bottom drawer

I love the idea of the iPad microflat but in reality it might be a bit grim, given it's being developed by housebuilder Barratt. Not as beautiful as the classic mini-flats at Lawn Road, featured in the AJ today. How much I would love to live there... Gordon Brown and Ruth Kelly just love the construction skills academy at the Battersea Power station site (a joint venture between developers Parkview International, their construction manager Bovis Lend Lease, the Learning and Skills Council and Lambeth College). Lingham Court in Stockwell wins a prize for being innovative regarding cross-subsidy. It's already won a Housing Design Award for its design last year. Final allocation announce for £135m to go into making our planners work harder, or better, or to hire more of them, or something. But guaranteed, everyone will still be complaining about them in a year's time. Especially as weirdly, the ones who get the most money are the one's who've already improved the m...

Designs by CZWG, Allies & Morrison and Carey Jones for a canal-side development by Isis in Leeds have been branded "staggeringly insensitive" in a last-ditch attempt to stop them getting through planning. The Leeds Civic Trust fumed: "It is shocking that council officers are recommending approval of such a staggeringly insensitive and inappropriate scheme which in its physical impact is directly at odds with all the strategy documents produced by the council for the Canal Basin and the Dark Arches in the past 10 years." Wowee. When was the last time that uber-safe Allies and Morrisson got panned for anything? I'm rather excited. And what are the Dark Arches? Sounds like something from Harry Potter.

Southend is bidding for the regional casino pilot. So presumably that means that Great Yarmouth will be spared? Other bidding locations are Birmingham (at the NEC), Middlesbrough, Bedford (like, why?), Blackpool (surprise), Cardiff, Rainham (please, no...), Glasgow, and many other weird and wonderful places who somehow think (like a complusive gambler) that their fortunes will be revived at one turn of the roulette wheel. I'm not so sure. Having seen what happened to the floating casinos in lower Mississippi? It made those towns pretty sad places, and that was before Katrina came along and wiped out the entire economy at one fell swoop, because they had no economic diversity. Putting all your chips on one number ain't that smart.

The ODPM/Academy for Sustainable Communities 'flagship' award is open for entries. Read about it all here .

The Leeds Partnership - a joint venture between Hammerson and Town Centre Securities - has 'revealed' that it had asked Farrell to mastermind the £500 million mixed-use redevelopment of the city’s Eastgate and Harewood quarters. The proposals, which go on public display tomorrow, will create 93,000m2 of new retail space, as well as 600 homes, a medical centre and a church. There are also plans for two department stores on the 8.5ha split site, including a flagship building for retailer John Lewis. I love the idea of 'unveiling' Farrell as the mastermind the day before the plans go out for public comment but actually this is the tail-end of a fairly long process of 'consultation' and negotiation and everyone's known about Farrell's involvement for ages. In fact, he prepared a masterplan for the area as long ago as 1990 according to the supplementary planning document ( pdf from October 2005. There's a long and quite dull (but interesting if you'r...

A slightly premature but welcome article from Ellis Woodman in this week's BD regarding a development by architect Peter Salter in Notting Hill. The project , which has not yet received planning, is for Baylight Properties , the developer headed by AA-grad and former student of Peter's, Crispin Kelly. The development, for 4 dwellings on a compact and complex site, is exciting as it will be the first permanent building in the UK by one of our most sensitive and virtuoso architects. Previously Peter, who has completed several works in Japan including the Kamiichi mountain pavilion, has until now in the UK been known most for his teaching at Bath and the AA, and as former head of the UEL school.

Richard Rogers Partnership's controversial masterplan for a key site near Cmabridge station came under fire last week from local residents at a meeting with the developer Ashwell. The first phase, which will include 1,400 new homes, a hotel and 10-storey buildings on the 8.5ha site, won planning permission, but the second is meeting opposition. Now CABE's design review panel have also refused to back the £725 million regeneration scheme because of concerns about the height of the project and the possible overdevelopment of the site. A report from the design review panel states: ‘We are not convinced that the right building type has been chosen to provide high density at an appropriate scale. ‘While we accept the premise that high-density development is desirable at major transport hubs, we consider that the quantum, scale and massing of the development is too great for the character of the area.’ The report continues: ‘We are particularly concerned about the height of the propo...

Of course, just after I write a minorly stinging post about CABE in the Gateway, I read Serota's interesting piece in BD (subscribers only) about the role of CABE. I will just quote the whole lot rather than post comment: It is the lot of advisory bodies, especially those funded by government, to be on the receiving end of accusations that they are either not toeing the line by slavishly praising the latest government policy initiative, or that they are supine recipients of taxpayer largesse, content to do the government's bidding. As is widely known, much of what we do on specific projects is pre-planning, and does not, therefore, make the sort of shock-horror headlines that are BD's stock-in-trade. That work is not something we brag about. We have no desire to expose to criticism architects, clients and planning authorities who are trying to improve significant projects by involving Cabe at a stage when design is fluid, and change is still economical in terms of both tim...

The Tate Modern in London has emerged as the hot favourite to house the soon-to-be-created National Centre for Creativity & Innovation. Other London contenders include the Argent's King's Cross development, Paddington and even the Thames Gateway, although this would probably be considered too remote. A northern centre will also be established, on the Quayside in Gateshead, between the Sage building and the Baltic. The London Development Agency has commissioned a feasibility study from the Whetstone Group, and will be advised by an panel of experts - including Norman Foster, Tate director Nicholas Serota, Terence Conran and Design Council chief executive David Kester. Tate Modern, which is to significantly extend its empire to designs by Herzog & de Meuron, is also tipped to house a new Design Museum, which will be moving out of its Thameside home on Butler's Wharf by 2012. The Design Council is likely to merge with the new centre, to create a significant new design ...

A consortium of museums and academic institutions in South Kensington have been granted £3m in the Budget to pro-actively reduce carbon emissions. Businesses in the area will apparently be fitted with meters that will measure energy consumption, and this data will be used "to develop a more integrated strategy for the whole area. We want to put in district systems for the area such as aqua-thermal storage systems." The project will be monitored by the Treasury, and hopefully evolve into a best practice model. Good news joined-up thinking-wise. Shame that this morning I woke up to 'Today' on Radio 4 telling us that we're all doomed and it's far too late to do anything about it. Via today's Building .

Everyone's been piling in to the Commons all-party Environmental Audit Committee report that yesterday gave virtually every lobby some tasty quotes to play with regarding the lack of infrastructure provision for the South-East housing growth areas. The best bit was their assessment of a "ODPM's reluctance to take on the building sector but also of a fundamental lack of urgency in the Government's approach to ensuring that new housing and new communities are truly sustainable" by not paying attention to the risks of drought and water shortages and the extra traffic and strain on services that an expanding population will bring. So the Countryside Alliance weigh in here . Prescott's reaction is here (quote: "The idea the government is going slow on infrastructure or the environment is absurd when we are increasing energy efficiency in new homes by 40 per cent this April and investing billions already in the Thames Gateway and other areas to support new ho...

We all love CABE, in the same way as we all love Marks and Spencer. It's aims are laudable and its full of some lovely people, but inside we all know its slightly ineffectual, hung up on due process and lacking flair. But when Yvette Cooper announces that she's asked CABE to "carry out a review on the identity of the Thames Gateway to provide a starting point for developing a strategic approach to design" I'm afraid we do all heave a sigh. To be honest, this is simply not CABE's job. CABE is good at design review, reasonable at some forms of training, and its good practice publications are often quite nice if a bit safe (in the M&S knickers way) and have a tendency to pile up on the desks of local authority officers who think that they don't offer enough specific advice (especially in rural areas). But vision? identity? I think not. But then, seeing as she thinks that The Bridge, Dartford " will encapsulate what the Thames Gateway is about - cre...

A new report by Davis Langdon has warned that the Olympics will be a drain on the construction skills market and may have a significant impact on the rest of the UK, causing other projects to potentially fail. It adds that the Olympics will add a further 1-2% to current inflation trends, with an overall rate of 6% from 2008 onwards, the risk of price spikes in certain locations during 2007/08 and 2010 as projects come on stream, and that projects unattractive to contractors would struggle to achieve competitive or properly resourced bids. (via Building , subscribers only) Meanwhile after intense speculation this week, Building also reports that Stanhope have sold their stake in Stratford City. This is expected to lead to a bidding war between Westfield and the Reuben Brothers for each other's stake, in order to gain total control of the lucrative development. This all comes at the same time as sources close to the Olympic Delivery Authority are leaking news that it is facing a subs...

Several people asked me yesterday about the article in the Guardian about a RICS report on the increasing privatisation of what used to be public spaces, by developers hiring private security guards and policing the streets and spaces. Unfortunately one of the images used, and the first paragraph, mentioned the recently-approved Kings Cross Central development, which we worked on as public realm strategists. Needless to say, we were rather surprised to see the connection being made as Kings Cross is actually not going to be policed privately and is going to produce (pace the local authority planners) "genuinely public streets and squares" for which the scheme has been applauded. If you do manage to read down to the bottom of the article, you will see that in fact, Kings Cross is singled out as the one large development which is taking a different attitude. "Camden council, north London, appears to have bucked the privatisation trend. It has struck a deal with Argent to ...

Work has started on the 'eco-park' at the centre of the New Islington development, Urban Splash 's high-profile scheme in Manchester which features controversial house designs by FAT and some masterplanning by Will Alsop. Obviously they all say it will be great. The Joseph Rowntree Foundation and the Housing Corporation have launched yet another guide to creating mixed 'sustainable' communities. I haven't read it but I know what it will say. Mixed tenure, mixed economy, schools and parks and youth clubs are good things, being able to access public transport is also a good thing, and hey, all will be well. Apparently Neighbourhood Management Pathfinders are successful. Well, anything that actually gets the different providers of social and public services talking to each other has got to be an improvement on the current situation where I constantly find no-one ever knows what the next department over is doing. There's a new regeneration company in Harlow...

The English House Condition Survey , out today, reports that social housing conditions are much improved since the last ten years. It claims there has been an overall reduction of one million social homes and 400 thousand vulnerable private sector households living in dwellings failing to meet the Decent Homes Standard since 1996. Well, things may be better but in 2004 there were still a fairly shocking 6 million (29%) officially non-decent homes as measured by the standards. And on the same day, it was announced that another £29m was going to the East Midlands to bring homes up to the Decent Homes Standard. It's actually not much money, I don't think. The average cost of making a home decent is £7,028 totalling over £47 billion for all non-decent stock. And the DHS is very much a basic level of housing, meaning that homes have adequate insulation, a working heating system and other pretty basic things, though the insulation standards are difficult to meet for older homes, es...

In another guise, this would be a proposal from Rem Koolhaas, in line with all he's written about Delirious New York and other crazy stuff. But actually, it's a developer-led, and very real, project to build a skyscraper in Birmingham that will house a freefall parachute drop the outside of the tower, a flight trainer taking thrill-seekers over the edge of the tower terrace 300 feet up, a gyro tower ride which will take up to 50 passengers to the highest point where they can enjoy a panoramic view, a bungee drop ride, an eight seat giant drop, and a high level seesaw ride. It will be illuminated with laser lighting, making it visible for miles around and accentuating the iconic nature of the development. Two storeys at the top of the building will comprise a restaurant and integral bar, observation area with bar/cafe, three ride lifts and one service lift. It's just been submitted for planning permission and as it has been developed very much in partnership with the city c...

David Cameron is very much in the news right now with his emerging views abou regeneration, housing and other related issues. Central is his assertion that housebuilding to solve social inequalities is the way forward, and those who oppose new development are "bananas" - people who want to 'Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anyone'. "How can we bridge the widening gulf in our society between those who benefit from being on the property ladder and those who are kept off? This is a challenge that goes to the heart of the sort of society we want to build. For pressing reasons of social justice, and economic efficiency, Britain needs to spread the benefits of ownership more widely." Ideas include rewards for areas that welcome new development (surely a strange sort of bribery?), changes to planning law to apparently 'build beauty in' to new housing (how on earth do you define beauty?), and environmental sustainability measures. He's also advoc...

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 competitio...

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. Aft...

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.

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...

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 sis...

I really wonder if initiatives like this make the foggiest bit of difference, or whether they are the design equivalent of greenwashing in the CSR/environmental field. Maybe we need a new term - design-washing doesn't really work - anyone got any ideas? It's all well and good to be a 'design champion' but if all it means is more crap 'modernist' blocks rather than crap noddy boxes, it really doesn't cut the mustard. How are these guys going to be trained to know what they are talking about? and it's not as though many people have that much faith in CABE's training schemes either... Senior executives at six of the country's biggest housebuilders have joined CABE 's design champions initiative. CABE has challenged every publicly quoted volume housebuilder to follow by appointing a board-level design champion with responsibility for delivering design quality. David Pretty and Stephen Stone, the chief executives of Barratt and Crest Nicholson res...

In a classic case of party political wrangling destroying the possibility of decent regeneration schemes, and wasting huge amounts of public money in the process, the Richard Rogers Partnership has decided to sever all links with its work in Birmingham. RRP is abandoning its work on the City Park Gate scheme (after how much money on fees has been spent?) and to sever its links with the city. Rogers' decision was prompted by three years of political wrangling at Birmingham council, which culminated in the scrapping of his £180m Centenary Library on the City Park Gate site. RRP's exit could adversely affect the £6bn Masshouse regeneration project in the Eastside district of the city centre. A report by Gardiner & Theobald last July concluded that RRP would help the council secure government and external funding, as it would deliver an iconic building of international importance. A spokesperson for RRP added: "The Park Gate scheme was based around the library and the desi...

David Miliband, our Minister for Communities [yeuch to the job title] has a blog . This is interesting in its own right but one post was particularly pertinent to my own concerns: Here he writes: I have been sent a thoughtful book called Transforming Cities: Revival in the Square by Nick Corbett, which takes this simple idea - pride in the public realm - and applies the concept to public space. A lot of the excitement about modern urban renewal is focused on new buildings - the Sage in Gateshead; the Bullring in Birmingham... But the argument of the book is that healthy communities depend on shared space and not just shared buildings. (By contrast tyrannical regimes tend to hate the idea of public shared space: the book points out that General Franco placed strict rules and control over the use of public squares). Public space creates community - from public art to cafe culture. The planning system gives Local Authorities the power to make a difference, and they need to use it. Yes, D...

Great piece in the Guardian today by Banksy about the literal whitewashing of Melbourne's vibrant graffitti scene before the Commonwealth Games, and a cautionary, well-articulated message for London: The precedent set by Melbourne does not bode well for London in the build-up to the 2012 Olympics. The games will be set in east London, where Hackney is one of the few remaining parts of the city where affordable studio space for artists still exists. After the warehouses have been flattened by compulsory purchase orders, the pots of grey paint will be opened and an area rich in street culture and frontier spirit will disappear. Factory doors whose flaked layers of Hammerite reveal history like the rings in a tree stump will be thrown on the fire. Disused cranes perched on top of foundries like skeletal crows will be torn down.[...] This is not to say that every city should aim to look like the south Bronx, or that regeneration cannot be a good thing, but society's headlong march...

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 .

A little light amusement: check out the new blog from The Man from Below - a dangerously funny satire on the development of the Thames Gateway. I am the man from below. Current location: 15 feet below the forest surface, busy digging a tunnel, I must keep on going down for another twenty feet before I start going horizontal. Destination: near to the Thames Gateway, London. A place apparently for the future of housing as we know it, I've seen the plans, they don't look so good. My concept, my mission is to turn this around to make the Thames Gateway a sign of the future of living. We aim to build underground homes that are safe and hidden, to make a place that has its own fence, its own thing, its own personality, a new way of living, a new chapter for an old city, populated by likemided people, a one stop shop for ideas, no pylons, no wires going in, this place will have its own wires, its own government, my organization will make sure of that, a new future for us all will be ...

Bit late noticing this one - but it's been announced that Crest Nicholson, with a masterplan by Richard Rogers Partnership, has been picked by the South East England Development Agency to regenerate Southampton's former Vospers shipyard. The masterplan includes 1500 homes and retail and leisure facilities on a site that has been used for shipbuilding for more than a century.

The fight over the key Croydon Gateway site continues. The back story: Stanhope and Schroders own the land and want to do a scheme they are developing, but Croydon has chosen Arrowcroft as their development partner for the site, but their scheme was called in last week by the Government office for London for inquiry. Then on Monday night, Croydon Council decided to go ahead with a compulsory purchase order for Stanhope and Schroders' land. This would give the council the land next to East Croydon station, and allow it to implement Arrowcroft's arena-led mixed-use scheme. It is expected that the planning aspects of the project and the CPO will be heard at a combined inquiry now. Stanhope and Schroders promised to press on with their rival scheme despite the threat to their land. A spokesman for both companies said: ‘We've taken legal advice, which said that the CPO is not likely to succeed and we'll fight it all the way.' (via PW , again.)

Cor blimey, you spend a day out of the office on a job and you come back to a stack of things to blog up about. Sigh. Well, there's yet another Budget initiative here - "a review of the third sector’s role in regeneration backed up by the largest ever consultation of voluntary and community organisations." Yet another study, yet another hefty report - why can't Gordon do an actual project? We all know that the third sector is important in regeneration. Do you really need to spend stacks on a bunch of consultants doing yet more questionaires? and a new 'office of charity and third sector finance' within the Treasury? Well, maybe that's the only interesting bit. We all know that GB totally believes in delivery via volunteering and other things that he doesn't have to pay for. If/when he becomes PM we can expect to see a lot more of this so at least this initiative will be close to his heart. But I would rather see him giving proper funding to some of th...

One of the associated Budget documents is a new paper on the economic importance of city-regions. I can't be arsed to read it, I'm afraid, but if anyone else does and feels like summarising it, please leave a comment. From the blurb: As well as highlighting the importance of cities as drivers of economic growth and employment within regions, the document draws attention to the importance of the interaction between different strands of sub-national governance in maximising the economic potential of cities and regions. Blah blah. Doesn't it sound boring?

One of the most sought-after sites in the City, Ropemaker Place, has gone to British Land after a bidding war. It has planning permission for a Gensler-designed 23 storey tower. The company is expected to complete development in 2009 to fit in between the completion dates of its two other big City office developments. The other two are the scheme at 201 Bishopsgate (currently on site) and the Broadgate Tower, and the Leadenhall Building. (via PW )

A side note: our friend John Ritblat, head of British Land, is to be the new chairman of the London Business School, Property Week report [subscription only]. He's got a pretty varied range of non-commercial roles, as a member of the board of governors of The Weizmann Institute of Science, deputy chairman of the Royal Academy of Music, vice president of the Tennis & Rackets Association, and president of Snowsport UK, formerly The British Ski & Snowboard Federation. Well, one of us was skiing with him over New Years so can certainly vouch for his skill in that department.

Various development news coming out of the budget today and if I find time I will comment properly on it later. Gordon Brown confirmed plans to introduce a new planning gain supplement and real estate investment trusts in today's budget speech although he gave no further details on the plans to introduce the two schemes by the lunchtime news. Brown also pledged £970m to support shared equity schemes, which he said would help 35,000 first-time buyers onto the housing ladder. The housing benefit that was currently paid into shared equity schemes would be used to pay for further housebuilding. He also pledged an investment of £50m in electricity microgeneration technology to create renewable sources of energy such as wind turbines and photovoltaic panels for schools, businesses and local authority tenants. Other energy measures include a pledge to insulate a further 250,000 homes over the next two years and a new £1bn environmental and energy institute in the UK. Brown also revealed p...

Ten new strategies have been launched to help bring major investment and jobs to cities. The City Growth strategy, which puts business and business leaders at the heart of urban revitalisation, aims to generate enterprise in some of the most disadvantaged areas and under-represented communities. The DTI supported strategies are based on a model developed in the US by Harvard Professor Michael Porter and the Initiative for a Competitive Inner City (ICIC), and is led by private sector champions working in collaboration with various local sector bodies. The ten areas where a City Growth strategy have been launched are: Derby, Leeds, Leicester, Liverpool, Luton, Manchester, Portsmouth, London South (Deptford/New Cross), Heart of South London, and London Western Arc (Park Royal/Wembley/White City). Industry and Regions Minister Alun Michael said: "These ten new City Growth Strategies will help create the "can do" attitude needed to drive entrepreneurial activity in our cities...

Elephant and Castle's £1.5bn regeneration took a step forward last night with Southwark council approving two key developments. The decision gives the go-ahead for two mixed-use schemes by Multiplex with its joint venture partner, private equity firm Espalier, and developer Oakmayne Properties. Multiplex and Espalier are to develop a 147-metre, 42-storey residential tower at Castle House, 2-20 Walworth Road, London SE1. The 247,500 sq ft (22,993 sq m) scheme will include 408 flats, 30% of which will be affordable housing. Oakmayne is to develop a 458,000 sq ft (42,549 sq m) mixed-use scheme including three buildings. It will comprise 219 homes, a 219-room hotel, a five-screen arts cinema, 15 shops, a supermarket, three restaurants and a market square for 100 traders. The schemes represent around £200m of investment into Southwark and construction on both will start by the end of the year. (via Property Week [subscription needed])

I've written about making gnocchi before, so I won't repeat the recipe. But tonight some left-over mashed potato and some tomato sauce from the freezer made a delicious supper without me spending a penny on it. And I remembered to take a photo of the gnocchi just to encourage y'all to do it... There's nothing quite like homemade gnocchi - forget those glutinous bullets that come in vacuum packs - and there are hardly any simpler things. They take about ten minutes to make and two to cook. Do it!

Londonist is reporting (via Harry's Place ) that Ken's had a foot in mouth moment regarding the (very much Jewish) Reuben Brothers (of Stratford City fingers-in-pies) which allegedly included the statement "If they're not happy here perhaps they could go back to Iran." Hmm. You might have thought our Ken had learnt not to make those Jewish 'jokes'. And they come from an Iraqi Jewish family anyway, so he got his facts wrong too. Though bad race jokes are a trait he shares with other local authority top dogs: a nameless (Jewish this time) head of regeneration at a nameless borough recently called a senior German urban designer 'my little Fraulein', which wasn't really a smart move seeing as she works for the people who are basically his bosses these days. He also tried to play on being Jewish with another member of the same organisation, only to look a bit stupid when the other guy turned round and told him that actually, he had served in the Is...

News of an upcoming exhibition; the Thames Gateway Assembly at the Architectural Association. The exhibition will be a combined effort by AA Council members, current and past students and associated architects.

Our beloved Mayor has been told off for not being 'transparent' enough regarding his planning decisions, by the London Assembly's environment committee. It sounds like what they objected to was not enough consideration of 'environmental considerations' in relation to other planning requirements and targets for development. They are playing at politics, of course, as Ken isn't all about letting developers build with no respect for green spaces or other environmental factors - witness his recent statement about green building standards. And really, do any of us care about what the London Assembly members say?

Forgot to blog this last week (slap on wrist!) but the former chief exec of Crest Nicholson has been appointed to be the new chief exec of English Partnerships. Callcutt headed up Crest for 14 years, steering their transformation from a relatively unremarkable housebuilder to one that wins lots of awards (despite, I might say, some pretty dubious 'design' still being churned out), and recently retired. He became their deputy chairman, but will give up that post when he takes up his new job in May. He was originally a solicitor and I was interested to see that he is also a director of the BRE Trust , a member of the Law Society and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts .

After the financial crisis at Alsop Architects in 2004, and the collapse of the Public project (his largest current job) earlier this month it now looks like he's thinking about selling to the AIM-listed SMC Group . The difficulties of keeping a 'radical' architecture firm going - or some might say, a badly mis-managed one, having lost a lot of key staff after the last crisis.

A feature in today's Estates Gazette discusses current trends in the public house industry. The potential property impact of the smoking ban gets a significant mention - highlighting the notion that pubs without gardens, particularly of course those urban corner boozers - will face dramatic falls in value after the ban comes into force. Meanwhile the developer Pathfinder is gearing up to invest £25m in 20 newbuild public houses - many next to new housing estates. On the evidence of the newly-built 'Crow's Nest' in Seaham, one of the first of this programme, we can expect a flurry of twee many-gabled fancies garlanded with white picket fences. I recall a project initiated by the AR in the 1950's which led to a competition to 'design a 20th Century pub' - the results (from twee repro-trad to spidery festival of britain frameworks) were most peculiar. The chairman of the AR's parent company, Hubert de Cronin Hastings, was so disappointed by the results tha...

In my newly co-habitating state, I have a renewed realisation of quite what a kitchen crusader (some might say kitchen bully) I really am. Certain little habits: from traits about how to cut up certain vegetables through to my general preference for being the cook rather than the bystander, reading or working while someone else takes control of the food department. The other night a risotto was on the cards, which was supposedly to be cooked by the boy (and he is capable of making a fine risotto, though taught to do so by me, I do believe). But even before any chopping began I had taken the whole affair right out of his hands. I have an infallible sense of self-belief that I can cook virtually anything better than anyone else, and that other people will inevitably do something that they consider just fine but actually will ruin the dish to my refined tastes. I watch others 'disobey' my strict rules on certain things (how to make a pasta sauce being a particular fetish) and twit...

The controversial and thinly-veiled ODPM plan to basically demolish thousands of terraced houses in the North under the guise of 'Housing Market Renewal' has come in for fresh criticism after new figures from the Office of National Statistics show that growth areas in the North and Midlands will need 20,000 extra homes a year on top of the current rate of build. For any of you who aren't familiar with this whole caboodle, the idea is that terraced mill-worker houses a la Coronation St aren't suitable for today's housing market and by demolishing them you make the prices of the stuff you keep shoot up, 'adding value'. Whereas there is clearly another argument that asks why demolish lots of perfectly sound, historically interesting, and highly adaptable houses at the same time as you are advocating massive new housebuilding in other areas. There was, you may remember, that moment a year or two ago when the government was debating moving a lot of its offices ...

It has been a source of puzzlement to me that in developing the new Code for Sustainable Homes , the ODPM has found itself arguing for lower standards while the building industry, the environmental lobby and just about everyone else has been arguing for higher standards. But finally whatever illogical brain in Whitehall that's behind all this has seen sense and the ODPM have announced that they will be including tougher standards. All for the best, although the debate over it was really necessary to replace the Ecohomes rating with a new code will continue. The new code will be mandatory for all publicly-funded homes, i.e. most social housing.

The Barking Riverside development, famously vetoed by London Mayor Ken Livingstone last year on the grounds that it was not supported by public transport infrastructure, has had a boost this week with the announcement of approval for a DLR extension runnng from Beckton to Dagenham Docks - and right through the proposed scheme. This move was optimistically lauded as an example of Government beginning to invest in the Thames Gateway... From today's Building Magazine .

...are Bill Dunster of BedZed fame and PRP architects , he announced at MIPIM. He want to use their 12-unit key worker scheme in Brixton as an exemplar project and recommend that the same kind of technology be used across the city. How this works within a legislative framework is of course to be decided. But Ken really is taking the whole thing pretty seriously - I think he has not only got genuine concern for environmental issues but sees it as another area in which he could leave his mark on the city and ensure his legacy. So be prepared for some pretty radical new guidelines coming up.

My old colleagues at Haworth Tompkins are in the shortlist for 200 homes as part of the first phase of the massive Elephant and Castle regeneration. Southwark have done quite an interesting thing by drawing up a panel of sixteen firms for the various parcels of the first phase, including a lot of relatively young and interesting practices as well as some safe pairs of hands. In other news down there, our friends at Lend Lease and the other big boys have been given till September to submit their bids for the main chunk of the masterplan - a major time extension as they were meant to be chosen around now. Southwark council also revealed that Elephant & Castle will be the first regeneration project in London to establish a major off-grid energy scheme, with a proposal for combined heat and power and other renewable technologies going to the council executive next week.

Our spy in MIPIM checked in with us this morning suffering from a cocktail-induced hangover and with plenty to tell. Most of it is unprintable if I want to stay out of the courts. But s/he has gatecrashed £400 ticket parties, nearly gotten thrown out of a party that she legitimately attended, chased after various powerful and somewhat lecherous men in search of new work, had some really good meetings, some really bad meetings, and has been asked to give an impromptu speech 'on-stand' for which the hangover is not really helping. But my ability to describe the trials and tribulations of MIPIM is nothing compared to the comic genius of Ian Martin in today's BD . It's not been uploaded to their online version yet but take it from me, he tells it like it is. TIPPL is abbreviated French for "Exchange of Ideas Between Creators of Epic Space". But if you run it through the online translator you get "International Confluence of Drinking and Property and Immobili...

Ken likes Kingston for it being the first borough to produce a plan to implement the Mayor's Transport Strategy. "Key areas of the LIP include extra road safety and cycling initiatives as well as improving accessibility and journey times." Yawn. Bless.

I haven't read the new book from Mike Davis (of City of Quartz fame) - but Salon.com has . From their review, it sounds like pretty doom-laden stuff - and of course, in a lot of ways he's right: slums are growing faster than the cities that they surround; by 2020, the world will have around 1.5 billion slum dwellers and 'solutions' to lifting these hordes out of desperate poverty are pretty thin on the ground. But it is very Davis to posit that Baghdad today is the city of the future - a kind of LA on (even more) crack, "with the police helicopters of the first world's gated communities perpetually hovering over the permanent low-grade conflict of the Third World's smoldering slums." Not inevitable, I don't think. There are other futures out there for the new megacities which aren't necessarily the archi-chic of Koolhaas's 'analysis' of Lagos which Salon posits as its alternative. I'm not sure whether a "giant hive of reco...

Yesterday at Mipim Ken vowed to stamp down on 'renegade' boroughs who dare to disobey his plans. Livingstone revealed that there had been a recent "surge" in planning rejections among London borough councils, citing Lambeth as one of the worst examples, where some 44% of applications were rejected last year. "There is a proposed scheme at Clapham Park in Lambeth, which we think would go a long way towards regenerating that area, but it's being held up because the council is afraid about the noise and disruption to local neighbourhoods," he said. "But honestly, do people really come to London expecting the stillness and calm of the Cairngorms?" Classic Ken. (Let's ignore the bit in the State of the Cities report where it said that over half of London's population would actually rather live in a rural idyll) He also took on the government a little bit, and David Miliband has reason to be scared: Referring to the current planning revi...

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 betr...

More culture schmulture. Don't get me wrong, I spend my days preaching about the value of culture. I just don't mean quite the same thing by that word as everyone else. Whereas the lovely EEDA thinks "Without culture, a community is bereft of a soul and can never be considered sustainable." Ah, poor unsustainable communities, bereft of 'culture'. Does it never occur to any of these idiots that 'culture' exists everywhere there are human beings, not just where there's a EEDA-funded National Centre for Carnival Arts. (I joke not. In Luton. Anyone see that doing a Public in a year's time?) Wake up - culture isn't about art and 'creative industries quarters' full of sub-standard potters and watercolour galleries. Culture is the fact that people like to go skateboarding and play football, as well as learn the clarinet or go to dance classes. It's learning that Canning Town is actually a major centre of pigeon-racing in the south-eas...

Another report from New Start. Apparently Manchester is going to "break the clone towns mould by creating thriving hubs of independent businesses in disadvantaged communities. Details of the ‘creative hubs’, comprising independent facilities such as restaurants, food shops, bars and art galleries, will be included in Manchester’s city growth strategy next week." Oh, the originality. Bars and art galleries will definitely save the "16 wards south of the city centre in which almost a third of adults have no qualifications and more than half those of working age are either unemployed or economically inactive." Instead of 'clone towns' you get clone creative quarters - pockets of graphic designers who relish the urban grit of working in the ghetto but go home at night to their comfortable semi or loft conversion. I wish that Richard Florida had never written that bloody book - it's actually pretty good, but has been horrendously misinterpreted by dumb city...

Apparently Scots lack interest in regeneration . Well, I'm tempted to say, I can understand why. All those acronyms, meaningless quangos, complicated funding mechanisms, annoying consultants running all over the place. Who would want the dreaded R-word on their patch? But seriously. Some professor of cities in Glasgow has criticised the Scottish establishment for not doing enough work in 'deprived areas'. ‘Scottish Enterprise will go on about people and business but places will fall down the agenda. Scottish Enterprise tends to view regeneration as a back door to welfare policy.’ The counterpost from Scottish Enterprise was that "We want to link disadvantaged areas to the growth agenda rather than tackling the problems of need in that community. The problems of deprived areas will not be solved in those areas." - which all seems sensible enough. And very Adam Smith too, at the risk of making a bad Scottish joke. Link up the poor to the bits that are 'growing...

Deciding to have a quick glance at the Thurrock UDC 's website today just to see what they've been up to, I happened to look at their new masterplan [pdf] for Purfleet, one of the areas that we looked at in detail on our project in the borough. When we presented the work from our project, which was commissioned by the borough council and various other agencies, the UDC (then in its early stages) told us in no uncertain terms that they weren't interested in any of our ideas despite the wide consensus among other local stakeholders supporting them - that they would do all their own work, thank-you-very-much, and that basically we weren't ever going to be able to influence their masterplanning so our project was a waste of space. So imagine my surprise to find, on pages 59, 61 and 75, some drawings that I personally drew for our project, used without any credit whatseoever in their document. You really might think they had more respect than to go to our website, download...

I love the seriousness with which only a Brit can address the subject of public lavatories. Yes indeed, today's Guardian contains 565 words on the subject by one of our revered London Assembly members - how the state of the nation's loos are a national embarrassment, a threat to public health and a major threat to our quality of life. I shouldn't mock. Of course, I believe whole-heartedly that we should have a revival of good old-fashioned municipal loos complete with semi-grumpy attendants. But a whole raft of initiatives and policy-talk that ends with the statement "And finally there should be twice as many women's toilets as men's to cut down on the queues. And when planning new toilets we want baby-changing facilities in men's toilets as well as women's - men change nappies too!" -the revelation! surely a little merriment is allowed. Petitions in parliament soon, I hope.

Interesting article in the Washington Post about the increasing income disparities and need for social housing in Tokyo at the same time as developments like the famous Roppongi Hills - 'compact cities' within the city, with high-rise luxury apartments and retail, offering a complete lifestyle, are becoming more and more common and successful. "We are seeing our society divided up by income," said Masahiro Yamada, a sociologist at Tokyo Gakugei University. "If we keep going like this, we will see the creation of slums in Tokyo even as more places like Roppongi Hills go up for those with extraordinary incomes."...Over the past five years, the number of Tokyo's 100-yen shops -- akin to dollar stores in the United States -- has nearly doubled. Yet over the same period, the number of local outlets of the French fashion house Chanel has jumped from 24 to 37. Roppongi Hills is an extraordinary development in both its absolutely astronomical expense and also ...

Londonist reports on two new proposed skyscrapers - one at Fenchurch Street by LandSecs (replacing what I think is a fairly elegant if not world-beating 1960s highrise with a rather ugly Vinoly building shaped weirdly like a 1980s mobile phone - see picture) and another on the Isle of Dogs by Rowan Asset Management, developers of the nearby Glengall Bridge, which apparently will have a lot of 'affordable housing' in it. This also has a rather dubious shape by Sheppard Robson. It really is not pretty but also goes right against the development framework set out by the local authority so will need a lot of negotiation to get it through (hence the affordable housing sweetener, I would think).

Today's Guardian has a profile of Michael Heseltine, back in the public eye as he heads up Cameron's new urban task force. He mentions the Docklands and the nascence of the Thames Gateway, as well as walking Liverpool during the Toxteth riots. The profile makes him a man from another time, talking of 'noblesse oblige' and reclining on antique sofas surrounded by Quinlan Terry-designed bookshelves. A long way from the bogey figure he once was - but I'm sure we shouldn't be swayed by the image of the ageing, 'elegant' millionaire. It'll be interesting to see his ideas after ten years of Labour policies that have adopted the concepts that he created, taking the idea of public-private partnerships in urban renewal to the heart of their agenda.

Yesterday at the market in my lunchbreak, again contemplating supper, my eye was caught by far too many good-looking things. Bunches of baby artichokes, with long stems and leaves; mizuna; the dramatic scorzanera roots; bundles of raazor clams, their bodies lazily poking out like tongues onto the ice; langoustines. I resisted all those on the basis of economy, but I couldn't resist the purple sprouting broccoli, my absolute favorite vegetable. So good. And then on the fish stall, I saw cods' roes all laid out for a cheap price, and remembered the delicious recipe I'd read in 'guru' Slater's book for real taramasalata, so I bought one of those. Then cheese from Neal's Yard (we get a fantastic discount due to working in the same building) and an oak-leaf lettuce, and some beautiful rhubarb stems. I didn't want any meat after the previous night's poussin and quite a lot of eating out this week. I didn't really have a plan for how all these things mi...

At the market in my lunchbreak, considering what to have for dinner, I found a row of poussins for £2 each. Rather a bargain, I thought. We had spuds and some lovely pyramidal spring greens at home, and in the Bengali supermarket on Brick Lane, of all places, I found a bunch of tarragon. I absolutely love tarragon chicken, and haven't had it for ages. In fact, I realised I hadn't eaten chicken at all for a long time, somehow it being displaced by cravings for wintry red meat, and then the craving for fish thaat comes when too much red meat has been consumed. The poussins, with a generous amount of tarragon pushed under the skin, roasted up a treat in 40 minutes, and they were perfectly succulent, the legs pulling away from the body with ease. While the birds were cooking, I soaked a few pieces of dried porcini that I always seem to have hanging around, and while they rested, I stirred them and their liquid into the pan, scraping up all the yummy bits, making a rather classy sau...

Not together, I hasten to add. But rather, a sublime piece of beef, simply roasted, which was perhaps the most succulent and tender, melting piece of that animal I had ever tasted, with perfect roast potatoes and slightly crunchy braised red cabbage. The beef came from the countryside, hacked off from a vast slab of the stuff that the butcher brought round one Saturday to the kitchen door, and it was absolutely amazing. And then, it was followed by the baked chocolate pudding out of Nigel Slater's kitchen diaries, perfectly translated. The girls swooned. And the best bit about it? With the exception of the cabbage and a green salad, it was all made by the boy.

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 po...

A quick news round-up (so you don't have to read the damn thing) of this week's Building Magazine. Nothing that exciting to report this week, I'm afraid. The cover story is about students not getting paid properly, or at all, by high-profile architects. It's nothing that any architect won't be aware of and that we all join in condemning round the pub on Friday nights. But I'm not really sure that Building Magazine running four pages on it will really change a thing, I'm afraid... Ed Balls's column is a rather odd ode to how great CABE is and its role in critiquing PFI projects. Seemingly this stems from him having commissioned Irena Bauman to do his house extension, and then finding out that she's a CABE commissioner. Whatever. Keith Clarke, head of Atkins, is trying to get EU funding for R&D into construction technology and sustainability, among other things. Sounds pretty interesting, actually - the steering group for the application includes ...

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 posts on this are here and here )

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 )

A trickle of comment from the press is starting to filter through. I'm actually surprised there wasn't more on my newsfeeds today - the decision came through late but not that late last night, and certainly in time for web and broadcast media to post it up. But hey ho, maybe no-one else is quite so interested in a derelict patch of hidden London as me. Here is Guardian comment mentioning that KXC will not have any chain stores in the development apart from a few around the station, and three small supermarkets. "We are doing this to make King's Cross a destination you are drawn to by the bookshop with great South American authors, or the best canoeing shop in London or the best fashion shops," said Peter Bishop, Camden council's chief planner. The Ham and High is quick off the mark with a comment piece , a piece specifically on the opposition to the scheme which mentions one thing I didn't know - that the former chair of the planning committee is under i...