bottom drawer

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organisations, businesses, masterplans, policies and, of course, buildings come to the point where they are redundant: superseded by the change that happens around them.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...

It's been a while - but I'm hoping that for those of you who haven't trashed me from your RSS feeder, this will pop up as a little surprise. I've been busy - new house, new baby, and a new practice, HAT Projects , set up from our studio here in Essex and currently working on lots of fun stuff, including the feasibility study for a new art gallery in Hastings. All of which means a new blog, which can be found here , so I hope you'll all migrate over and have a look, and sign up to a new feed!

Studio swallows Originally uploaded by hanaloftus The swallows have flying lessons and fluff themselves on the wire outside the studio window where I work. Distractingly lovely creatures.

I thought this story was fascinating and strangely emotional. A team of Urdu calligraphers turn out a daily newspaper in Chennai that is first hand-written, then transferred to printing plates. It has a circulation of 20,000 and a staff of six, led by a 76-year-old editor whose son thinks it is all far too old-fashioned - "I understand Urdu, but have no interest in calligraphy." "In the meantime, the office is a center for the South Indian Muslim community and hosts a stream of renowned poets, religious leaders and royalty who contribute to the pages, or just hang out, drink chai and recite their most recent works to the staff. The Musalman publishes Urdu poetry and messages on devotion to God and communal harmony daily." There is something in this story about how newspapers perhaps should be - not just the endless churning out of barely re-written press releases but something more passionate and personal. It is perhaps how I imagine the offices of our earliest ne...

I thought this was a good piece of true BBC reporting, exploring whether all is as rosy as it seems in the creation of the 'exemplar ecocity' at Dongtan. None of it surprises me - that it will probably become a "suburb for the rich", that it is being accompanied by potentially disastrous development of shipyards and power plants nearby. But I have been surprised that the building and development press have so far been so blinkered as to the reality of what modern China means for projects like this. There is the kind of wishfulness (exemplified by much of what Norman Foster says) for the speed and decisiveness of a totalitarian government in making 'big things happen' - architects and developers appear to long for European systems to work so smoothly. But they seem willing to disregard the trophy nature of these projects; the lack of a strong environmental policy from China in any strategic way; the social consequences of mass relocation of people, moulding of...

DEFRA have launched their new online carbon calculator, as David Miliband proudly announced on his blog. I'll give you the link in a second, but don't all rush - because this has got to be a prime example of how not to design a user-friendly online tool. Think irritating flash popup that does that thing where it fills your entire screen. Then takes several minutes to load due to the volume of gratuitous animation. Then every time you fill in a question, takes ages to move onto the next one, and even more time when you finish a 'section'. And an html version that runs even more slowly, if that is possible. When all you need is a series of simple questions in html, with almost no graphics, running on a nice fast server so that you don't get so irritated that you stop bothering half way through and never do find out quite how much you are damaging the environment. I applaud the idea behind a good online calculator (this one includes a postcode function), but guys - th...

A quick update from a project that I'm working on in my birth county of Suffolk - the new initiative Suffolk: Creating the Greenest County (skeleton website here that we launched a couple of weeks ago) which is starting to gather momentum. Not nearly as fluffy as it sounds, the project is bringing together lots of passionate and active people in the county to strategise some ambitious targets, and the actions needed to get there. As part of this we're holding a conference in October that will spread the message wider to community leaders, business, and the local authorities, and start to get them all to consider what their organisations or communities can do to contribute to the bigger aims. It's very much going to be a hands-on event with a series of seminars on different themes that are all about stimulating discussion, creating learning opportunities and sharing experience from those who've already started to take action. But we're also talking high-level with k...

The debate that Nigel Lawson has so effectively ignited by arguing that we should concentrate on adapting to climate change rather than stopping it, is an interesting one and exactly mirrors a (less polarised) conversation I had a few weeks ago with one of the leading City investors in low carbon technology. It is foolish to claim that Lawson doesn't have a point. Climate change is happening, and even if we do manage to turn the ocean liner around, the emissions that we have already produced will continue to have an effect for many years, and it will be decades, if not longer, before the effect of any cutbacks we make now will be felt. And that's without even getting into the possible effect of feedback loops. It is not enough to put our collective heads in the sand, hope that the government legislates for carbon cuts and that the problem will go away. So like it or not, we have to concentrate on adapting to the effects of a warming climate. Strategies for our water resources...

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,...