bottom drawer

Last night I started to write a post with reflections on working in local government, on the occasion of moving on from my role at the Greater Cambridge planning service. This morning I checked my phone to find the news that Richard Rogers had died, prompting a host of other reflections on what public service means for an architect.  When I was looking for Part 1 jobs in the early 2000s, people were starting to talk about this unit that had been set up in the new Greater London Authority - run by Richard Rogers, no less. The Architecture + Urbanism Unit, or A+UU, was suddenly the place to be. The most talented of my graduating cohort, Emily Greeves , got a job there, and over after-work pints we would hear exciting stories of how they were radically changing the city from their messy studio in City Hall.  The A+UU made working for the public sector aspirational - something that hadn't occurred to me before. But apart from the A+UU itself (I wasn't brilli...

Everyone in the planning and architecture world has been trying to desperately get some insight into the approach that new Secretary of State, Michael Gove, might take to the vexed question of planning reform. There has been plenty of speculation and few actual pronouncements, but this week his comment that the idea of Street Votes - as proposed by the Policy Exchange , a thinktank - was a ' cracking idea ', gave commentators something to grab hold of. The concept of Street Votes is that residents of a street could band together to develop a 'street plan' which, if approved by a supermajority of votes in a mini referendum, would then permit whatever it contained to automatically gain planning permission.  On the face of it, how democratic and what a great way to avoid planners having to determine lots of individual planning applications! And how fantastic for the property owners, who could all stand to profit by building extensions or even whole new homes by subdividing...

On Wednesday I went, with a HAT colleague, to Essex County Council's High Streets Business Summit at the decidedly un-High Street venue if Hoyland House,  as an opportunity to get back to in-person networking and hear some perspectives on where next for the High Street. Great to reconnect with some good people from across the area, and a few insights from the panel - pr should I say, disappointingly, the manel - they really could have done better on that, although it was great to have Holly Lewis from We Made That and other female speakers given short slots. Among some fairly predictable perspectives, it was good to hear Ojay Macdonald unpick the role of tax structures in shaping our town centres. With a good historical perspective on how we ended up where we are on tax, and the major issues regarding taxing immobile rather than mobile capital - bricks and mortar via business rates rather than the fluid money of online trading - he cut through a lot of guff effectively. He touched ...

Yesterday we went to see Hofesh Shechter's Political Mother Unplugged - a reworking of his work Political Mother from over 10 years ago, for nine young dancers from his apprentice company, at DanceEast in Ipswich. We are so grateful to have such incredible work available for us to experience, in the intimacy of a studio theatre, so close to home. Some apprentices - the dancers were outstanding, and the piece intense, emotional, at times painful.  I spend so much of my time working with words - writing, reading, editing, sharing stories and using words to analyse and persuade. As often, it took some time for me to turn off my word-brain and allow the non-verbal world of movement to sweep me under. The wonder of dance and music is, for me, the chance to do without words, without analysis, for an experience that can mean something completely different to each person on the audience. Once in that world, it is hard to decompress afterwards and try to put words to what has been experie...

This week has seen a lot of work at HAT on the new public realm projects we are working on for Colchester Borough Council and Colchester BID.  I can't emphasise enough how fantastic it is to work on projects that are literally on our doorstep. We are designing improvements for streets we walk through every single day.  Even so, looking at them through the lens of a project reveals things I had not known at all. Helena and Katarina, in our team, have done some amazing research into the history and the present day of these streets and spaces. Dredging up old photos from the library round the corner and paintings from the local museum archive, standing on street corners counting people, bikes and cars, taking photos of all the pavement types in the town centre has been totally illuminating. (My contribution was finding a couple of Nigel Henderson photos of our patch in the Tate's online archive - they must have been from when he was teaching at the Colchester Sch...

Last week was certainly an eventful one as, at the Greater Cambridge Shared Planning Service, we launched our big Local Plan consultation on 1st Nov. This is the third major plan-making stage I've shepherded out into consultation at GCSP and slightly bittersweet as I'm moving on at the end of the year. But it also shows exactly why I'm moving on. The launch went really smoothly - and I know the team can now build on a solid foundation of engagement and communications practice that I've helped develop. We've got the interactive map which links through to the full digital plan , we've got three gorgeous videos  on targeted social media placements which have already had over 20,000 views, we've got great illustrations to show that planning isn't just blobs on a map, and we've got over 30 events , online and in-person, from youth club sessions to community coffee mornings and webinars that are actually interactive, not just chalk-and-talk. Already we...

One of the things about localgov work is that it doesn't often fit neatly with family life. There are limited windows in the year between elections to get stuff through member scrutiny and out to consultation between election cycles. Having spent all August getting a massive amount of planning work into Council scrutiny at the start of September, I've now spent all of half term preparing to launch a big Local Plan consultation on 1 November. Luckily our half term plans were blown off course anyway by a child catching Covid, so it was lockdown at home for one half of the family, while the other half went jollying up to Scotland 🤔 Last weekend I spent a lovely evening talking to with my old friend Ambrose Gillick for his podcast A is for Architecture . I talked about planning and participation and what it is I try to do. Then this week has been a flurry of logistical preparations, writing briefing notes about everything under the sun while overseeing printing, digital plan finet...

  I was asked to give a 'provocation' last week to a workshop led by the Glass-House Community Led Design and Urban Design London on co-designing design codes. My thoughts below are not exclusively about design codes, but could apply to any co-design process in the built environment. I wrote this thinking about my own two Gen-Z kids and I was rather aware - when giving this provocation - that most of the audience were in their later years in life. What if the only people we should be co-designing with are Gen-Zs? The new National Planning Policy Framework asks Local Plans to look forward a minimum of 20 years, and that this should be at least 30 years if you are planning for strategic scale new developments – the kind of things for which design codes are intended – new communities, new villages, urban extensions, major regeneration sites, which take decades to build out. Someone who is 65 now – possibly the typical person who has the time and energy to...

Over the last couple of years I've become slightly obsessed with thinking about how things end. How organisations, businesses, masterplans, policies and, of course, buildings come to the point where they are redundant: superseded by the change that happens around them.  Cassie Robinson's brilliant blog How do we help things to die?  crystallised a lot of those thoughts for me and I've been considering how this applies across a whole field of things ever since. I admired how FAT announced their disbanding rather than fizzling out through mediocrity like so many architecture practices. I've been involved with some charities and one came perilously close to shutting down, prompting a lot of thought about when a charity's mission is complete, or when it no longer becomes relevant.  I've watched buildings be built for all the right reasons, but with little thought to the sustainability of the organisation that they were built for, resulting in disillusionment in the...

I really enjoyed reading Dan Hill's piece on  Small Vehicles of Sandhamn  this week. Our family spend a disproportionate amount of time discussing our vehicle choices, trying to interpolate between what we all know about the hideous carbon cost of car travel, what I learn through my work as a planner about mobility trends and possible approaches to reducing car use, and what the pressures are of living in a rural house with two early teenage kids, and working in jobs that involve site visits and physical stuff in a way that few 'professional', supposedly desk-based jobs do. Every year at about this time, we sit down and look at the new weekly schedule to try and organise the logistics with the aim of minimising the amount of car use. Its a fiendish job that involves a lot of tortuous negotiation and trade-offs, and refinements (usually, more car use) once the flaws in the perfect plan are exposed through being tried out in practice. School: not exactly too far to cycle but ...

Recently we developed a scheme where we didn't show the clients or the planners any design options, and they approved it. In detailed design, we showed the client a couple of design options for a particular tiny detail, thinking they would see so clearly why the one we preferred would be better than the other, only for them to all like the option we thought was worse, and with no logical explanation as to why. Recently we presented a scheme that, we thought, had a strong logical response to brief and difficult site conditions, and an attractive design presence, only for the planners to ask us for lots of other design options because they didn't 'get' why it was designed as it was. We duly prepared a lot of other design approaches, but because the underlying premise, brief and site constraints, and the designers working on it were, of course, the same, they all had a similarity. The planners still didn't like them. In fact, they liked the version that we thought was ...

I'm not gonna lie, this week has been tough. But I'm not going to focus on the people and the things that made me blue, but on a few tidbits that inspired me and cheered me up between the bad bits. Firstly my brilliant friend Ben Yeoh has a podcast where he chats to a whole range of interesting people. Some madden me with their worldview, but as Ben says, you've got to listen to all kinds of voices; but some provide insight and entertainment and I certainly found that in his podcast with C Thi Nguyen about games, philosophy and food. Lots of insights into what makes a game, and what happens when we intentionally/unintentionally gamify things. I won't spoil it too much, just have a listen. Secondly, I made a really good dinner on Monday night that went down brilliantly with all the family. I hadn't made a coconut based curry for ages, and it came about by accident as I was feeling pretty uninspired and tired, but it turned into almost a Thai red curry of sorts, wit...

I've been thinking a lot (even more than usual) about the issue of engagement and consultation in planning, and the barriers that exist to making it meaningful. Fundamentally we have a real issue in how planning, as a system, is set up. I have a much longer half -finished piece on this, but basically it operates on a judicial basis, yet with a statutory requirement for consultation.  It's a bit like saying saying that the general public should be consulted on a complex legal case before it goes to court.  In this system, consultation is not a decision-making process and, unless your comment/representation is backed up with well-researched evidence, it is likely to be outweighed by the huge amount of professionally produced evidence commissioned by local authorities themselves and by major development interests who submit reams of paperwork. Yet government - in their Planning White Paper - talk about foregrounding consultation. What is this really going to achieve, other than m...

Another super busy week. (This might be a theme.)  I had a great chat with Claire from the Planning Inspectorate about her new project investigating how AI might be useful to planners in analysing consultation comments,  or representations, as they are known in the regulatory jargon. I say a great chat, but I fear it was somewhat one-sided...Claire made the mistake of letting on that I wa the first local authority planner she'd spoken to, so I gave her chapter and verse on the challenges planners face in collating, analysing and presenting reps to PINS. If we could just send them a secure database link rather than endless PDFs, that would be a great start 😉. I've got a half finished post about this in more detail so I'll stop there. I sent out a  survey  this week to ask our cultural and digital community in Colchester what the way forward should be for the Creative Colchester Partnership, for which I am the new Chair. Already lots of great responses in, and if you ...

This week had the pleasure of two face to face meetings in one day! On Tuesday I went to Beth Chatto Gardens to meet director Julia Boulton, Beth's granddaughter,  and talk all things Jaywick Sands. We are collaborating with BCG's designer Lucy Redman on the design of the community garden as part of the Jaywick Works project, and we really want to expand what we can do with the project to involve the community as far as possible - with designing, training, creating, building, planting and caring for the garden. Obviously there's no money in the project budget for all this, but Julia is brilliant - can-do, down to earth, up for anything...so we are cooking up a plan. One of the benefits of the 'new' ways of working is that you can literally work from anywhere, so before my meeting with Julia, I sat in the shade of a tree in the garden, got out my laptop, and joined a teams call with Frances Brown of Nightingale and my colleague Paul Frainer to talk about local pla...

Giving the currently fashionable weeknotes format a try. I spend my week in a messy mashup between my two roles - as director of my own practice, and as Engagement and Communications Lead for the Greater Cambridge Shared Planning Service. This week, at GCSP,  I said goodbye to a fabulous colleague who I hired during the first lockdown and who I've only met once in person. Jo has been amazing, and it's such a shame that, b/c localgov, we couldn't turn her agency contract into a proper job. I'm now starting to try to find her replacement as the job she did is basically core to our service. We also won a few awards at the Planning Awards, which is a massive morale boost for the whole service. Sadly we didn't win the engagement award, but we lost to a truly outstanding projec t which sets a standard we are nowhere near yet. But we are trying- and I had a great conversation with a local secondary school about how we can work with their students to bring planning into th...

This week I started reading Elizabeth Jane Howard's The Long View. I am in awe of it already - a deep, gorgeously written, beautifully uncomfortable and smart exploration of a dysfunctional long-term relationship. At the start, the protagonist is 43 and feels irretrievably old; as the book goes on, time moves backwards, so we find she felt old at 37; and that's as far as I've got so far. She is as beautiful and discomforting as the book.  At 43, she has a daughter aged 19 and a son aged 25 or so, on the brink of marriage. As a just-turned-40 myself, I read this and imagine myself meeting a future son- or daughter-in-law, although our kids are still just into secondary school. I often feel barely out of being teenage myself, but I have become increasingly aware that, of course, the world doesn't see me like that. I'm not sure that the term 'matron' feels very 2021, but that's how I'm seen, most of the time. I have kids, some middle-aged spread, no-non...

So, it's been a long time. 13 year, two children, many projects, one pandemic (ongoing). But on and off, over the last year, I've been thinking how much I miss the regular practice of blogging - of writing, pretty much unedited, about what interests, preoccupied, frustrates or pleases me on a more-or-less daily basis. Plus, I have to say, I am needled (in a good way) by my great friends  Ben  and  Anoushka  who are brilliant bloggers, plus the new-ish fashion for weeknotes and Medium, but as I've got far more old school blog domains registered than I should, I thought I'd see what happens if I resurrect writing here. I have started to re-read my old blogposts here too, in case there are things that have aged as badly as a cricketer's tweets. So far I have decided to leave them as they are, but I haven't read them all, so if you find something that excruciating, or worse, please forgive. Blog mark 2, here goes...