Among the hardest-hit industries during the pandemic, there is no doubt that cinemas have had it tough, with money-spinning blockbusters such as No Time To Die repeatedly delayed. But now that James Bond is finally returning to the big screen, let’s spare a thought for the real victims in all this – the opportunistic PRs forced to sit on their 007-related press releases for months.
So, congratulations, Checkatrade, your time is now. The website has crunched the numbers on how much it would cost to repair the “iconic” house that came a rather violent cropper at the end of 2012’s Skyfall. Checkatrade notes that Skyfall Lodge “sustained heavy damage from helicopter fire” and “grenades tossed through the windows” before “Bond himself triggered a huge explosion with a home-made gas canister bomb” (spoilers, sorry, for anyone waiting to binge-watch all the Bond movies when they are done).
All of which suggests a very heavy intake of breath through the teeth of whichever tradesperson is brave enough to take on this very odd job. Total estimate? A surprisingly low £1.8m. That’s less than Q would spend upgrading Bond’s wristwatch.
Kids design the darnedest buildings
It’s never too early to celebrate Halloween, as far as Diary is concerned. So, in the month of October, when Barratt London shares 3D renderings based on local schoolchildren’s inventive redesigns of London landmarks, we were obviously going to put six-year-old Ayan’s spooky revamp of the Shard as a giant orange haunted roller coaster (complete with ghosts and vampires roaming the tracks) on the page. Big Ben, Tower Bridge and a star-shaped overhaul of the London Eye are all fantastic, too.
Somebody get these kids jobs in city planning… or, at the very least, ask them what to do with the Marble Arch Mound. Compare the renderings against the original drawings here.
No time to diesel
Did we say opportunistic PRs? Hat-tip to the team at Acuitus for the most topical e-mail in our inbox this year: “As queues for fuel formed across the UK last week, investors at Acuitus’s latest commercial property auction showed similar persistence for a petrol filling station investment.”
The filling station close to London’s North Circular at Willesden, London NW10, which includes a Spar convenience store with Starbucks and Subway concessions, sold after concerted bidding for £4.58m. Which is one way to get to the pumps without waiting for hours.
Adonis admonished
Former Labour cabinet minister Andrew Adonis waded into the debate on business rates this week. And then probably wished he hadn’t.
“A message from a friend who is senior in the corporate sector,” he tweeted. “Labour is planning to scrap one of the only wealth taxes we have. Businesses don’t pay business rates, landowners do! Rents will increase by £30bn as a result.”
This might come as news to anyone who has ever paid business rates, but let us be kind and assume this was an attempt to point out that a landlord will charge whatever they think a tenant can afford, so if rates go down, rents will go up.
Nevertheless, this parsing of the Lord’s word did not wash with the Twitterati, who quickly inundated Adonis with what might politely be termed “corrections”.
“Not quite right,” tweeted Eversheds’ Bruce Dear. Others were less kind. “Pure misinformation”, “nonsense” and “simply wrong” they wrote, as well as the advice to go “back to school”. “Your friend is a fanny,” was a considered response, along with “you thick tw*t” and a simple branding of Adonis as “an arse”.
“Who is this dimwit?” asked one, while another, we imagine, hit the nail on the head: “Your friend is, if not imaginary, at least wrong.”
Barking up the right tree
Back in October 2019, Diary reported word that Barking and Dagenham was letting down its good name by being one of the least pet-friendly boroughs in the capital. Now, just two years later, new research hails it as London’s most pro-pet borough!
Diary won’t seek to take the credit for this remarkable turnaround, which sees an eighth of all properties on the resi rental market there described as pet-friendly, while the average for the City is just 4%.
Sadly, All About Cats, which strayed slightly outside its stated remit in compiling the research, did not say if the name of the borough was somehow a factor. Certainly, nominative determinism didn’t help Catford or the Isle of Dogs much.
Lacking interest
How much interest would you get on £3m in your bank account? £27, in one example spotted by auctioneer Allsop as it carried out routine identity checks on the buyer of one of its bigger commercial lots. OK, it’s not quite as bad as the negative rates seen in Germany, but it’s still less than the 0.1% Bank of England base rate.
Suffice to say the Allsop team was shocked. Small wonder, then, that the auctioneer is enjoying a stellar year as private investors sitting on cash continue to seek out more decent returns from commercial property. It has so far sold £323.5m through its commercial auctions this year, against a five-year average of £312.05m – and a quarter of its buyers are first-timers, who have presumably looked at their bank statements and wept.
