Arches at Guildford cathedral, November 2008

Sorry punk fans – another song title red herring there.  Today I spent an interesting day in Guildford at the University of Surrey, attending a political seminar with my trade union, Unite.The topic of the day was how the union and the Labour party can work together better to deliver more electoral victories in the south-east region.  There were at least five PPCs there – all Unite members, except the local Guildford candidate who is in the GMB – and mostly candidates in seats we would not expect to win, so it was a good opportunity to say hello and compare notes.

It was no great surprise to find that the main outcome was an increase in enthusiasm and morale, but there were a few specific bits of information that may come in handy too.  I came away with the feeling that we still have some work to do in improving the party/union links at all levels, but especially at the local level where us ordinary members can make a difference: there are not enough union members joining the party and not enough party members joining unions, to the detriment of both parts of the movement.

Party funding is a hot topic, but in many key constituencies if the unions could deliver an extra dozen or so active and committed members it could make more of a difference than mere cash could.

I also took a few photos of Guildford cathedral, which I had never been up close to before.  It looks impressive from the town, but get closer and its impressive in a different way: such expanses of brick give it a real Bankside vibe.

As yet there are no drawings or other documents available online, so I don’t know if all my previous objections will still apply; let’s wait and see.

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 trouble to apply for the free special box to keep them in. That would be a bit obsessive wouldn’t it? Mine arrived today.

I didn’t make the scale model of the Empire State Building though. I’m saving that for the Christmas holidays.

So I was a little peeved when it featured the Gherkin (his guess) instead of the Sydney Opera House (my guess) last week but then cheered up when the opera house featured this week. I was pleasantly surprised to see the Zaha Hadid building turn up as well. I would have nominated her, but expected her to be overlooked as she so often is over here.

Like so many of the better British architects, Hadid gets nearly all her commissions from abroad. We do seem to be, Gherkin and Lloyds building notwithstanding, terribly conservative with our building design over here and you get architects who are being employed to design airports, art galleries, major sports facilities and other large-scale projects overseas who barely get a loft conversion commission in the UK.

When I picked up the paper the other day I had a real double-take though: Arnos Grove tube station. Nothing wrong with it, a fine example of London Transport’s 1930′s design but not really distinctive from half a dozen other tube stations out that way. (But wasn’t everything connected with it so much more stylish when Frank Pick was in charge?)

Dropping that one into the list is making it harder to guess what the last one will be as the scope has really widened now! As Le Corbusier featured today with his funky church the chances of his Marseille apartment block featuring now are very slim.

Mies van der Rohe is conspicuous by his absence, but I am going to go out on a limb and say what about the seven sisters or one of the building influenced by them? If only to see how the Grauniad’s typesetters cope with something like “Kotyelnicheskaya Nabyerezhnaya embankment”.

But of course, the chances are that bloody Danivon will be right again and it will be Fallingwater.

So far they have done the Empire State Building, The Guggenheim in Bilbao and the Pompidou Centre in Paris. Tomorrow it is the Gaudi cathedral in Barcelona and I am really wondering what will be there for Thursday and Friday.

All the buildings so far have been world-class icons. I would expect the Sydney Opera House to feature at some point, but then what? The Lloyds building would be a contender, but it is too similar to the Pompidou. Surely not the Gherkin – its pretty but just another skyscraper really. Britain doesn’t have too many examples of large-scale, world-class, iconic architecture. All our best architects get their best commissions abroad, with Spain leading the way these days.

The Burj Al Arab hotel in Dubai? Hundertwasserhaus? The Scottish Parliament? The Welsh Assembly building? Portmeirion? The Crawley College Tower?? Actually, now I think about it, we do have a structure in Crawley with a small chance of being included: the bridge at Gatwick Airport. But its not really up there with the other icons. And if something as old as the Empire State Building counts as modern then how about some of the Albert Speer designs? Extremely dubious with all the connotations, but visually impressive.

I am not enough of an architectural anorak to be on the edge of my seat with anticipation, but I’m still enjoying a worrying level of anticipation. If I had to put money on it I would go for Le Corbusier’s Unite d’Habitation in Marseilles as a long-shot.

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 sympathetic, using the same type of bricks with the same pattern, the shape for stone details around the windows and at propping up the roof, which has the same tiling. (Click on the picture to see it bigsized and more detailful)

You can only really tell its an extension because its all shiny and new but a few years of weathering (and corrosive exhaust fumes from passing lorries) will make it blend in a lot more. Much better than a lot of the monstrous and tacky modifications that are normally made to old houses.

Oh.. Does that all sound a bit ‘Prince of Wales’?

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 idea of an estate was to hold all our camping gear so we can take holidays in Britain instead of flying away.

Anyway, when we took it out for a prolonged test drive we ended up at Winchelsea, which is a place I had known nothing about.

It is possible that I had been there as a child. We used to take a lot of holidays in that area and I can remember going to Rye, Hastings, Romney, Dungeness and other places nearby but I can’t remember this place, and it is a very memorable place.

The most striking feature is the church. It is quite a large church for a small place (it claims to be the smallest town in the country, but I’m not getting into that again) and its a very unusual shape. Reading about the history of the church reveals not only why it is such a strange shape but that it was supposed to be much, much larger.

It turns out that Winchelsea was an important place back in 15th Century. It had a port on the river (since silted up) which was the main port for importing wines from France, had its own mint and a naval base. At the time King Edward I had plans made up for a completely new town, based on a grid pattern, with a magnificent church as a centrepiece.

This was, arguably, the first attempt at organised town planning in the country, and would have resulted in a very impressive settlement. Who knows – if it had been built it and been successful it might have encouraged organised town planning centuries ahead of places like Bourneville and the garden cities, and the country might look very different now. On such things does history pivot.

Unfortunately the French kept popping over and raiding the place and it never really got properly established. The current church is what would have been just the choir section of the completed building. The remains of the two transepts, flank the entrance, but nothing remains of the rest of the building. I suspect the main body of it never got built, but standing at the entrance and comparing it to the original plans you can see that it would have been of cathedral proportions.

I would strongly recommend a visit to anyone who can get there easily, and to anyone who can’t I would recommend a visit to the town’s website instead.

And I can’t let this go without the obligatory plug for my Flickr page, where there are loads of other pictures of the church.

I thought I would show Jayne the sights of Borough Market, which must be one of the best places to buy food in the whole country. It would have been a bit silly for us to buy sacks of old fashioned potatoes, specialised cheeses and piles of wild boar sausages to cart around for the rest of the day and then have to take home on the train, so it was really just to go window shopping.

Instead of the normal route I led us by the more direct short-cuts and we passed a sign for the Old Operating Theatre Museum and Herb Garret which was just too much for Jayne to resist. I had heard about the place, but not in any great detail, and had not known exactly where it was.

To be honest it didn’t really appeal to me, but I am so glad Jayne insisted that we go in because it really is one of the hidden gems of London. It is an old-style operating theatre which was forgotten about until it was rediscovered in the 1950s.

Now it has been turned into a museum of the sort of medicine that went on before anaesthetics were invented and is very quirky. The attitude of the place is summed up by the “please touch” sign – a refreshing change.

Access to the museum is by a steep and narrow spiral staircase – it would be impossible to manage if the museum was a lot more popular – leading to a small shop and ticket booth. Then it is up some more stairs into the loft space of a church full of examples of medicinal herbs, old medical instruments and samples.

Some of the medical instruments are truly scary, even if they do not all have such brilliant names as the scarifiers (rotating blades for blood-letting). There were vicious-looking fleams there (non-rotating blades for blood-letting) and some horrific gynaecological items. Perhaps the nastiest instrument was a surgical decapitating hook. The description just said “for cases when the only way to save the mother’s life was to sacrifice the baby” – leaving you to work out the details yourself.

At the moment the museum is host to an exhibition of wax sculptures called “joint Account”. The various pieces of the exhibition are scattered around the place and all represent aspects of conjoined twins. The way the sculptures are made from lots of short lengths of wax makes them disturbing already, but when two disturbing figures are joined together in grotesque ways it can be very unsettling. One figure of a man with a vestigial conjoined twin stuck to his head is on the operating table in the theatre, as if ready for a separation operation which would be risky nowadays, let alone then.

The place is not large, and the entry fee (nearly 6 quid) might seem a lot for such a small place, but it really is an amazing place. its worth having a look at the website, but even better to get round there if you are ever near London Bridge with an hour or so to spare.

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…

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 the possible redevelopment of an office block in Brighton.

As far as land tax is concerned, I have a lot of sympathy for the concept. The writer made the point that a lack of any sort of land or property tax, based on value, has led to increasing inequalities. On the face of it there is an unfairness that the absolute cheapest property in the lowest council tax band attracts a third of the tax for the biggest house possible in the top band, even if the house is worth 100 times as much and presumably the income/wealth of the inhabitants is far more than 3 times that of the hovel-dweller. Have the richest ever only been 3 times richer than the poorest?

That much is pretty straightforward, and something which has bothered me for a while, but another arguments made was that the absence of any sort of annual property tax does absolutely nothing to encourage landowners to develop land. The example given was of Battersea Power Station, bought for £10 million and then sold for £400 million after doing nothing but crumble for eleven years. An appreciation of £35 million a year with a lot less than that spent on maintaining and securing the site. There was no incentive to do anything when that much could be made by doing nothing.

A further argument was about second homes and those tax avoiders who live here but manage to pay no income tax and contribute very little while owning much. Interesting, but I was a lot more interested in the empty property implications. There is great pressure to build housing and offices on green belt land, but a lot of land and property is vacant and allowed to stay that way, or is brownfield land held in the landbanks of supermarkets and other organisations. At the moment it costs them nothing to prevent development in the locations where it would be more suitable: in fact all the time the asset is appreciating for them.

The Argus story is about just such a property, a tower called Anston House on Preston Rd in Brighton. It is described as the ugliest building in Sussex, but lets not start that argument all over again, as we know every planning meeting in every council involves some building or other being described as the ugliest ever.

Anyway, this 9- or 10-storey block has been unoccupied since 1987. In the 19 years it has been empty it has obviously declined a bit, although I wouldn’t like to speculate on what has happened to the value of it, or the value of its land for development. I expect that the increase in value has far exceeded any costs in keeping it empty.

I don’t live in Brighton, but I do visit, and when I visit I go past this building, although I can’t say I have noticed it: the whole road is full of office blocks and tall apartment blocks so it is not out-of-place apart from the state of decay which is not immediately apparent when you are keeping your eye on the road, but I am sure it is a constant annoyance for anyone living there.

So the question is, would a land tax or property tax have made it a lot less likely that this huge chunk of property in a prime position would have stayed derelict for almost 20 years? I think so. Especially a tax which did not give huge exemptions for empty property, or even penalised wilful waste of land. The follow-up question has to be how many bits of land are there in a similar situation?

I can think of a few examples immediately just in areas which I know: the old office block by the ‘squareabout’ in Crawley is one and No. 1 Westminster Bridge Rd is the most obvious example. Both are in areas where there is a huge demand for housing and office space and both have been derelict for years. The suspicion has to be that every town or city has several such sites and that together they would meet the current demand but there is just no incentive for the owners to do anything.

I’m afraid that since reading Freakonomics, I have been quite taken with the concept of looking for the incentives in everything…

Getting back to Anston House, it must really irritate the locals because the local Green party councillor says he would “welcome getting that horrible building pulled down.” Surely it would be greener to just modernise it? There are a couple of apartment blocks in Lambeth which have been modernised inside and re-clad outside which look OK – not great, but no worse than a brand new building would have been since they have been clad to match the current vernacular for tower blocks. An office building in Crawley was completely gutted, stripped to the bare concrete floors and pillars, and then rebuilt with modern-looking exteriors.

At the time I thought the remodelling was so extreme that they might as well have pulled it down, but on reflection the amount of concrete used for the main structure and foundations was considerable, and isn’t the production of concrete a major source of either pollution or CO2 emissions? (I’m sure I read that somewhere)

We have a throwaway society, which extends to buildings themselves. The fact that an official Green party councillor is so ready to ignore that and see this building torn down at any cost to the wider environment gives some sort of indication of how unpopular it is locally.

If a land tax will encourage greater use of otherwise derelict land and reduce a few inequalities along the way then I’m all for it. If nothing else it will have an effect on those boring conversations about property prices with everyone inflating their own.