bottom drawer

I am a naughty blogger. But life has been busy in both personal and professional spheres with lots of exciting stuff. And to be honest I don't know when/if this is going to change massively but I will try to keep up. And in the thought that most people read this blog via RSS I'm resurrecting an old del.icio.us tag and splicing it into the feed so that at least I can track some of the interesting stuff that I come across but don't have time to post about properly. Very 'lazyblog' of me, I know...but needs must. Sorry. Meanwhile, one thing that caught my eye recently was this article by Madeleine Bunting touched on many issues that I'm interested in, though I don't agree with all of her analysis. I guess it depends on how you start thinking about the middle class, partly, as well as how you start to define 'rural' - and the countryside, in a broad-ish definition, is certainly not as homogenous or NIMBY-ish as she presumes.

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 Hu...

The £1bn Liverpool Baltic project has collaped into administration . Unbelievable, really, that such a massive project can be so badly planned and run. Everyone already knows this but in case you don't, British Land beat out Stuart Lipton's Chelsfield Partners to bag Euston Station's redevelopment . Apparently commercial development is at its highest level for three years. And Prince Charles will appear, bizarrely, by videolink at this year's Think regeneration conference, on May Day.

Oh, the Canadians. I had the task of submitting a tender for a Cultural Planning Toolkit to be funded by DCMS last year. We didn't get it, though we got close... But now I see that the Canadians have got there first and, from at least my very brief glance, done it better than anything resulting from a trial-by-committee British approach to such things. Here is their version of a CPT . Wonderfully, it doesn't even mention the word 'art' in the introduction, except in a sentence about European approaches. It talks about cultural planning as a "way of looking at all aspects of a community's cultural life as community assets...Understanding culture and cultural activity as resources for human and community development, rather than merely as cultural 'products' to be subsidised because they are good for us...and when our understanding of culture is inclusive and broader than the traditionally Eurocentric vision of 'high culture' then we have increase...

Oh, sorry...I've been way too busy to post recently. And am about to escape for Easter to a place with no internet. So here's a rather dry round-up of some recent things that caught my eye. Vinoly has beat Fosters on their own territory, winning the contract to develop plans for Battersa Power Station under its new owners. It will remain to be seen whether his plans will get built, however - given the lengthy history of discarded schemes that the site carries. Another in the list of white elephants, the always ridiculous scheme for a huge indoor ski slope in Sheffield is going down the pan, as the developer Menta is on the point of entering adminstration, with huge financial problems. The competition for designers for Barking Riverside has been launched. And in the Kent gateway, Land Secs is going to venture into housebuilding in order to keep closer control of the quality of its huge Ebbsfleet sites. With the growth of mixed-use as a sine qua non in contemporary development...