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...