Wed 2 Jan 2008
Green for stop
There is something a tad, or given Ken Livingstone's obsession with newts, a toad hypocritical about his London Green Homes initiative.An eco-house has been built at No 1 Lower Carbon Drive, aka Trafalgar Square, London, inviting people to ask questions about how to reduce C02 emissions in their homes, as part of the Mayor's Climate Change Action Plan. Very laudable, until you sit in London traffic supposedly freed up and speeded up by his iniquitous congestion charge. I hate to think the carbon emissions being belched out by London's vehicles, not to mention the loss of trade as people arrive late for meetings. Of course it's a nice little earner raising money under a green banner, which is already black with soot. The only consolation is that at least Livingstone is drawing attention to the need to reduce emissions from existing housing stock, rather than housebuilders being expected to be the only drivers of the environmental wagon.
The house that Jock built
A while back in response to an angry letter from a Glasgow developer who made Govan's finest Sir Alex Ferguson look as threatening as Miss Jean Brodie, I had to import my Scottish cousin Mad Jock McSquirrel to guest edit this column. The problem was a Show House article had referred to England's green and pleasant land and my Scottish reader was not best pleased at Scotland not appearing in the article, asking for his subscription to Show Hoose, sorry House, to be cancelled. Considering it was probably English tax payers funding his subsidised subscription in the first place I thought it a bit rich.
Anyway in reluctant deference to Mr McChip from Glasgow, let's hear it for the Scots who have taken over the world of housebuilding. Miller Homes scooped the big one - Housebuilder of the Year - at the What House? Awards and Applecross and CALA were also among the winners. According to Homes for Scotland, the Scottish housebuilding industry is the largest source of private investment in the country, contributing £5 billion annually to the economy, building 20,000 new homes a year and employing more than 110,000 people.
Not Rosie in the new homes garden
I think I might invite Rosie Millard who writes the Tales of a Landlady column for The Sunday Times to the next What House? Awards, so you can throw your bread rolls at her. Every week the former BBC arts correspondent twitters on about her buy-to-let investments - good, bad or indifferent. But recently she had a pop at city developers "shoving up their new blocks of flats, not realising the great British public knows a pig in a poke when it sees one." Yes there is new apartment saturation in certain city centres, but the better developers have driven urban regeneration that the government would not touch. Millard ends her column saying: "get with the programme, developers. The dream is over. The goose laying the golden eggs has flown off somewhere else. My money's on Dubai." I assume she is being ironic, for Dubai is re-writing history when it comes to rampant, speculative development of new build apartments. Mind you Rosie, I did like you in that dress at the Oscars a few years back. Wear it at the housebuilding Oscars - the What House? Awards - next year and all will be forgiven.
Beauty and the Bates
I am watching developer/architect Crispin Kelly's proposed affordable homes project in Aldershot with great interest. "I want to be the midwife of this process, to employ good architects to show what can be done," said Kelly, writing in The Daily Telegraph. "The volume housebuilders need a kick in the pants to supply us with designs that are not the enfeebled neo-vernacular that is on offer today. This pastiche aesthetic has no spine. It is housing trying to hide." Ouch. Give Crispin the gold for most sweeping generalisation of the year. I wish him luck as he tries to prove that profit and beauty can sleep together, although in November his original planning application was refused. More interesting is his choice of architectural firm Sergison Bates. The Bates in the partnership is Stephen Bates, who despite being a first cousin of our very own Rupert Bates, appears to have brains, beauty and profit.
First published in Show House Magazine January 2008.
The greatest care has been taken to ensure accuracy but some information contained within this article may have changed since it was first published.
Posted by Secret Squirrel
in Applecross, Cala Homes, Crispin Kelly, Ken Livingstone, Miller Homes, Rosie Millard, Secret Squirrel, Stephen Bates on Wed 2 Jan 2008
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