Barwell’s recipe for success
If anyone were to doubt housing minister Gavin Barwell’s ability throw a decent party, Savills’ director of residential research, Lucian Cook, could set them straight. Speaking at a UK housing projections event last week, Cook revealed he lived across the hall from Barwell 25 years ago when the pair attended Cambridge. Cook’s claim to fame, he said, was concocting the world’s biggest vodka jelly with the future Conservative MP for Croydon Central. Diary couldn’t verify Cook’s claims, but it’s good to know the current government knows the ingredients for a good house party, even if it is struggling to build enough houses.
Property in the driving seat
Calling all property petrol heads! Nick Dare, founder of Dare Property, has established the Property Road Racing Club – a quarterly breakfast club that involves venturing out in members’ steeds to visit venues with a property- related slant, such as redeveloped World War II bases. The first escapade is on 12 February to the motorsport and aviation-focused Brooklands Museum in Weybridge, Surrey, where attendees will compete on an F1 simulator and experience laps of Brooklands in the 4D Theatre. Perhaps Top Gear could use it as an audition for a new presenter?
Trouble brewing in Aberdeen
Diary always applauds the cutting of red tape, so we take our hat off to James Watt, the straight-talking founder of hipster beer maker BrewDog. The company has had quite a tiff with Aberdeenshire Council over the price of the land the brewery needs in order to develop a hotel and distillery and expand its current premises in Ellon. BrewDog says the land is worth £5,000 an acre, the council reckons £300,000. After calling out the council on Twitter the parties are now back in “proactive discussions”. Negotiation by social media? Sounds far more straightforward than an OJEU process.
Going round in circles at Defra
It seems property isn’t the only industry that moves in cycles. EG’s story about the Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs consolidating its London offices into 2 Marsham Street, SW1, caused some hilarity among civil service old-timers.
“The old Department for Environment spent years trying to get out of 2 Marsham Street in the 1980s,” one civil servant revealed to Diary. “It was then an awful old 1960s building known as the ‘toast rack’ and I find it exquisitely funny that they are going back.”
Not to be outdone, an old-timer on the Diary desk recalled a meeting with a minister at 2 Marsham Street in the mid-1990s. The minister complained that the home of what was then the Department of the Environment was so inefficient that the heating had to stay on all summer. It would, confessed the embarrassed politician, take too long to fire it up again for winter.
Braving the cold at Propski
Testament to the industry’s fortitude was the 40 or so men and women who attended EG’s Question Time at Propski. As the debate played out on the terrace of a bar in the French Alpine resort of Tignes, the temperature dipped to well below zero and the refreshments, turning to solid ice, became undrinkable. Bar a few near-hypothermic attendees who dipped indoors before the debate had finished, the gathering stuck it out to the end, and for that EG is not just grateful but mightily impressed.
Bees at the Beeb
It is important developers think about the impact of their schemes on the ecosystem, and the dedication of Stanhope cannot be questioned at Television Centre in White City, W12. The company is installing wooden bee boxes from the London Bee Company on the top of the Studio 1 building to try to help boost the dwindling number of honey bees in the city. The scheme will be buzzing as a result.
