The research team at Knight Frank has been poring over holiday snaps. No, not a shot-by-shot recreation of a colleague’s “life-changing” safari. Instead the team analysed 500,000 tourist images on photo-sharing site Flickr to rank London’s Grade I listed buildings in order of popularity.
Unsurprisingly, the usual suspects score highly, with the Palace of Westminster, St Paul’s Cathedral and Tower Bridge the top three.
KF also took the opportunity to flag up the capital’s hidden gems – the “historically and culturally significant buildings that are hidden in plain sight”, according to Ian McGuinness, head of geospatial. These include the medieval Church of St Olave that escaped the Great Fire of London and Finsbury Health Centre, which, we are told, “encapsulated progressive post-war politics a decade before the NHS was established”.
But officially the least photographed grade I site is the Ebury Street home in which Mozart composed his first symphony. He was only eight years old when he did it, so if that isn’t worth a quick selfie on your way past, we don’t know what is.
Happy birthday to us
This week saw the 160th anniversary of EG (or The Estates Gazette and Investment Record as we catchily went by). Diary was curious to find what its no doubt outrageously moustachioed predecessor found wryly amusing back in 1858, but alas such a page had yet to be invented.
The closest thing to funny was Messrs Norton, Hoggart and Trist’s offer for sale of Little Titnest-Park Estate (titter ye not). But what did catch our eye was the price: 12 shillings for an annual subscription.
Now, converting old money into modern value is far from an exact science. There are a lot of variables. But one seemingly reliable online source estimates the “income value” as high as £620 now. At £5.99 an issue, today’s EG sets you back less than half that annually. Talk about value for money.
Coupe’s “oops” moment
It was almost impossible to miss the news about the proposed Sainsbury’s/Asda merger this week – not least after the former’s boss, Mike Coupe, made global headlines for being recorded singing the show tune We’re in the Money before an ITV News interview.
Apologising, Coupe explained that it was stuck in his head after seeing 42nd Street last year. After all that unwanted attention, perhaps he should console himself with a rendition of another song from the musical – after all, there’s a Sunny Side to Every Situation.
Now we’ve all heard Coupe’s tuneful voice though, Diary can only assume he wooed his chosen merger partner to the table with a suitable ditty. Perhaps not a show tune, but his version of a Sinatra classic? “It Asda Be You”.
James’s Shire calling
The housing minister merry-go-round is well-documented (Diary, passim), so it was only a matter of time after the dreaded H-word was added to former communities secretary Sajid Javid’s title that he would move on to pastures new.
Congratulations, then (or should that be commiserations?) to the new home secretary. But we still have a crisis to crack across our many counties, and so swooping into MHCLG to fix our broken shires is, er, James Brokenshire.
Nominative determinism, always a pleasure. A quick search of Brokenshire’s Twitter feed from the beginning of 2015 until the morning of his appointment showed no mention of “housing” or “homes”. It reminds us of that old joke about the boy who, after years without speaking a word, pipes up to say the soup is cold. Why didn’t he say anything before? Well, everything was fine up till now.
Mirror into the past
Croydon has been transported back to the 1980s. It’s all part of filming for the next series of Charlie Brooker’s dark sci-fi anthology Black Mirror, which has returned such sights as a Wimpy, a Chelsea Girl and an old-school brown WH Smith to St George’s Walk.
The latter gives Diary flashbacks to its days as a Saturday worker at the newsagent chain. Sure, that was the late 1990s, but we are fairly sure the staff uniform must have been around since the previous decade.
Yes, minister
The restructure of government property teams has had an unintended consequence: tongue-twisters. The latest reshuffle? A “government chief property officer” has been appointed to the “Office of Government Property”, which has replaced the “Government Property Unit” and is separate to the “Government Property Agency”. Some of us will no doubt be picturing Bernard explaining all this to a confused Jim Hacker.
What will we do without them?
As the troubled retail landscape has a dramatic impact on real estate, naturally our industry focuses on the sites coming on to the market, and possible new uses for all the empty floorspace.
But we should never forget the human cost of store closures, and our sympathies, of course, go to the employees of any affected chains – not least the staff at Maplin in Shrewsbury.
Their sign of FAQs demonstrates how they are taking the upheaval with remarkable good humour. After someone named Remainbow Warrior posted a pic on Twitter, it was shared almost 5,000 times. So if you do pop in to Maplin, at least you know what not to ask.
To send feedback, e-mail jess.harrold@egi.co.uk or tweet @jessharrold or @estatesgazette
