bottom drawer

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 ...

Not only is the design bad (at the ‘Middlesbrough level of the Premiership – with some more akin to Watford, without, of course, the same fear of relegation’) despite the threat of Housing Corporation funding being withheld for badly designed schemes. But we should be building at twice the rate we are . The National Audit Office has published a rather damning report which says that the government is no longer accurately counting the number of units being built, and criticises the DCLG for "having no cost strategy". Hang on a minute - how can it have no cost strategy at all? Apparently they lack "a single costed plan for the programme to join up local initiatives". Forgive me, but that seems to be a basic omission. So it is business as usual in the marshlands of Essex and Kent - the government playing catch-up to the developers who are racing ahead on their own isolated patches, with a total lack of effective, strategic leadership, no matter what Judith Armitt may ...

Colin St John Wilson, seminal professor at Cambridge architecture department (where I studies though not, of course, under him) and best known or infamous as the architect of the British Library, died last week. It is funny how the press fell over themselves to eulogise him although most of them were very dismissive of the BL when it opened. But the reminiscences of him were largely just - his wide scope of interests (including an extraordinary mid-century art collection), his belief in a humane, nuanced and warm architecture, his admiration of Alvar Aalto (which prompted many borrowed architectural motifs) and his work at Cambridge. Like myself, and indeed like a former assistant to Wilson and subsequent Cambridge professor Peter Carolin, he actually applied to Cambridge to read History and switched to architecture. I most recently went to the new wing at Pallant House which houses his art collection in a building he designed in collaboration with MJ Long, his 'life' partner,...

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 fr...

Talk about the five 'eco-towns' that Gordon Brown would like to propose has filled the trade press and had significant mainstream press coverage too. Common mis-perceptions have been that these are actually new towns (they aren't - they are existing development sites or areas that he would apply new 'green' rules to), and he has also attracted criticism (epitomised by Jonathan Glancey ) that this is merely greenwash over the same old 'unsustainable' growth areas. Because Brown commissioned the Barker reviews of both housing supply and planning, and those reviews raised the hackles of people who, fundamentally, want to contain development and seem to believe it is impossible to build new housing developments that actually do have a sustainability of their own, sections of the commentators have already cast Brown as the bad guy who doesn't care - who wants to erase our green fields at any cost and carpet the land with Wimpey homes. But it may be that actua...

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 poli...

No, this is not about a failing inner-city school that has been found to have no outside space, but the most expensive new flagship school that is being designed not to have a playground. I thought this was quite an extraordinary story. The Foster-designed school in Cambridge will treat its pupils like employees so, it is believed, they will not require free time outside. What this says about our approach to workplaces is also somewhat weird. Most workers leave their office for lunch, even if only to stroll to the local sandwich shop - a degree of freedom the school's pupils will not be allowed. There are sports pitches, but no playgrounds - and an argument is being made that this will reduce bullying. But bullies do not need playgrounds to operate - and children do need spaces to learn to socialise and negotiate public behaviour. And in a word of warning the article ends: 'A school without a playground has been tried before - at Unity city academy in Middlesbrough, said to be...

A few items caught my eye recently among the burgeoning quantity of green-themed news... Seattle has approved an interesting new green building code that requires developers to provide elements from a menu that includes green roofs and walls, permeable paving, biodiverse habitats and garden space. Clearly modelled on the Malmo BO01 code, developers are awarded points per element, weighted according to their 'greenness'. BioRegional Quintain are the poster boys (and girls) of the zero-carbon development sector but CABE has criticised a current project for not carrying through its sustainable ideals in a more holistic way, in the masterplan. The 40 acre, 750 home scheme near Middlesbrough was masterplanned by Studio Egret West. The Think conference came up with a so-called 'action plan' in relation to environmental issues. Not sure what, if any, impact this will have. I'm intrigued by the idea of buildings having a master 'off' switch - something I've b...

The 'controversy' over HIPs and, in particular, the energy performance certificate part of them continues to rumble on in the media and in Parliament, though my hunch is that they are unlikely to be halted. I find it all a storm in a teacup (or should that be a hipflask?) and this Telegraph article to me sums up the fallacy of the arguments being made against them. So older buildings come out badly on energy performance? Well, that's not a flaw in the rating system, that's the point of the system. We know that old buildings are not efficient, and we also know that it's often hard to retrofit them so that they will ever be so. But that's the idea - to encourage people to buy houses that are more energy-efficient, and provide the incentives to upgrade the kind of stock that can be retrofitted easily. The idea isn't particularly to make life hard for the owners of £900,000 thatched farmhouses featured in the Telegraph - but they may as well come to terms with...

Billed as the 'world's first zero-carbon, zero-waste city' - I think Dongtan (covered recently by WIRED ) might have words to say about that - this is a Foster-planned project , to house 50,000, in the desert state. The hubris of the Gulf states knows no ends - and has ended up with a perfectly square walled mini-city (50,000 surely isn't really city-sized?) in the middle of nowhere, with a science and technology institute developed in conjunction with MIT, "research facilities; world-class laboratories; commercial space for related-sector companies; light manufacturing facilities and a carefully selected pool of international tenants who will invest, develop, and commercialize advanced energy technologies." Oh, and lots of monorails, which will provide the "personalised rapid transport system" for this car-free development. And "surrounding land will contain wind, photovoltaic farms, research fields and plantations, enabling the city to be enti...

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...