Skuds’ Sister’s Brother

It was a bit anorak-ish of me to take an active interest in the Guardian’s series on Great Modern Buildings earlier this year.
Still having all of those supplements is even worse, although I could blame it on a combination of a hoarding mentality and not getting round to recycling everything yet…
…unless I actually took the […]

[Read more →]

I was sharing some idle speculation with others, mostly Danivon, about which buildings would feature in the Guardian’s series of ‘Great Modern Buildings’ when neither of us were aware it was a two-week feature and not just one week.
So I was a little peeved when it featured the Gherkin (his guess) instead of the Sydney […]

[Read more →]

Another thing I am enjoying this week is the Guardian’s series of pull-outs on great modern buildings - a great improvement on wallcharts of mushrooms or sharks. (I’ll reserve judgement on the booklets of speeches and interviews. I kept them all and just never got round to reading any of them)
So far they have done […]

[Read more →]

This is a gratuitous photo. I just thought the page could do with a picture.
I saw this building in Penshurst village last weekend and was impressed by the attention to detail on the extension. The left-hand side is the original building and the right-hand half is a new addition. The new addition is extremely […]

[Read more →]

I have to get this out of my system first. It may only be a 7-year-old Ford, but we are quite excited about our new car.
Its a Mondeo estate, 2-litre GLX, which is a bit naughty in these carbon footprint-aware times, but then we do only have one car for the family and the […]

[Read more →]

After our meeting on Saturday we headed across to London Bridge. The intention was to visit the London Dungeon, which Jayne has never been to and really wants to see. When we got there we found a queue which went on for ever. One of the assistants estimated that it would take about […]

[Read more →]

I have mentioned before how easy it is to get carried away in a planning committee, and make hyperbolic statements, but this is a classic.
Broadwater Farm will be an everlasting memorial to my committee
Chair of Haringay planning committee, 1967
Apparently its nowhere near as bad as it was 20 years ago, but still…

[Read more →]

There were two interesting articles in the papers today, which I will attempt to clumsily relate to each other.
The first was Ashley Seager in the Guardian, arguing that we need a land tax to replace council tax and possibly allow reductions in VAT as well, and the second was in the Argus: a story about […]

[Read more →]

The other story in the Crawley News today was about expenses for councillors on fact-finding visits to Liverpool and Rotterdam. The facts appear to be that a group of 7 officers and 6 councillors went on visits to compare town centres to help them with planning the major redevelopment of Crawley, the developers paid […]

[Read more →]

When I saw the Crawley News on Wednesday my curiosity was piqued by the teaser on the front page which said “Library is branded ugliest building in Britain: page 10″ and I was quite looking forward to getting to page 10.
I imagined it was a verdict from some relevent body like CABE or RIBA or […]

[Read more →]