Thanks to Jon Bower, partner at Womble Bond Dickinson, for sharing the splendid snap above, taken after EG’s recent Question Time event in Bristol. With Diary having been looking both back and forward this week, it is fitting to see the past and the future encapsulated in a single photo.
As Bower put it on Twitter: “As I left @EstatesGazette #egqt hosted @SSGreatBritain the @TheMatthewShip was sailing past with the relatively newly regenerated Harbourside as a backdrop. That’s one of the many reasons which makes #bristol such a great place to live and work.”
Apparently, the Matthew of Bristol is a replica of the Tudor caravel sailed by John Cabot on his famous voyage of discovery from Bristol to Newfoundland in 1497. But Diary is sure you knew that already.
As I left @EstatesGazette #egqt hosted @SSGreatBritain the @TheMatthewShip was sailing past with the relatively newly regenerated Harbourside as a backdrop. That’s one of the many reasons which makes #bristol such a great place to live and work pic.twitter.com/RryHgfJthB
— Jon Bower (@jon_bower) May 15, 2019
City slickers
Last week, the Financial Times quit its South Bank HQ to move across the river to the City. Next week, EG joins the pink ’un in the Square Mile.
Like its colleagues, Diary is excited by the move, but we can all identify with the confused emotions described by one FT journalist when it comes to leaving a long-term corporate home. “I am frequently invited to other people’s offices to see the latest in design trends,” wrote Emma Jacobs, work and careers columnist.
“Despite the co-working spaces, sleeping pods, whizzy canteens, it had never really struck me that the FT’s office was outdated, even when I stumbled across the mice frolicking across our floors. It is only in the build-up to leaving that I have noticed the coffee-stained carpet and the greyness. It’s like falling out of love with a boyfriend and realising their honking laughter is not charming but rather annoying.”
EG is looking forward to falling in love again, with 99 Bishopsgate.
A moving story
As we say goodbye, we like to think that we have been instrumental in sharpening up Midtown. In the 15 years we’ve called Holborn home, we’ve watched hotels, restaurants and bars spring up around us. But all good things come to an end, and our move to the City will take us the furthest east we have lived in all our 161 years.
Born on Fleet Street in 1858, EG moved to nearby St Bride Street in 1887. Twenty years later, we headed the few hundred yards to Hatton Garden. Bombed out of there in 1941, by 1947 we were heading west to a new home on Museum Street. Within a decade we were on Denmark Street, until Centre Point’s development forced us into Soho in 1957. EG watched the area change from its office on Wardour Street for 40 years, before moving to our current home on High Holborn.
Given how long we’ve been around – and how little we’ve moved – It’s perhaps safe to assume that we’ll be in our new office for quite a while.
Thanks for the ad
Speaking of history, and our place in it, the great and the good gathered at the London Transport Museum the other night to celebrate the 220th birthday of property agent Farebrother. Addressing the crowd, senior partner Alistair Subba Row gave a (very) potted history of the firm – which included the fact that it had advertised in the very first issue of EG in 1858.
The ad (pictured below) was for the sale of various plots of Kentish land at an auction to be held at the legendary Garraway’s Coffee House, which was selling cups of hot java to Londoners more than 300 years before Starbucks came on the scene.
Sad to say, Garraway’s is no more, but both EG and Midtown specialist Farebrother are still going strong. It clearly pays to advertise…
Happy days
You can’t put a price on happiness, they say. Well, that hasn’t stopped lettings platform Howsy from trying. It has analysed data from the Office for National Statistics on the “wellbeing score” of each area of the UK, and, dividing the cost of renting in each area by this score, arrived at a league table of the happiest places to rent in the UK.
Top of the table is Kingston upon Hull, with a wellbeing score of 7.59 and an average rental cost of £421 per month, resulting in a rent-to-happiness cost of £55.47. Diary’s mum is from Hull, so that’s great news for her home city.
Wales dominates the rest of the top five, with Blaenau Gwent, Rhondda Cynon Taf, Neath Port Talbot and Carmarthenshire, while Powys and Gwynedd also make the top ten. Bolsover, Dumfries and Galloway and north-east Lincolnshire complete the list of places that are not necessarily used to topping league tables. And we can be fairly sure their renting inhabitants will all be rather pleased about that.
