When an email arrives with the title “LIVE LIKE HUGH GRANT ON ICONIC NOTTING HILL STREET” – yes, all in caps – you can be sure that Diary is opening it. We’d love to live like Hugh Grant: a life, we imagine, of effortless charm, self-effacing wit and romantic moments in the rain. Sign us up. But, oh, the press release is just telling us that we can rent a flat in Notting Hill for £650 a week. Diary would already have to be Hugh Grant to afford that. Or, indeed, a different bumbling Englishman – we are also told that Boris Johnson used to live on the same street. All of which has us imagining a fantasy world where Grant leads us to a prosperous future as PM, while Johnson is a posh, stammering national treasure of the big screen. We would love that, actually.
Cradle your new-look EG
Why, Diary has lost weight – thank you for noticing. We hope you are enjoying the page’s new look, all part of a streamlined EG’s climate commitment that will save 20,000 tonnes of paper a year. One of our partners – Drees & Sommer – came up with another novel solution for us to think about in our quest to save the planet. Could we consider cradle-to-cradle paper? For those unaware, that is fully biodegradable paper – making it, in theory, edible. Readers could devour their (now very beautiful as well as informative) EG as usual, and then literally consume the news! Diary, for one, is always happy to eat its own words.
Ricketts on song
Diary celebrated turning 42 the other day by washing its hands while singing Happy Birthday to itself twice, as per official government coronavirus advice. But other songs are available, and a handy online tool has seen alternative lyrical hand-washing guides flooding the internet, featuring everything from Eminem’s Lose Yourself to Nick Clegg’s I’m Sorry. We know that our good friend Simon Ricketts, of Town Legal, has a strong social media game, so it’s no surprise that he joined the fun with this pitch-perfect “public health poster for planners” (below), featuring Starship’s 1985 hit We Built This City. Only one problem – there’s no way you could stop on “Marconi plays the mamba” without lathering up all over again to belt out “listen to the radio”. Which, we suppose, doubles the protection.
Missing MIPIM?
Of course, Ricketts – like many others – had time on his (well-scrubbed) hands this week. On Monday he captured the mood of the industry: “Would have headed to #mipim about now. Pity Cannes businesses. Time off at home instead but recreating daytime vibe w/ sunglasses, lanyard – & business card for anyone w/ pulse. By night obvs hope local café staff will stand outside on crates clanging €10 beer bottles together.” It’s almost as if we were there.
Going viral
You’ve got to hand it to real estate for keeping its eye on the main chance. ICG-Longbow announced this week it was well placed to “capitalise on any attractive opportunities” that come about as a result of coronavirus disruption. Meanwhile, Asian proptech company Juwai IQI sent out a release titled “UK Among Coronavirus Property Winners”, reporting that there were 9.1% more enquiries from Chinese buyers for UK property in February 2020. Greece is the word, though, as it enjoyed a 57.1% jump. Covid-19 is good news too if you are a digital platform. Quarantine means more time at home, which means more time surfing the web. Online tour of the property you want to buy? Count us in. Virtual meeting? Hell yeah. As a result, shares in remote conferencing outfit Zoom have rocketed over the past few days. It does feel a little crass, but you have to quietly doff a hat to those always looking for the silver lining to every cloud.
Meet the minister (again)
So, we’re in that getting-to-know-you stage once again with the latest housing minister… (checks notes)… Christopher Pincher. And so, it seems, is the Planning Inspectorate, which he addressed this week at its annual training event. “You are probably thinking to yourselves,” he intuited, “‘what on earth can he know about planning?’ But what I do know a bit about is bad design. I live in a house which is very hot in the summer and very cold in the winter, the roof leaks like a sieve, and when I wanted to put a gas cooker into my kitchen at the back of the house, the whole of the front of the house had to be dug up to put the piping in. Now, I can’t blame the developer and the planner for my house as it’s about 200 years old. But I know a bit about what bad design can mean for households and homeowners.” That’s good to hear – though his apparent failure to fix his own leaky roof doesn’t bode well for plugging the holes in UK housing supply…
