Diary’s Facebook has worked out what it does for a living. There’s no other explanation for it recommending Top Brutes, an inspired homage to the classic card game Top Trumps by design firm Spaceplay, featuring the best of brutalist architecture in London and Birmingham (the two packs shown thus far). Players can pit such concrete brutes as the National Theatre, Trellick Tower and Brum’s Rotunda against each other on six exciting metrics: year completed, number of stories, exclusivity, bespokeness, ugliness and, of course, brutality. Ideal for getting the kids into real estate. But there’s no guarantee these sets will actually see the light of day – a certain number of pre-orders are needed to cover the cost of production and, if you want one, you need to act fast: the pre-order deadline is 10 November. Get in quick at www.space-play.co.uk
Pity the fool
An unscheduled appearance by EG at this week’s London Conference held by the Centre for London thinktank. One of the panels discussed how the built environment can help to foster inclusive communities and drive out loneliness. Martyn Evans, creative director at regeneration specialist U+I, went so far as to brand any developer or property owner not focusing on the issue as “a fool”, and gave credit to those admitting they needed help getting to grips with the issue. He used this very title (well, our old one at any rate) as proof of the trend: “If you look in the jobs section of the Estates Gazette every week, you’ll see lots and lots of jobs that have got odd titles, [like] ‘community understanding managers’, being hired by pension funds who realise that they haven’t got anybody that understands people.” Remember: pension fund managers are people too.
A stitch, in time
Well done to ULI UK on the sold-out launch of its “Later Living: Housing With Care Guide”. One in four of us will be over 65 in 2037 (and Diary will be not far off) so it pays to be thinking about where we are all going to live and how we will be spending our days. ULI’s guide focuses on professionally managed communities and its “aspiration is to encourage conversations about what is needed”. Well, it sounds like mission accomplished on that front, as the guide definitely got people talking – at least according to attendee and consultant John Forbes (@JohnForbes_JFC). He tweeted: “High point of the @ULI_UK Later Living Guide launch had to be the elderly resident who described the ladies’ craft class as ‘stitch and bitch’…”
Agents dodge a bullet
“Everyone hates estate agents.” Not Diary’s words, but those of part-time fast house sellers and seemingly full-time property industry researchers Sell House Fast (somewhat of a regular on Diary, if this is your
first page in a while). This week, SHF took to Google to find out “the professions Brits love to complain the most about” – but, despite rather harshly bearing the brunt of the press release, agents only actually come third in the poll. A mere 1,830 online searches for “estate agent complaint” in a month pales in comparison to similar queries for lawyers (5,800) and police officers (a remarkable, and frankly concerning, 29,000). SHF also utilised Google’s autocomplete function with a search beginning “why are
estate agents so…” The top results? Expensive, rude, bad, hated and pushy. Ouch. Oddly, in a direct comparison there, police officers fare much better. Top results were “why are police officers so tall?” and “why are police officers so hot?”. But then there was also “why are police officers sociopaths?” so at least agents dodged that bullet.
Going down the tubes
Not to be outdone, SHF’s rival Fastsalehomes.co.uk kept up its own formidable record of non-home selling related activity, by investigating “Lawless London”. It explains that, aware that “higher crime rates in an area mean lower house prices”, it was interested in looking at the most at-risk London tube lines. Undertaking an exclusive freedom of information request from the British Transport Police on incidents of theft on the underground, it found that the underground lines with the highest number of thefts in 2019 are: Piccadilly (1,110), Central (991), Victoria (971), Northern (848) and Jubilee (763). If you live or work on those lines, do with this information what you will.
Up the creek without a paddle?
Some building sites pose bigger challenges than others. Example: Boulevard Wharf in Nottingham, only 11m wide and bang on the bank of the city’s canal. Necessity, however, is the mother of invention, so construction firm Stepnell employed a key bit of kit in order to deliver one of its most complex student accommodation schemes to date – a kayak. Part of the team’s emergency rescue procedure, it meant that any items (or, Diary assumes, workers) that inadvertently fell into the canal could be retrieved. An elegant solution to being left up the creek without a paddle.
