It seems that 2020 will go down in history not just for Covid-19, but also as a time when established thinking was challenged, hopefully for the better.
Whether it is race, gender or our entire way of working, people are questioning the orthodoxy, and increasingly looking for ways not just to rebuild our old world, but to forge a new one.
And some are doing with a style that Diary cannot match. Take author Leslie Kern, whose new book Feminist City highlights the “toxic masculinity” at the heart of our built environment.
Writing for The Guardian, she explains how with its “glass ceilings and phallic towers” the city is “filled with reminders of masculine power”.
And, citing decades-earlier work from American poet and professor of architecture Dolores Hayden, she notes how “architects un-ironically use the language of ‘base, shaft and tip’ while drawing upward-thrusting buildings ejaculating light into the night sky”. Does she have a point? Probably, yes, though Diary is perhaps not the best one to judge.
One thing for sure, though: wow, she has a way with words.
A dog’s dinner
Picking an in-house project name for your latest deal is a chance for creativity and a little fun. But not everyone will end up laughing. Just ask the real estate fund manager offloading a portfolio of less-than-desirable properties who chose to name the deal after his canine chum, given that “the assets were all dogs”.
Not the kind of in-joke you’d want the buyers of the buildings to discover, but unfortunately a colleague let the reasoning slip at a celebratory dinner to mark the closing of the deal. Still, every dog has its day.
Extended planning woes
A raft of fresh planning changes promise to unleash new development and help the economy recover in the wake of Covid-19. Last month, a frenzy of new legislation included extensions for some 400 consents due to expire this year. Cue champagne corks popping. And just two weeks later the draft guidance is here… and maybe time to put the bubbly back on ice.
Planning applications will automatically be extended, it begins. But they do need an “Additional Environmental Approval”, the guidance continues. All it takes is a simple application to the local authority with the necessary information, including the original screening, for a new decision.
If that was already feeling a little groundhog day for some, then consider those developers without an EIA, who have effectively seen their schemes bumped back to the start of the approval process. As one planner bemoaned: “Any largish consent will need to go through an approval process with the LPA – rather dilutes the key aim of ensuring housing is still being delivered.” As ever with planning, one step forward…
How’d you like them apples?
Housing secretary Robert Jenrick is well known for his fixation with “tree-lined streets” playing an integral role in his vision for housing. The National Trust has taken this one step further, demanding that those trees should, in fact, be fruit trees, and now London Square has specified a penchant for apple trees.
The developer will celebrate its 10th birthday by providing every new homeowner with a tree to plant. Chief executive Adam Lawrence says: “We are embracing a great tradition by visionaries such as Dame Henrietta Barnett, who presented apple trees to every home in Hampstead Garden Suburb when it was first built at the turn of the 20th century.”
He adds that “many of those trees still survive today.” Diary is very much looking forward to seeing how long the “apple tree-lined streets” of Holloway Prison, Croydon and Lea Bridge stay in bloom.
The V Factor?
It’s a good job chancellor Rishi Sunak found a spare £1.6bn down the back of the sofa to save culture and the arts, otherwise we might see more TV personalities forced to leave the small screen in search of work. Investment bank Goodbody got in touch to reveal a “V-shaped bounce in UK new home sales” with expert insights from its chief economist… Dermot O’Leary. Unless that’s a different Dermot O’Leary?
So here it is, Merry Christmas+
This year has been about as far from normal as most of us have ever experienced. So it is a great relief when something reassuringly predictable happens… like receiving an e-mail about Christmas in July.
Delivery firm ParcelHero predicts that the pandemic has so fixed regular home deliveries in our minds that online shopping will “remain at Christmas+ levels all year”.
It claims that, despite the high street reopening, demand for home deliveries has now become “evergreen”, with seasonal peaks and troughs a thing of the past. Sadly not the glad tidings of good cheer that retail tenants and their landlords were hoping for.
Love the tender
“Build, build, build,” Boris said. And Derbyshire Dales District Council listened. It has a “strategic objective to improve housing affordability in the area”, so has put out to tender a housebuilding programme that will deliver – drum roll please – a whopping 52 homes over seven years. Yep, that’s seven and a bit houses a year. For a contract worth £800,000. Nice work if you can get it.
