now definitely be the hot stars at the MIPIM schmoozefest next week, and we're excited to see what happens next!

(Previous post on this are here and here)

New blog experiment

2006-03-07T17:31:00.000Z

Those of you who aren't interested in planning or regeneration may be happy. I've started a new and experimental blog which aims to fill a gap in British web resources - bringing together all the latest news and comment from all sorts of sources on what's going on in the big bad world of urban (and rural) development. And so I'll stop posting here so much about all that. The new blog's here and very much a work in progress so expect many design changes and updates over the next few weeks. It's meant to be a useful resource for those who do work in the sector but find it hard keeping up with all the news so please leave me a comment to tell me how it could be improved! It may also become a group blog soon so if anyone feels like contributing, let me know. And if no-one finds it useful...well, I'll just stop.

Lucy's on the road

2006-03-06T21:34:00.000Z

My good friend Lucy Begg has started an amazing year, funded by a travel grant from Berkeley, travelling all over the world to investigate the methods and strategies used by young and fringe architectural practices who work in participatory, activist and socially engaged ways. Check out her website Spaces for Action and her blog here. It's an amazing project and much to my own heart - and I was glad to be able to help a tiny bit during the formulation of her plans. I really have Lucy to thank for encouraging me to go to the Rural Studio after she spent a fantastic year - and our many conversations always make me question my own work and raise the bar for what you can do. She's got great energy and is a fantastic designer too...so I'm excited to follow her over this year!

Hopefully, Lucy, you'll make it to London at some point during your travels and I can hear it all from the horse's mouth!

The future of community?

2006-03-05T22:17:00.000Z

Spent my Saturday at the Future of Communities 'festival' at Central St Martins. Why a 'festival', I'm not sure - perhaps to make the idea of a conference on a Saturday more appealing. The event was organised by the Future Cities Project in collaboration with the MA in Creative Design for Narrative Environments at CSM (why a name so begging for a piss-take? what the heck is a 'narrative environment'?) and boasted a mixture of the usual suspects (Geoff Mulgan, last seen giving almost an identical spiel at last week's conference before shrugging me off when I tried to talk to him with more than necessary rudeness), interesting pillars of the academic establishment (Richard Sennett, Saskia Sassen), un-rigorous media types (Jonathan Meades, Jules ) and the kind of male, bolshy, posturing types that unfortunately hang around with a project of the optimistic name of Future Cities. Of whom I have strong opinions (and could write many paragraphs) but I'm not sure how helpful it really is to share these with you.

Anyway, this conference was supposed to be about the future of communities. What 'community' is, whether it's a 'good' thing, if so how to 'create' or 'sustain' it, and how to engage the 'public' themselves in this debate and process of change. Sadly, not much new stuff. Sennett and Saskia Sassen were perceptive, subtle and interesting as always - and the subtlety of what they were trying to say got lost on many of the other panellists and much of the audience, at least those who stuck their hands up to enter the debate. And the debate was almost all hypothetical, lacking real case studies of real places and people that could be analysed, evaluated, discussed and learnt from. What are the models out there that seem to be working on both a conceptual and a practical level?

The elephant in the room, as far as I was concerned, was a point that Sennett, and other critical commentators, make time and again: that of choice. Engagement is all very well if you want to engage, or if you have the time; but who advocates for those who won't or can't? Isn't a lot of this 'double devolution' and 'power to the people' talk actually hugely disenfranchising to those who don't get involved, for whatever reason? And shouldn't, in an ideal world, there be a place - whether within the democratic system of local representatives, or other perceptive and articulate advocates amongst whom I would count artists and other creative critics - for these disparate voices to be heard, and their views to be respected and addressed?

Part of the joy of (certainly urban) living is the choice between anonymity and presence. On a personal level, I care hugely about my local area but I don't want (and don't have the time to) become a local busy-body. I like to be able to be anonymous and to choose where I become more actively engaged, without feeling like through a more passive, spectatorial role my needs will be discounted. I would like to feel that I can express my views more easily (techniques of consultation/engagement that are more thorough and wide-reaching), but also that simply because I don't turn up to the meeting in the town hall, it doesn't mean that those making the decisions discount the fact that there are people like me within their constituency who share a commonality of interest.

Some of this is about better research, and making it count: more thorough local surveying and more active local surveying - literally knocking on doors, rather than waiting for us to pick up our pens or log onto a website. But some is about choosing in whom power lies. I would like to see our elected representatives take seriously the issue of representation and I'm not sure that undermining their power by devolving to largely self-selecting local groups actually makes our governance and public services any more just or inclusive. We should have the right to engage actively - to protest, petition, attend meetings and question our leaders - but I'm not sure that we should have the duty to engage, or risk disenfranchisement. After all, whether I vote or not, I still pay my taxes; whether I have time or not to trek down to the town hall, I still have needs; and many of those who have the greatest needs and strongest local knowledge and views are those who certainly do not have the time to voluntarily spend as activists, in between being a single mother, holding down several jobs, cleaning the house and making time for friends and family.

I might suggest that one way to avoid this, certainly in the field of planning, regeneration and development, is to take a vastly more sensitized approach to what the local means. Do really good research - not just quantitative but qualitative and perceptual, subjective and fine-grain. We do this through not only talking to real people - kids excluded from school, shopkeepers, youth workers - on proper field investigations, but also by commissioning those with the skills and authority to articulate and communicate - artists and writers - to make tangible the aspects of local quality and distinctiveness that don't come up on surveys and statistics. Live in the area - walk the streets and enter its life - and, as I was told on arriving at the Rural Studio, watch and listen carefully - become sensitized to the unsaid and the multiplicity of readings and relationships that exist in a place.

This sounds fluffy, but it means a real and deliverable shift of emphasis. You can pick up on things that have resonance with local people and give them spaces and voice, meaning they are less likely to contest your planning application. You can make sure that new public spaces and buildings don't stand empty after the opening fanfares. You can demonstrably make places safer, more popular, and more valuable in both economic and social terms. And above all, it allows places to be distinctive and characterful, the antidote to the 'anyplace' that everyone from the policy wonks to the man on the street says they hate.

Kings Cross countdown

2006-03-03T13:50:00.001Z

The planning decision on the major development at Kings Cross Central, on which my firm worked, comes this time next week. In advance, we are cheered that the planners report from Camden Council recommends it for approval. In particular, we are very pleased by one comment. They said that it would deliver 'a real step change in the quality of the public realm at King's Cross with high quality and genuinely public new streets and open spaces'. Well, folks, not to beat our own drum too much, but that's all our work. We did the entire public realm strategy, for open spaces, streetscape, play, schools, event spaces, and most crucially, the links and integration with the surrounding areas.

This is the re-submission of the planning application, after the initial submission attracted a lot of criticism. The biggest difference between the first and second versions? I have to say: our work. From the Camden planners website:

"Major changes to the application include:

- more public open space
- new designs for streets and squares
- new health, education, sports and other community facilities
- changes to the road layout and introduction of home zones

All our work. If this gets through (as we hope) next week, I think it proves something: that caring about the public realm is not only a 'nice' thing to do, but actually, is essential for getting planning permission. (And, of course, that we are the people who can do this for you!)

Density (again)

2006-03-03T13:50:00.000Z

More news today in the trade press about the housing density debate. CABE has said, in its response to the PPG3 consultation, that it thinks the national minimum density of 30 dwellings per hectare should be scrapped as it is leading to the development of crap edge-of-settlement housing and too many flats, which doesn't help create a socially mixed community as it attracts too many young couples who move on as soon as they want kids.

I wrote earlier this week about how misguided it is to measure density of occupation in dwellings per hectare as opposed to habitable rooms per hectare, and if we change this, how it would effectively get rid of precisely this problem. But the answer is not to scrap minimum densities, with the return to ecologically unsustainable, sprawling development that this would generally entail.

I would, however, make an exception. If a carbon-neutral development was proposed at less that 100hrh (about the equivalent of 30 dph), it should be allowed through. The reason for this is that I'm currently looking at models of carbon-neutral development for rural areas where energy is generated locally and potentially through means such as biomass rather than wind or solar. This starts to imply interesting new forms of lower density development.

The other point is that we should be much more serious about linking non-city development to public transport. A fundamental justification for density guidelines is to make people drive less. Well, a high-density development miles from a bus stop or train station isn't really going to make people drive less. In the very rural area that I'm looking at for my hypothetical study, there are only six railway stations but the entire new housing quota for the local authority over the next ten years could be accommodated within ten minutes walk of these stations at a density of only around ten homes per hectare. So, in this case, low-density development is highly sustainable.

What's my conclusion? The primary requirement should be a link to public transport. Edge-of-settlement development should not be allowed, even at high density, unless all sites near public transport are used up elsewhere. (This is more radical that it sounds, when you consider that may rural stations are in the middle of nowhere, not in the centre of towns.) Secondly, in rural areas, be carbon-neutral. Thirdly, go to hrh, not dph, to take away the excuses that developers currently have for poor quality design and ethic-less planning. Then lets see where that gets us.

Housing density

2006-02-27T15:52:00.000Z

Again...another week, another report. This time its the Policy Exchange promoting some seriously muddled thinking about family housing in cities and a version of planning gain levy which would apparently promote more family housing rather than 'too dense' flats, save our green spaces and make 'communities' roll over with happiness every time a developer wanted to build something in their area, rather than standing up and complaining as they apparently do all the time now.

There are two linked themes in here - the meaning of 'density' and how to provide a good urban environment for families. These themes cropped up a month or two ago in the ippr report on city centre living that concluded that city centres shouldn't try to accommodate families, and the myriad other attacks on 'density' that complain that the government's new targets are making our cities crammed and unsustainable, forcing families out. And many other recent pieces of commentary have criticised the regeneration of our town and city centres into monocultural zones for the young and childless, unwelcoming for families and lacking a real sense of community, blaming this on the culture of density stemming in part from the first urban task force report.

In a way, there's a point here. The way that local and national government is now measuring density does tilt the market towards one- and two-bed flats, because they insist on measuring in dwellings per hectare (dph), rather than habitable rooms per hectare (hrh). This, quite honestly, is stupid, because you can more profitably meet a target of, say, 200 dph, by building one bedroom flats than by building three bedroom homes, so the result is a monocultural population of transient 'first time buyers' who move on after three years and who stimulate demand for bars, clubs and clothes stores, rather than the more mixed economy and generous public realm demanded by families. Whereas, if you had a target of 400 hrh, it would be quite possible to meet this in four bedroom houses or flats.

This plays into the hands of the lobby that is trying to create a 'backlash against density' by citing the monothematic nature of a lot of new 'dense' development. They are using the facts to suit their own ends, of course, and to lobby for a deregulation of land use. The likes of CPRE, in their strange confluence of interests with radical urbanists and Richard Rogers, keep arguing for density and brownfield development. But they should keep their arguments valid and cut off the 'anti-density' lobby at its root by pushing for this fundamental change in the way density gets measured in this country.

The London Plan tries to do so by giving guidelines for both dph and hrh, but doesn't really go far enough and still makes a presumption for higher densities meaning more, smaller dwellings by giving guidelines for the number of habitable rooms per dwelling that should be achieved for different zones - less for the 'denser' areas near good transport, and larger dwellings for the areas further out. Though who needs to live closer to a public transport node - a mother juggling pushchairs, shopping and children, or a single young person with a handbag or briefcase?

The other point - how to provide family-friendly cities - is more loaded with assumptions. The first persistent myth is that families can't live happily at 'high' densities. To debunk which, just look at the fantastic family housing in New York, Paris or even most of London. Design is the issue - providing generous internal and external spaces, not microflats, with decent balconies, roof gardens, communal gardens, pavements to play on as Jane Jacobs observed in the 1970s. The second issue is the quality of the public realm and of the local social infrastructure. Again, generosity and space for pleasure: greenery, wide pavements, pocket parks, corner playgrounds, and schools, corner shops, activities that include all ages, space just to wander around and enjoy watching city life go by. This is the real issue - all of this costs money, of course, and local authorities simply find it easier, in effect, to designate areas child-free zones and not to have to worry about schools, nurseries, doctors and playgrounds. Section 106 - the current version of 'planning gain' that developers are meant to pay - goes mostly into grotty social housing (again, not generally for families despite the affordability of family housing being much a much greater issue) built in the most inaccessible corners of sites or neighbourhoods, not into infrastructure that might actually improve quality of life.

This is the issue that the Policy Exchange paper tries to address, but in fact muddles through in a horrible way. It proposes that the 'market' says that families would rather live in suburban-style housing, but that developers are stopped from building on greenfield sites and instead build on the "allotments, playing fields, parks and gardens" inside cities (a strange reversal of the 'selling off the playing fields' critique, given the right-wing nature of the PE). So, their deeply illogical conclusion is not that the greenbelt should be loosened up, or that better quality housing should be built inside cities without compromising on public space, but that communities should in effect be bribed not to object to their allotments being replaced by crap microflats, by a planning gain levy on development sites. If anyone can explain how that is logical or desirable, please let me know.

Every time this topic comes up in the office, we groan. One of my directors has four children, lives in a Barbican skyscraper, and is moving to an even more extraordinary city centre flat that she's building for herself practically on Old Street roundabout. She doesn't see any contradiction between her family life and living dead central in a buzzing part of the city. The real problem lies in the lack of investment in the public realm and social infrastructure that mixed family neighbourhoods require. To get this right depends on more bravery on the part of local government, and national (the current proposals for a new kind of planning gain certainly don't achieve this) to demand better quality development that in itself incorporates a decent public realm, rather than just offsetting its inadequacies by putting money into an ill-defined pot; and more commitment to the idea that city neighbourhoods can contain and should provide for both families and 'first-time buyers'. Social infrastructure and the public realm is what creates the 'sustainable communities' that we're meant to be aiming for. It needs to be built into development, not added on or compensated for, when it's lacking.

Equal pay

2006-02-27T15:20:00.000Z

Another day, another damning report with no surprises: a 17% average wage gap between men and women. In fact, men will earn £2.6m over their lifetimes (averaging around £57,000 p.a. if working from 20 to 65) as opposed to women earning £1m (an average of £22,000). Nice.

The depressing thing is that if you go back six years, you get an almost identical report. Nothing changes. And still, we don't get progress on equal paternity and maternity leave. In fact, it seems that the government is going to double women's right to maternity leave - to a year in 2009 - without increasing paternity leave at all. It will stay at two weeks, with the potential for six months unpaid leave only if the mother has returned to work.

Regular readers will know my views on this. It is blatant and institutional discrimination. While we face a bad 'baby gap' that threatens our future economic health, and while other civilised countries find that having decent paternity leave reaps real benefits, and a survey found that 80% of UK dads would be happy to care for their babies if only they had the chance, what is our government doing by sanctioning Victorian views on the place of women?

The fact is, as I bang on about time and time again, the pay gap will only get better if men and women are treated equally when they have kids. It should be equally 'risky' for an employer to take on a man approaching child-bearing age as it is to take on a woman. Then they will get equal chances of promotion and responsibility. All the other stuff - equal pay reviews, better careers advice, etc is important but the studies show time and time again that the big pay gap comes with kids and that is absolutely unacceptable.

I think maybe it's time for another campaign...Give us twelve months maternity leave that can be split between the parents as the parents wish. You don't have to force the man to take leave - but you shouldn't force the woman to either. Then let the arguments start erupting inside all those homes, as women discover what 'traditional' men they have married...and if one still finds that all the men go back to work while the women stay at home, well, blame the sisterhood for not having the guts to fight it out. But at least level the playing field first.

Boring conferences

2006-02-25T11:42:00.000Z

I was forced to spend a day this week, as an experiment in whether it was a useful thing to do more often, at a terrifically dull conference at Earl's Court. Two things struck me:

a) What a rip-off! at around £250 per delegate, someone is making a lot of money. All to watch a few big-wigs give the same old speech as they always give, answer a couple of questions and then run off before you get the chance to buttonhole them yourselves or network at all; and then hear a lot of non-big-wigs ramble on with bad powerpoints about their latest fantastically awful projects; partake of crap catering; half-heartedly try to network despite the total lack of interesting people there or a decent way to meet them; and wander around a load of crap stands telling you nothing at all.

b) Everyone always says the same thing. Its voting for apple-pie and motherhood - we all want 'sustainable' 'communities', 'design quality', economic 'diversity', 'creativity', 'partnership working', etc., etc. Why is that all that people talk about, whether big-wig or not, at these things? What we actually need to be taught or at least discussing is how to get there. And that's where everyone will suddenly find that they either haven't a clue or disagree violently with each other. Is the first step in the process to send out a questionnaire to every local citizen or to employ a large economic consultant to do a needs assessment? Is it to meet with an official from the ODPM, or the local council, or DEFRA, or the local soup kitchen? How, in practical steps, do you actually work in partnership so that you get creative results and not another bland talking shop? Is 'design quality' about nautically-themed apartment blocks or Dutch minimalism, design codes, young architects or established volume contractors? Who decides?

These are the questions that we desperately need answers to - many answers as there is no one solution. There are brains out there who have been working on these things. Why, rather than presenting yet another lookalike 'strategy' for 'double devolution' (this weeks buzzword) or worse, can't they present the nuts and bolts of what they actually did during the last three years of their 'project', how it worked in detail. Then, maybe the boring officer-level types who attend these conferences might at least be able to learn something useful.

The problem is, of course, that most of these people have actually done nothing at all. They've written the strategies but not yet carried them out. And they keep avoiding carrying them out by commissioning yet more reports, studies, business plans, scared of making the leap into actually doing something radical so watering down the lofty rhetoric by the mundanity of the detail. What a waste of public money. How great for the consultancy industry (though, sadly not for consultants like us who keep the radicalism in and try to act as though things might actually happen, scaring off risk-averse clients) and what a massive tragedy for our citizens.

Winning

2006-02-21T23:25:00.000Z

What more exquisite pleasure than becoming the first English team to ever beat Real Madrid at home. I hadn't dared hope; and by the looks of things, neither had the BBC or the Guardian who both gave limp and somewhat perplexed early reviews to the game.

I could have been there - but my last minute ticket offer conflicted with meetings (not the equal of a date with Real, but necessary to attend) and I credit our win with my absence, having the feeling that my intense jealousy at the boy's attendance at the match would entail even greater jealousy at him witnessing us doing London proud. But, to counter the early reviews, it wasn't just about Thierry. The whole team put in exceptional performances, full of commitment. The number of tackles won, headers reached at the risk of injury, balls booted bravely out of play when needed - our captain should surely now sign a new contract, seeing the passion that can be ignited within the team when he gives them a chance. It should also show him that we play our best when he also commits rather than spending his time raising his hands in frustration and giving Gallic 'bouf's to his teammates whenever a pass goes awry.

But enough of the dissection; we are all on Cloud Nine. This is what football is all about; and I still think I'm dreaming.

Kerala

2006-02-20T22:27:00.000Z

Apologies again for lack of posts. I had a lovely break in Kerala last week, far from emails, computers, English grey February days. It was my first time in the most 'equitable' state in India, famed for its successful war against the caste system, its 91% literacy rate, welfare system and supposed equality of women, thanks to its communist government - the first democratically elected one in the world, dating to 1957.

What I saw of Kerala certainly stood out against my previous brief visit to Delhi and Ahmedabad. Granted, this time I was a tourist pure and simple, not seeking out slum dwellers or sprawling rubbish dumps. But nevertheless, I saw less beggars, almost no street children and plenty of, if not wealthy, at least decently living people, even on the bus journey through the outskirts of the city of Cochin where you might expect to see endless slums and wretched poverty.

We saw the famous, beautiful and ingenious Chinese fishing nets, dipping back and forth slowly on the shore, rarely seeming to catch anything more than a handful of sardines, being snapped by slightly flaccid Western tourists living out their somewhat hippy dreams from the late 1960s in a way commensurate to their entry into the mainstream of holidaying society. We watched sunsets on the beach alongside Keralans who all seem to come out too at that time of day, to perch on rocks, eating twists of roasted nuts, watching the sun disappear into the haze of the horizon. And the extraordinary synagogue, made famous by Salman Rushdie in The Moors Last Sigh, the remnant of a Jewish community dating back perhaps to Babylonian times and certainly to the first century AD, and now reduced to a mere four families thanks to the incentives to emigrate from the Israeli government. Its hand-painted Chinese tiles, dating to 1100, and strange trompe l'oeil ceiling were magical and odd, the mixture of the European and the Indian something very particular to Kerala as a whole.

Elsewhere, old Portuguese churches - grand and large in the cities, similar in atmosphere to some remote Andalucian or southern Italian churches with their naive, gaudily painted statuary bleeding drops of lurid red paint against impossibly pink skin. In the backwaters, where we spent an extraordinary three days in a watery world, they are smaller, even more naive, thick with the accumulated layers of slightly blue-tinted whitewash that gives them a somewhat papier-mache air, like the effigies that get burnt as ceremonial fireworks in Mexico, similarly garlanded with flowers. Adorable nuns and impossible cute schoolchildren murmur lessons behind barred windows or traipse along the dusty paths in impeccable uniforms. Jesus, on top of a tower or column, carries an umbrella to shade him from the strong sun, as do the nuns.

The backwaters life was extraordinary, eccentric and moving. A completely different form of human life, occupying thin strips of solid land between canals and marshy paddy fields or partially reclaimed swamp, everything dictated by the water. Thin slipper-like canoes seemed almost an extension of the human body. Women (liberated? I don't know) rhythmically slapping their washing on smooth flat stones by the waters edge was a sound that accompanied us everywhere, from dawn till dusk. They stood knee-deep in the canals, saris hitched up, swinging the clothes with a weary accustomed air, sounding like the beavers that I heard in the swampy rivers of Alabama. Or washing metal pots and dishes with a very particular movement unlike how we wash dishes and scooping water up with them to fling into the air.

Men with wider canoes often work fetching mud (for reclaiming land) or sand (for building work) from the bottom of the canals - a human dredging act that looked horrendously taxing, diving down with a basket or metal tray, scooping up mud or sand and rising to tip it into the canoe until it was heavy and the edges only an inch or two above water, when they paddle it to its destination, unload, return and repeat. These mudmen, dressed only a ragged white loincloth, were wiry and, given the pollution of the water (not as bad as the urban watercourses but still the repository for everyone's shit and rubbish) I dreaded for their health - but they always smiled at us, even so.

For some reason, there's a lot of duck farming on the backwaters (again, I dread the inevitable advent of bird flu) with the flocks swimming around or dabbling on the edge of paddy fields like flocks of sheep, crowded together in large herds although not penned in, with seemingly no desire to escape from the crowd. I saw one 'herd' get shepherded by a man in a canoe, gently moving them along to a little ramp leading up from the water which they obediently waddled up and over to the field on the other side. Very strange.

We were floating on one of the ubiquitous 'houseboats' - converted rice barges that ferry tourists around with a driver or two and a cook to cater, luxuriously though simply, to your every whim. Breakfast of fresh pineapple, Keralan steamed rice cakes or eggs and chapatis; lunch of spicy fried fish, a myriad of little vegetable dishes, puffed-up pappadums and rice; tea -time with banana fritters or bean cakes; dinner of fish or meat, maybe a kind of Keralan biryani, occasionally a pudding. It's on the one hand, a horrendously decadent way to travel - you don't need to lift a finger, just lying on the shaded deck reading or watching the world go by, stopping for the odd church, eating and drinking tea. On the other, our boat was also very simple - no TV or radio, no frills, no endless hassling to buy tourist tat from the shops of uncles and brothers or nudging winks about whether we wanted to get drunk on local booze. We stopped by the house of the skipper's aunt one day to drink fresh coconut juice and laugh at jokes in Malayalam that we couldn't understand but still found hilarious, and then our skipper, after serving us our delicious dinner, shyly asked if it would be OK, but he lived just across the water and he wanted to go home to stay the night.

Altogether it was an incredibly beautiful, restful and eye-opening week's break. A different, calmer, more harmonious-seeming (at least, to my untutored eye) India. However, its amazing how quickly that sense of easy well-being can leave you after several hours of airplane airconditioning and the rude shock of cold England. Plus, the boy returned with me and has full-on jetlag after his ten weeks away, so keeps waking up at 4am. Which doesn't exactly do wonders from my state of Zen-like calm...

Market forces

2006-02-05T20:53:00.000Z

Since coming back to Cheshire Street after over a year away, I've noticed a lot of changes on my beloved East End Sunday markets. Actually, they're really quite radical changes - seemingly having altered more in that year than in the three and a half previous years that I've lived in Bethnal Green.

Firstly, you no longer have to get up at 8am to catch the best of the market. It used to be that all the good stuff was gone by 9 (well - all the really good stuff was gone by 6) and the whole market packed up around midday - at least, the bits I loved the most, being the dodgy stolen-goods flea-market super-cheap non-organic veggies and headless dolls bits. Now the whole thing barely kicks off before 10. Well, a few little bits do - but this is really symptomatic of the massive underlying shift in clientele and legality. No longer headless dolls and stolen bikes underneath my windows. No - the police have decided that the market can't happen any further down Cheshire Street than the Carpenters, and certainly no dodgy stolen random crap. That doesn't mean, of course, that people don't still sell the most random things in the more 'legal' part of the market - but it certainly means that if I come back home at 3am on a Sunday morning, there isn't the same throng of early-bird dealers and wheelers starting to stake out the territory, peering at chairs in the gloam to see if they can spot a genuine antique or smoking under the streetlights in that way which makes London still so Dickensian.

And of course, the Carpenters Arms is no longer functional, so one can no more get an 8am pint to sip on the pavement while selling or browsing. And even the posh bit on Brick Lane itself and in Spitalfields - well, I got there the other day around 10 and there was nary a stall to be seen - everyone still unloading their vans. Incredible. It used to be almost unbearably crowded by 10 in the olden days. But now, you can go down at nearly 5pm and its still just about going - the real crush comes around 12-3 or 4 - so strange, and yet I know I haven't really the right to mourn.

Even the cute kooky shops on my street are opening later than they used to. 11am for Labour and Wait and all the rest, when it used to be 10. I'm a late riser so you might think this would suit me, but actually I would rather it still woke me up early, that lovely sound of just people buzzing on the street below, footsteps, no cars, the odd little call-out. I liked getting up earlier to beat the rush - the benefit of being a local - and then retiring to have a coffee or go home when all the outsider trendy crowds arrived. But somehow its just not quite the same, beating the crowds when its still only 10.30. I also liked the fact that people coming from across town had to make that real effort to get up early too, to hunt down the real stuff, the good vintage clothes or stolen old-school cycles. Now - well, its just a little bit too easy. And you don't really find that much good stuff any more, either.

Still, some elements of the illegality survive and change, too. The DVD trade has expanded massively and become an entirely Chinese operation, extremely well-organised, with a man or woman every few yards down Cheshire Street selling porn and children's films, the latest Hollywood blockbusters and the latest Bollywood alongside the latest X-rated girl-on-girl, all 3 for a fiver or some ridiculously low price. When the police arrive they are adept at vanishing, as are the Eastern European cigarette sellers.

But all in all, with the opening of the 'up-market' in the Truman brewery and the decline in the dubious trading down my end, the balance has shifted in favour of more handbags and printed t-shirts, organic pastries and badly-made young designer dresses. And that's even without the next stage of evolution that can be seen in full flow at the far end of Spitalfields, where the stalls have been squeezed out, Norman Foster architecture pushing in, and you get chain crap like Giraffe and (oh, sell-out) Patisserie Valerie catering to Boden-clad professional couples with mewling brats in oversized strollers.

Sigh. I'm such an old codger. But at least, the Mon-Sat market on Bethnal Green Road hasn't changed hardly one bit. I can buy my winkles and spuds undisturbed...

Open your eyes

2006-02-05T20:22:00.000Z

I've been following Go Magazine's campaign to make Sheffield's cooling towers into Britain's biggest public artwork and the other day, I came across their more expanded manifesto for the future of Sheffield. In the clearest possible way, they say exactly the same things that we try to persuade our clients of, whether in Canning Town or Dorset - "If you want a city strategy, all you need to do is open your eyes."

"It seems obvious to us: if you want your city to be famous, you have to make it different to other places. The greenery, the music, the friendliness: these make it different to other cities. So it's these that could draw people to Sheffield, make it a place to visit, an individual city...A strategy for the city has to be based on these things. It's the only way to make Sheffield stand out. All the brilliant plus points of Sheffield that you and I see every day, the things that make us love our city, brought to the fore instead of brushed under the carpets. This city could be amazing."

Their strategy is based on a few simple things based in the intrinsic character of Sheffield - Green City, Music City, Modern City, Punk City. The language that they are using is much more up-front, ballsy and, dare I say, effective than the kind of language that we use at work, which tried perhaps too hard sometimes to be serious enough to be taken seriously by the men in suits. (Of course, they aren't in this instance trying to suggest actual spatial strategies, masterplans, policies or programmes - which is where most or our bureaucrat-speak probably comes in, at least we hope.) But here's a bunch of people with genuine passion for the city, a intimate and wonderful knowledge of its every strange and beautiful corner and a whole load of great ideas for what to do about it.

All I hope is that, as Jeremy Till beat us to the British Pavilion in the Venice architecture biennale this year with the concept of doing Sheffield (rather than our utterly ace and totally timely idea about getting radical with the countryside), he's calling these kids up. Or if the kids read this, hope you call him up, sharpish.

Life update; and the decline of my alma mater

2006-01-28T21:27:00.000Z

Apologies for lack of posts. This was not due to anything exciting - rather, the fact that the office has been busy and I had an interim portfolio hand-in on Thursday that caused considerable panic and the use of every free minute in working, if not on actually producing drawings, on rather terrifying sessions of 'architects block' where I realise why I always hated being a student designer. However, hand-in is over and I've given myself a day and a night off. So its soup, wine, the footie on the radio and update blogging for my Saturday night. I'm really, really getting old.

Last night was the architect's equivalent of a high-school reunion, being the opening party for the Cambridge Compendium - a backslapping session to 'celebrate' my alma mater, which is sadly but surely sliding down the pan in terms of quality and vision. So much repeating of 'what are you up to these days' and the whole of Cambridge's alumni who are unsuccessful enough to bother, crammed into a tiny pub off Great Portland Street after the booze ran out at the RIBA.

I'm being a little harsh: it was very nice to see former tutors and others, but I don't have much optimism about the school. Many worthy, heart-in-the-right-place architects have come out of the school, and many running relatively solvent and interesting practices. But that fact is that there are no real high-fliers out there, a lot of frustration and struggle (the patented architect's 'business is fine, yes' complete with gritted smile seen far too often) and a lot of people haven't really moved very far since I last saw them, five years ago. Everyone is producing decent, well-considered buildings but there's a lack of people with real mouthy guts with radical positions, or even radical ways of promoting the approaches they already have, most of which are sound and, as I said, decent, which I think is a much undervalued quality in architecture.

Of course, most of these people graduated a long time before the recent well-publicised problems - but many are still sticking around the school, teaching or otherwise. At the risk of getting horrendously spammed by a lot of people who are good mates of mine, the school really needs to cut off from a lot of these people. Of course, there is absolutely no chance of this happening while Marcial Echenique is head of the department. I have no qualms at saying that he is the worst possible candidate for the job. Total lack of architectural vision, public profile or engagement with the world of practice. Someone who cites 'Computer simulation models of cities and regions' as his principal research interest - and having seen his work, he doesn't mean something more innovative than it sounds.

Well, rant over and enemies made. I was glad to be there and see some lovely people who I rarely bump into, but glad that my path since I graduated has led me to interesting, challenging and genuinely innovative work; the opportunity to engage with the real world, high-level clients and influential projects, rather than the world of slightly depressing small architects full of complaints. I respect them for their commitment to something that must be pretty hard to get up for, many days and I'm not saying that I'm somewhat magically superior. But Cambridge influenced my thinking in important ways and I think the fundamental tenets of its approach, underneath all the cruft, are important and valid. If the school wants to start producing more ambitious graduates who advocate these principles in public and influential ways, something really drastic needs to happen.

Galloway update

2006-01-17T22:40:00.000Z

I got a reply from Sir Philip Mawer, Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards, to my letter about George Galloway. He's not really having any of it. "Although I understand your concern...I am afraid that, on the evidence currently available to me, there is no remedy under the Code."

I know that the Code of Conduct for MPs is debatably concerned with issues of this kind - its purpose being basically to deal with financial wrong-doings by MPs. While this is a factor of the Code's history, I do think it should be expanded to contain much more explicit guidance on how MPs should use their time while the House is in session. What they do in their holidays I don't much care, but there should be limits to the activities that an MP can carry out which detract from their official duties in 'termtime'. This is not only about GG's relatively facetious actions, but also the number of non-executive directorships, consultancy jobs etc that MPs can have. I don't think that having to declare your interests on the Register of Member's Interests is sufficient - I would rather see Members not allowed to commit more than x days per month to outside paid work, for example. Sitting on charitable boards and so on is of course another matter but I would rather - especially given our constituency system - that MPs were given more concrete obligations regarding their use of their time for the public good. As Mawer's letter to me said, "there is no minimum attendance requirement or statement of expectations" - but why not? We pay our MPs a very decent salary, and I don't buy the argument that if they weren't allowed to earn extra money outside the House, we wouldn't get the talented people to put themselves forward for election. Surely they should want to become MPs not for financial gain but for the privilege of serving the interests of the nation?

Mawer wrote to me that "if their constituents are dissatisfied, their proper avenue of remedy is to pursue their concerns by political means". But I might ask, what 'political means' are open to a constituent like myself, whose MP is the head of their party? I can't lobby GG to get rid of himself. The only recourse I have is to external bodies like Mawer, until the next election in three years time when I can attempt to unseat GG. If I'm unhappy with my telephone service I can go to Ofcom. If my bank misuses my money I can go to the FSA. If I'm unhappy with a government department, I can go to the Parliamentary Ombudsman (an office that seems to be rather misnamed). But my political representatives have no regulatory body apart from Sir Mawer's office and none of the strict and clear rules for conduct that govern any other job. I am contracted to work a certain number of hours per week and I have to justify any time that I spend outside of this - conferences, teaching, media appearances - with relation to my job description. Yet our archaic political practices mean that our highest representatives - those in whom the governance of the nation resides - have none of the same expectations. Surely there's a case for reform?

Given this current state of affairs, I got pretty much the reply I expected, but I was pleased that he actually sent me a genuinely signed letter, not just some standard secretary's reply, given the fact that he has received over a hundred letters from my fellow pledgers! And GG was investigated by the Speaker of the House to find out how he has managed to table a set of Early Day Motions while incarcerated in the big Brother House - although cleared of wrong-doing, we still got the words 'Galloway'. 'cat' and 'box' uttered in the HoC in the same sentence.

And given GG has recently been seen pretending to be a cat and licking a fellow contestant's hands, dressing up as Dracula and hiding in a cardboard box for lengthy amounts of time, I can't wait for the catcalls (bad pun intended) when he finally re-enters the House where he's meant to belong...

Observer 'Woman'

2006-01-15T21:12:00.000Z

As with the Labour Party, thus with the Guardian/Observer stable of newspapers. Steadily less exciting, more saleable, more middle-of-the-road, more hypocritical. Getting rid of the old masthead and broadsheet format was a seminal moment, though the signs had been there for some time - the steadily decreasing amount of real content and the increasing number of pull-out sections printed on that horrible glossy paper that makes your fingers feel all funny after you've touched it. Now, I never buy the papers any more. I read it all online, thankful for not having to throw away the 90% of the paper version that I don't want to even have to buy.

I held onto the Observer for a bit longer - but now it too has resized as 'Berliner' (what a tempting sounding name for a rather horrible redesign), it's gone the way of the rest. (At least, until the boy comes back and starts buying it again, along with the News of the World, for our Sunday mornings.) And this week they launch the most depressing new arrival - Observer Woman.

Of course, it always was going to be depressing, wasn't it. We just knew it was going to be about shopping, how early-thirties professional women try to reconcile child-rearing with sensible work and boring fashion, and lame gossipy articles about lame famous women. But really, this was a triumph of focus-group marketing. Purves and Purves in magazine format.

I'm a woman (natch), perhaps on the young-ish end of their target audience but not so young that I don't hold down a good job and eat out rather a lot. But there, evidently, the similarities between myself and the new Observer audience end. I don't care about Liz Hurley - or rather, I do, but I'd rather read about her in the Sun because its so much more fun than trying to take her vaguely seriously. I do think society's fetish for hairless bodies is worth thinking about, but I'm not sure that the most interesting article you could write about it is the erstwhile Cocktail Girl recounting how disgusted she is when she grows out her leg hair. She was funnier as Cocktail Girl, and much more up my street (literally, when reviewing Loungelover). As for all the other filler - why wearing leggings is a bad idea, why simpering in the boadroom is OK even for ambitious women, what fashion items men and women don't agree on; it is a waste of paper, pure and simple. The only half-decent bit was Gordon Ramsay, because he talked about grating black truffle onto his girlfriend's breasts.

One day, someone will realise that women might want a magazine all to themselves that is actually funny, smart, edgy and dangerous. Not in-jokes for the Islingtonites. Not stuff that you giggle over with your boyfriend/husband but stuff that makes them squirm with discomfort. The other day, Norway announced that it will shut down any stock exchange-listed companies that don't have 45% of their board as women in two years. Or you could be writing about the star geeks of the female Silicon Valley sex bloggers. And all our oldest Sunday newspaper can think to report on is Polly Vernon's leg hair.

7-0 to the Arsenal!

2006-01-15T00:57:00.000Z

What more can I say. A perfect day. Thierry Henry hat-trick, Hleb, Senderos, Pires, Gilberto goals. And Man Utd lose!

I'm sorry for Middlesbrough's stand-in goalie. Today probably ruined his career for ever. But up in Highbury, we're a happy bunch of gooners.

Ditch Monkey

2006-01-13T17:07:00.000Z

I'm sure everyone apart from me already knows about this but I just found out that there's someone who has been living in the Oxfordshire woods - really in the woods, with no tent, just a couple of sleeping bags and a rucksack's worth of stuff - for seven months now while holding down a steady job in London. Amazing. Jealousy-making, despite the tales of the cold and wet and thorny. I want to go live in the woods now, sod this hip urban lifestyle thing. People think that my going to live in a big cold tin shed in the middle of redneck Alabama was a weird thing to do and I told them that it was great and really, having no central heating doesn't matter. But my squatting was absolutely nothing compared to this act of marvellous genius. Even Thoreau built himself a house.

Anyway, his blog is fantastic, go read. He's doing it all in aid of the Woodland Trust, so you should go sponsor him too.

Finally, the Labour whip catches up

2006-01-13T00:29:00.000Z

I'm not a New Labour fan or voter, but it did amuse me to see the news that today - a week after I started my pledge - Hilary Armstrong, the Labour whip, announced the launch of a petition against George Galloway's continued presence in the Big Brother house. Which is supremely useless, really, as GG won't know that its going on, or how many people have signed up, because he's not allowed any access to the outside world.

Whereas, I might say, writing to the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards at least has a point to it, however implausible it may be that it will have any effect - to get GG censured in the House (of Commons, not BB) when he returns to the real world, and maybe (if enough of us write) to see further action.

In any case, he may get evicted tomorrow, in which case Labour's petition will be very much too late. Whereas I have already got over 100 people to post off their letter to the Commissioner. I'm also wondering whether Labour are being tactical about mobilising their members to vote for the eviction. If they were smart, they should try to keep him in there - the longer he's there, the stupider he looks. I might rather he was evicted and got back to work in my area, but as he doesn't do much there at the best of times, I guess he may as well stay in.

I was on TV tonight. I didn't see it because I don't have a TV. Can someone let me know whether I came across as an idiot for the five seconds that they probably showed my face?

Ricky Burdett on cities

2006-01-12T21:34:00.000Z

I didn't think this piece in the New York Times was up to much, regarding Ricky and his ideas. This is not to say that Ricky doesn't have good ideas on 'cities'. But to say that the debate around "people, society, architecture" is one that "five years ago might have been a gently heated discussion among colleagues, [but] is now a global flashpoint" is, well, to be a bit five years ago. Burdett's colleague at the LSE, Richard Sennett, has been talking about this for years. Mike Davis's seminal City of Quartz was published over ten years ago. Jane Jacobs first brought it up over 25 years ago. Everyone in the developing nations sector has talked about nothing but the challenges of urbanism and civil society for a long, long time. Even little ol' me, I was talking about the crucial links between urbanism, democracy and social cohesion five years ago, and the debate was pretty live then.

Which is really to say that maybe even the NYT doesn't have enough perspective to see that the pre-9/11 world thought that urban development was important on a political level. But I might also question - at least, given the evidence in this article - what new Burdett is really bringing to the debate. What he is quoted as saying is old hat, despite there being some really interesting and innovative work out there that he doesn't mention. Even the cities on his longlist - Shanghai, Mumbai, Tokyo, Mexico City, São Paulo, Bogota, Caracas, New York, Lagos, Johannesburg, Beirut, Istanbul, London, Berlin, Moscow, Copenhagen, the 'urban regions of Catalonia', Milan, Turin, Genoa - seem a bit 'five years ago'. What about Manila, Tirana, Addis Ababa (where the mayor recently won 'World Mayor of the Year' from the UN); why New York and not Phoenix, Arizona; what about Tijuana; why three Italian cities but not Paris (given the recent events), and where the hell is Jerusalem?

The Biennale is a difficult candidate. On the one hand, architecture is the most important thing for society, or at least that's what architects like to preach; on the other, nobody but architects actually goes to the Biennale. So the real purpose of a good exhibition there should be to give the profession a shot in the arm, not to preach to the converted, or to try and sell an message to politicians and others who quite frankly will never visit. 'Meta-cities' is definitely preaching to the converted. Every single architect is obsessed with urban ecosystems, favelas, uncontrollable social forces creating crazy urban spaces, gated communities vs. the starving hordes, etc, etc. Burdett, in icon magazine a couple of months ago, said "The visual manipulation of data – I'm very interested in that. Like what Bruce Mau did with the Rem Koolhaas book [S,M,L,XL, 1995] - taking dry statistics and turning them into something visually exciting. Like the fact that 50% of the world's population lives in cities; that in 20 years it will be 75%; that 100 years ago it was only 10%. That is quite a story to tell, but you have to make it visually rich so you can put it on the wall rather than in a book." We know. Yawn.

Well, if he's still stuck with mid-90s graphics, I hope that Ricky at least manages to do two other things with this Biennale:

Get a bit super-serious on the profession and ask, why aren't you engaging? Why are you churning out 'non-human species as a model for architectural form' or (outside of the student sphere) bullshit (sorry, Zaha) about how the "urban repertoire of deconstructivism and folding is geared up to create complex, polycentric urban fields which are densely layered and continuously differentiated...Key concerns are layering, interpenetration of domains and multiple affiliations of figures". World to architects: You what?

Get ahead of the game. Forget books by Rem from ten years ago - lets look at ecocities by Arups in China, the rebuilding of New Orleans, the stuff that's absolutely of today and tomorrow. There's a helluva lot of interesting stuff out there - whether you think it's 'good' or 'bad' is, to me, not the point. We don't want the Cities Programme lecture course distilled into an exhibition, thank you, nor a publicity job for the Thames Gateway. I want radical, I want heart-on-sleeve, I don't want any more of his big, bland statements.

I respect Ricky, of course, and having dealt with him in the past I know he's smart. But he's playing a good game right now, getting everyone to love him by peddling home truths with none of the difficult detail . To quote himself, "I start from the position that you can have your cake and eat it" - well, he's doing great at that. But curating the Biennale is a chance to really show your hand. He said, in that Icon article, that "It will end up with a series of propositions about how to change the world". That's a big statement, and I hope he can live up to it.

Galloway letter

2006-01-11T22:13:00.000Z

I've written the letter to the Parliamentary Commissioner for standards about George Galloway and its available for download here. If anyone else feels like sending it off, please do! The bits in red should be changed to suit the sender.

Thanks again to everyone who signed up to the pledge and those who continue to do so. All this campaigning is quite fun!

'Respect'

2006-01-10T22:38:00.000Z

On the night the 'Respect Agenda' was launched by Tony Blair, I walked home past a classic example of what he's trying to stop. Zooming dangerously down my street came two cars, full of local lads sitting on the edge of the windows, hanging out, standing up on the seats so that they were heads above the roof of the cars. They were yelling at each other - in high-spirited couldn't-care-less competition rather than rage - and waving their arms before coming to a screeching halt at the end of the street.

This is, perhaps, the thin end of the 'anti-social behaviour' wedge - but certainly what Blair might describe as 'disrespectful'. I see worse, of course - kids on crack, threatening each other or random strangers, nicking bikes and phones and hitting their girlfriends. But I don't see how any of this behaviour is going to be changed by beating them with the stick of withdrawing their housing benefit, punishing their parents, evicting them from their houses or hauling them up in front of vigilante neighbourhood 'community' groups.

If people - not just teenagers - are to discover some 'respect' (and how I hate the cap-doffing associations of that word) for their neighbours, that is going to come about through better and less formalised communication between different groups, rather than one gang - the vigilante neighbours - confronting another one - the 'feral', 'anti-social' 'tribes'. And if kids grow up with no help, no real friendship shown to them from anyone, no investment from school or family; well, I don't know how they are meant to grow up to be normally socialised human beings.

At Christmas several of us - who have worked at various times with highly disadvantaged kids, including the criminal and nearly-criminal - recited the old cliche that everyone who works with these people knows, that if you just pay them a little bit of kind, normal attention - not patronising, just what 'we' might consider normal - they are fantastically bright and responsive individuals. And again, we all repeated, if this is so blatantly obvious to all of us, how is it possible that the policy guys have never managed to get hold of this idea?

It is not as dramatic as some people make out, but I agree with this blog post that we should be paying attention and worrying about the decline in what might be termed 'civil social relations'. But this is an incredibly long-term problem that will not be solved by £50m from the government and a whole lot of hope-less people feeling resentful because they've been made to take parenting classes. One might, if one was taking the historical perspective, say that what we are seeing now has its roots in the pretty disastrous social policies of the last forty years, where the ghettoisation of at-risk, low-income families has been state-sanctioned and even encouraged, and it will take a generation of serious investment into social infrastructure to get rid of these problems.

The fact is, maybe its not the 'problem families' that need parenting classes. Maybe the rest of us need to train as social workers, or somehow rediscover a sense of real engagement with our neighbours that goes beyond calling the cops on them. We need to learn a) not to be scared of people from a different social group and b) to go a little beyond the call of duty in befriending, getting involved and so forth. I can't remember whether I blogged about this before, but six weeks ago we happened to walk into a pub just as a pretty serious fight was breaking out. An incredibly drunk guy got glassed in the head by another drunk-ish guy, and after a brief but vicious fight, the second man walked out with his mates right through the crowded pub, right past me (still practically in the doorway) and out. No-one stopped him - and I'm not sure I would have even if I was a big burly man, for fear of a knife. But what shocked me more than anything was that when the cops pulled up mere seconds afterwards, no-one in the bar went to talk to them, or would give them a description of who and what they saw. I had gone to find a friend but coming back, overheard the cops saying that no-one would talk so I immediately volunteered, giving a description of what I saw and driving around in the cop car for a while to see if we could spot the guys.

Why did no-one want to get involved? Surely to give a description of a guy who just kicked someone else in the head isn't a big commitment, a big chunk out of your Friday night? Similarly, why do people just stand and stare, or walk by looking the other way, when they see other unacceptable behaviour take place in public places? I've just got over 100 people to sign up to a dumb pledge about George Galloway, yet 100 people in that pub would not give a few minutes to talk to the police about a guy getting hurt. And if we nice liberal middle-class people haven't got enough spirit of goodwill towards our fellow man to do that, no wonder the social fabric here is seen to be tearing.

Update: Simon Jenkins has an excellent piece in the Guardian that says it all fiercely and eloquently. As opposed to the leader column which makes some decent points but also this clanger: "Curbing incivility - noisy neighbours, teenage tearaways, Saturday night yobs - is less serious but much more difficult than tackling terrorism". Erm - I think 'tackling terrorism' might just be the harder task there, given that we can't even define what it is?

Pledge update

2006-01-10T13:25:00.000Z

This thing keeps snowballing. My pledge about George Galloway has passed its target of 100 people, and the numbers keep mounting - if you want to sign up, please do, because the more the merrier! I had my comedy interview for the Late Edition (BBC4, 10.30pm Thursday - I got it wrong before, sorry!) this morning - if you tune in, I may look like a prat but think charitable thoughts!

I'll be writing the letter to the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards soon, in between all the other million things I need to do. Hee hee.

Icons mess up

2006-01-09T22:47:00.000Z

I'm sure I'll blog about the Icons project at greater length at due course, because it's an interesting and difficult project that also touches on lots of things I work with, but here's a quickie which starts with a BIG MISTAKE they made.

Oh dear - if you go to their atlas page, try to find the 'east of England' area. It's where the East Midlands should be. And vice versa. As an East Anglian, this riles me, and it's unfortunately ironic, symptomatic of the London-centrism of the trendy web designers that invented the whole project to look at 'Englishness'. While we're on the map, I'm not sure how the Isle of Man feels about being part of Cumbria either.

And then, when you do go to the East of England page - or, for that matter, any of the other regional pages - there's hardly any items on them. London gets a whole sheaf - but someone's really not been doing their research. Given that one of their first twleve 'icons' is the Empire Windrush, isn't it a bit strange not to put Tilbury on the atlas page for the East, when London gets Windrush Square in Brixton? and why does Chelsea and Man Utd football clubs get a mention, and not Arsenal, or Liverpool? are they only things of interest in the whole of Merseyside an Anthony Gormley installation and an art gallery - nothing about the Liver Building, the Cavern Club or any other Mersey icons?

I know that the idea of the project is to start a debate, and by writing this post I'm probably pleasing them, but it does strike me as more than a little insensitive to be so blatantly lazy about the regions. The Bramah Tea and Coffee Museum round the corner from my office is not more 'iconic' than Blackpool Pleasure Beach, which gets its image used as the map 'icon' for the North-West but doesn't actually merit getting an entry. And poor Cumbria and West Midlands gets absolutely no entries - no Lake District, Staffordshire Potteries, canals, Coventry Cathedral, Stratford-upon-Avon - what the hell were they thinking?

What is stranger is that in the national press no-one I've read so far has picked up on this. Has our media really gotten so introverted? Surely someone's noticed the sheer laziness of this piece of work - thinking its being 'inclusive' by nominating the Windrush and cups of tea, while leaving out whole swathes of the country?

Hello...

2006-01-09T21:47:00.000Z

if you're coming from PledgeBank, as I know many of you are. Normally I don't write at all about Big Brother, or much about politics. Mostly about urban development (and rural stuff too) - architecture, planning, 'community' engagement, sustainability etc - and about what I did at the weekend, what caught my eye on the way into work, a bit of geeky stuff and kooky ephemera, and (if you dig into the archives) what I did for a year in the depths of rural Alabama. Which was the really fun stuff - here's a post, and another one to get you started.

It's my online scribble pad - disorganised, but some people seem to like it! Hope you stick around and make it into the 'return visitor' bit of my stats.

Fifteen seconds of fame

2006-01-09T16:29:00.000Z

It's not only GG who is getting his moment in the spotlight on TV, being laughed at by the rest of the country. It might happen to me too. Yes, dear readers, the BBC emailed me as a result of my pledge and you may be able to get a glimpse of me on the Late Edition on Thursday, being made a fool of by some comedian type. Me, on the British equivalent of the Daily Show! Being interviewed in Bethnal Green tomorrow.

The excitement is killing me.

[Update] I thought it worth pointing out that the excitement is not, in fact, killing me. The problems of irony in electronic media. In case Je's comment was taking me more seriously than I intended!!

Galloway pledge mentioned in the Times

2006-01-09T11:39:00.000Z

This article both mentions my pledge and quotes one of Galloway's important supporters in the Muslim community expressing dismay at his appearance in Big Brother.

I'm already over half way to my target for people to sign up, which has taken me by surprise. Sign up here if you haven't already...this could start getting fun soon!

How to find me

2006-01-08T13:06:00.000Z

I'm proud. Checking my site stats today (not very impressive) I nevertheless found out that if you google Marble Halls Highbury I'm the first website that comes up.

Other wasy to find me - muddy kit fetish, is Harry Redknapp Jewish [there's obviously a football thing going on] and "fake urbanism"/.

Its Sunday. Forgive the inane posting. I'm getting dangerously obsessed by Celebrity Big Brother. As I don't have a TV and the live online feed isn't available for Macs, I'm reduced to following it via the forums - which, as a friend of mine pointed out, is rather like what happens during cricket season, when one endlessly presses 'refresh' to follow the over by over commentary, and thus no work is done...

Spy on the unsuspecting

2006-01-08T11:04:00.000Z

My Sunday morning was made much more interesting by the discovery of this new website which has found all the unprotected CCTV camera streams from all around the world and mapped them onto a GoogleMap. Absolutely enthralling stuff. I've spied on ski slopes in the Alps, a Portugese cafe at breakfast time, a cast aquarium with what looks like dolphins swimming lazily around, and some extraordinary square in South Russia (I know not where) - snow-filled, vast, with some incredible architecture. If you look at the map, its the middle marker of the three in that area.

An amazing way of seeing your way around the globe at this moment in time, from the sleeping USA to the super-activity of the Swiss Alps in January. The images open if you click on the markers - you don't have to go to the 'link' - just give it a little time as it can be a bit slow. Thanks to Google Maps Mania blog for the tip!

Galloway pledge update

2006-01-07T15:13:00.000Z

My pledge to write to the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards about George Galloway is doing pretty well, with a third of the number signed up already after two days. If you haven't signed up, please do so!

The Guardian has an article today on how impossible it is for a constituent to get hold of anyone in Galloway's office in case of a problem. This is really, to me, a serious dereliction of duty and while I'm sure there may be other MPs who are also less-than-perfect in this respect, the fact that Galloway has no party structure keeping a check on his behaviour must be responsible. You can't imagine the Labour Party allowing any of its MPs to do without a decent telephone answering service in their office, for example.

Talking to the public about the Thames Gateway

2006-01-07T15:09:00.000Z

Went to ippr yesterday for an update from their Centre for Cities and bumped into an old college-mate of mine who's now working there and is partly responsible for this report of findings from various focus groups of existing residents in the Gateway and the kind of social groups who are being targeted to move into the new developments there.

No real surprises, I'm afraid - pretty obvious conclusions about the lack of meaningful engagement with existing communities - and, although I'm not a statistician, I'm not really sure how a focus group of only 56 people can produce fully meaningful results, especially the focus groups of existing low-income residents in Tilbury and Sittingbourne - eight people in each town. But none the less it's useful to highlight the lack of engagement and produce a few 'shock statements' that might make policy-makers and the UDCs think a little bit more about the need to really take the public seriously.

It's a very serious problem, in my view, that at the very early stages of forming plans for things like the TG, the policy-makers never consider any form of public involvement. It's neither at all democratic, nor a pragmatic way to proceed; with big projects like this, as Kevin Harries notes here, you crucially need the local people to be behind if in the spirit of the inspirational WiMBY project that we used as a case study when we did our Thurrock project. There's simply no way that a 'sustainable' community - in the sense of a long-term, viable social entity - can evolve unless one works with the existing residents, who are generally the most deprived and least hopeful people. I'm not necessarily looking forward to seeing how these communities are behaving in thirty years time, unless the decision-makers really start addressing this fundamental principle of planning and governance.