This is interesting, would like to see more of this. Tower blocks in Glasgow have gone through various revisions, originally the saviours of Gorbals dwellers (& seen as such by those folk), then sink holes for impoverished Glaswegians, now another revision seems in the pipeline. Getting away from knocking everything down & starting again would be a good move in any case I think.
Generally there seem to be very different attitudes to high rises. Paris (admittedly a city I hardly know) appears to see the banlieues as something to be forgotten about while Berlin seems to take some pride in them.
It depends how they are built and who they are aimed at. A friend was early into getting mortgages available for tower blocks in the UK - used to be that the big lenders wouldn't lend above floor X....
The demented social engineers who built unsafe "communal spaces" into their structures really achieved something special.
When I lived in New York, I never had the heating on in my apartment, even during the coldest days of winter. Indeed, rather the opposite, I had to crack at least one window most of the time to cool the place down. My energy consumption was highest in the hottest days of summer.
I know there is a theory that humans don't like living structures that fall outside our range of vision, i.e. tall structures beyond something like 6 storeys. But, I wonder. How does that theory mesh with the reality of high rent skyscrapers in NYC and other big cities. I don't recall any particular social horrors associated with buildings in nice neighbourhoods (although clearly there is little sense of community in the buildings).
I would always want to step out into my garden, big no from me
I am with you there. The only apartment living I have ever done is in NYC. Now my 'garden' is 75 acres.
I wonder what percentage of the remaining, effective Russian military has been diverted by this?
Interesting to note that the Japanese GDP is 3 times that of Russia....
They probably don't need to worry about the Japanese government suddenly deciding to take the islands back by force. But there are a bunch of guys who have spent the last 40 years driving around in black vans playing patriotic music and shouting about the islands through loudspeakers, you'd think they could find themselves some boats and guns and make themselves useful.
In paranoid Greater Russian Nationalist world, everyone is an enemy.
My step mother (Russian) has people on her facebook telling her that the Swedes* are just waiting to pounce on Russia if the Motherland is defeated. Yes, the Greater Swedish Empire is just waiting to be a born....
With thinking like that, Japan must seem like a real enemy...
*Among others, of course
Surely the Greater Swedish Empire would be reborn? There was one in the Middle Ages, and subsequently.
True. Not sure there are any actual, existing Greater Swedish Nationalists though.....
Is Putin taking exit ramp and leaving Ukraine, we lift all our sanctions, UK policy?
I would say no, definitely not, for example what definition of leave ALL Ukraine?
So does it maintain signal of staunch sanction resolve Liz Truss floating this?
All Ukraine is exactly what it says: the internationally recognized borders of Ukraine.
To b fair it is somewhat of an artificial construct. By Stalin, if memory serves.
All countries are
Misha Glenny has done a lot of good radio programmes on BBC sounds called “the invention of…” about how many countries came about and absolutely agree they are all “artificial” constructs. Worth listening to.
I've just finished watching McMafia on I-player; it's based very loosely on Misha Glenny's non-fiction book of the same name. I know it's a few years old, but I found it pretty resonant with what's going on today - Russian oligarchs and kleptocrats, crime syndicates, dirty money, money laundering in London and so on. Worth watching, I thought.
Yes, good. And he's a talking head on the current BBC podcast "Putin" which I'm enjoying. He rose to power, apparently, by "making himself useful to people". Well that's one up on Boris Johnson, I thought, dishonourably.
"making himself useful to people" is likely a euphemism.
No, but it is quite sinister - it means sussing out who has power and making yourself indispensable to them with quiet amoral competence and an ability to keep secrets. They get to depend on you, they trust you, they bit by bit transfer their powers and influence to you, thinking you're no threat, until one day enough has seeped from them to you and lo you're the Man. Now you make them YOUR subordinates, which they go along with, or, if they don't, you chop them off at the knees. And then you make sure you never make the same mistake with others as they did with you. This was how Putin ended up running Russia.
This is interesting, would like to see more of this. Tower blocks in Glasgow have gone through various revisions, originally the saviours of Gorbals dwellers (& seen as such by those folk), then sink holes for impoverished Glaswegians, now another revision seems in the pipeline. Getting away from knocking everything down & starting again would be a good move in any case I think.
Generally there seem to be very different attitudes to high rises. Paris (admittedly a city I hardly know) appears to see the banlieues as something to be forgotten about while Berlin seems to take some pride in them.
It depends how they are built and who they are aimed at. A friend was early into getting mortgages available for tower blocks in the UK - used to be that the big lenders wouldn't lend above floor X....
The demented social engineers who built unsafe "communal spaces" into their structures really achieved something special.
You should see the original plans for rebuilding Glasgow after WWII, which including razing the city centre (the greatest Victoria city in Europe - Betjeman), Speer and Germania had nothing on them. They still had a bloody good go, mind.
I must admit to a sneaking admiration of post war Town planners. There was a misplaced belief in the future, and that vibrant communities would thrive in these cities in the skies. Too much faith in human progress, I suppose, when it seems what is really wanted is a better facsimile of the past.
One thing I do see from Ukraine is that the Kruschevski concrete blocks of flats seem to have lasted better than our own 1950s and 60's blocks. At least until mother Russia came visiting.
Can you point to any evidence that such planners actually liked or understood humans, or were they just using them as some sort of funnel of reconstituted human fodder for their grand experiments, like liquidised meat in Subway's ham?
The interesting thing is that high rise tower blocks seem to have worked okay in certain parts of the world like Hong Kong. It's not a universal thing that they're doomed to failure. They were also a partial success for the first 15 years or so in this country.
max seddon @maxseddon · 1h Russian deputy defense minister Yunus-Bek Evkurov gave a soldier who lost a leg fighting in Ukraine a medal yesterday and told him: “I hope you’ll get back on your feet”
One of my uncles lost a leg in Normandy. 100% medical discharge. At the time of Suez he was called up for a medical 'to see if he was now fit'.
Turned up on his crutches.
Shame he wasn’t living in Ancient Greece - he could have served as a Hoplite.
His elder brother, my father, was absolutely incandescent; all for calling on the Press, his MP etc. Uncle was more philosophical; just made sure he had to go on crutches along a route where he could be seen.
Apparently afterwards he could hear the sergeant who was supervising the reception swearing for some time!
HMG still try that today for "benefit" claimants from irreversible diseases and disabilities - but that isn't intended to detract from your uncle's situation. At least your uncle turned up; a lot of reservists didn't even respond to the Suez mobilisation AIUI.
No, Mr C, didn't think the for a moment. And yes, I too have heard of benefit claimants being 'barred' because they were physically unable to attend an interview. I was 18 at the time of Suez; worried that I could be serving too! Although still in VIth Form.
Just wondering, what arm of service was your uncle in? I assume infantry? And when did he lose his leg, if one might ask? Presumably they didn't want him for office work ...
He was a Gunner. Wounded outside Caen. Reconnoitring for gun sites I believe. Sad thing is, back at base there was an order recalling him for an OCTU. If he'd gone out half an hour later he wouldn't, if you see what I mean.
"Analysis Ukraine war: With a single sentence Joe Biden has given a gift to Moscow's propaganda machine The US President may well be wishing his own verbal flourish about his desire for president Putin's political demise does not come back to haunt him as he returns to Washington. Deborah Haynes"
max seddon @maxseddon · 1h Russian deputy defense minister Yunus-Bek Evkurov gave a soldier who lost a leg fighting in Ukraine a medal yesterday and told him: “I hope you’ll get back on your feet”
One of my uncles lost a leg in Normandy. 100% medical discharge. At the time of Suez he was called up for a medical 'to see if he was now fit'.
Turned up on his crutches.
Shame he wasn’t living in Ancient Greece - he could have served as a Hoplite.
His elder brother, my father, was absolutely incandescent; all for calling on the Press, his MP etc. Uncle was more philosophical; just made sure he had to go on crutches along a route where he could be seen.
Apparently afterwards he could hear the sergeant who was supervising the reception swearing for some time!
HMG still try that today for "benefit" claimants from irreversible diseases and disabilities - but that isn't intended to detract from your uncle's situation. At least your uncle turned up; a lot of reservists didn't even respond to the Suez mobilisation AIUI.
No, Mr C, didn't think the for a moment. And yes, I too have heard of benefit claimants being 'barred' because they were physically unable to attend an interview. I was 18 at the time of Suez; worried that I could be serving too! Although still in VIth Form.
Just wondering, what arm of service was your uncle in? I assume infantry? And when did he lose his leg, if one might ask? Presumably they didn't want him for office work ...
He was a Gunner. Wounded outside Caen. Reconnoitring for gun sites I believe. Sad thing is, back at base there was an order recalling him for an OCTU. If he'd gone out half an hour later he wouldn't, if you see what I mean.
HYUFD, one man wrecking crew against Cameron approach to detoxification of the Tory brand....
Highest Tory voteshare under Cameron? 37% in 2015.
Tory voteshare under Boris? 43.6% in 2019.
I campaigned for Cameron but he always appealed more to the liberal upper middle class than the bigger group of the lower middle class and skilled working class. Boris is the reverse
Lets see where they are at the next GE, 37% might be a pipe dream and luckily for the Tories your personal campaign to tell every floating voter to f##k off and vote for somebody else is currently restricted to a niche message board and local politics.
No, I think young HY is onto something here. That is exactly the message that the country has been waiting for. And what we all need. I think young HY ought to be promoted to Chairman of the Conservative Party, and put in charge of campaigns.
2010 - “Change to Win” 2015 - “ Strong Leadership, Clear Economic Plan & a Brighter, More Secure Future” 2017 - “Strong and Stable Government” 2019 - “Get Brexit Done” 2024 - “If you’re not a real Tory you can F**k Off!”
This is interesting, would like to see more of this. Tower blocks in Glasgow have gone through various revisions, originally the saviours of Gorbals dwellers (& seen as such by those folk), then sink holes for impoverished Glaswegians, now another revision seems in the pipeline. Getting away from knocking everything down & starting again would be a good move in any case I think.
Generally there seem to be very different attitudes to high rises. Paris (admittedly a city I hardly know) appears to see the banlieues as something to be forgotten about while Berlin seems to take some pride in them.
It depends how they are built and who they are aimed at. A friend was early into getting mortgages available for tower blocks in the UK - used to be that the big lenders wouldn't lend above floor X....
The demented social engineers who built unsafe "communal spaces" into their structures really achieved something special.
You should see the original plans for rebuilding Glasgow after WWII, which including razing the city centre (the greatest Victoria city in Europe - Betjeman), Speer and Germania had nothing on them. They still had a bloody good go, mind.
I must admit to a sneaking admiration of post war Town planners. There was a misplaced belief in the future, and that vibrant communities would thrive in these cities in the skies. Too much faith in human progress, I suppose, when it seems what is really wanted is a better facsimile of the past.
One thing I do see from Ukraine is that the Kruschevski concrete blocks of flats seem to have lasted better than our own 1950s and 60's blocks. At least until mother Russia came visiting.
With hindsight the truism that there are a shitload of difficult questions and no easy answers usually applies.
In the example I referred to, the alternative to the Bruce Plan was the Clyde Valley Regional Plan which involved moving much of Glasgow's population out to new towns. Most modern analysis believes that this was the major contributor to the Glasgow Effect, leaving as it did the older and less economically viable in the city. In practice the two visions kind of stumbled along in tandem to not necesarily the best effect; the M8 snaking through Glasgow is probably the main consequence of the Bruce Plan.
Still, Mother Glasgow endures.
There is a very good documentary called New Town Utopia that looks at some of the idealism of the time, set in Basildon.
Cumbernauld looked young and optimistic in Gregory's Girl too. I don't know how well that has aged either. Not as well as Clare Grogan I imagine.
There seems a paucity of ambition to solve our current housing crisis compared to the post war idealism, flawed as it was.
This is interesting, would like to see more of this. Tower blocks in Glasgow have gone through various revisions, originally the saviours of Gorbals dwellers (& seen as such by those folk), then sink holes for impoverished Glaswegians, now another revision seems in the pipeline. Getting away from knocking everything down & starting again would be a good move in any case I think.
Generally there seem to be very different attitudes to high rises. Paris (admittedly a city I hardly know) appears to see the banlieues as something to be forgotten about while Berlin seems to take some pride in them.
It depends how they are built and who they are aimed at. A friend was early into getting mortgages available for tower blocks in the UK - used to be that the big lenders wouldn't lend above floor X....
The demented social engineers who built unsafe "communal spaces" into their structures really achieved something special.
You should see the original plans for rebuilding Glasgow after WWII, which including razing the city centre (the greatest Victoria city in Europe - Betjeman), Speer and Germania had nothing on them. They still had a bloody good go, mind.
I must admit to a sneaking admiration of post war Town planners. There was a misplaced belief in the future, and that vibrant communities would thrive in these cities in the skies. Too much faith in human progress, I suppose, when it seems what is really wanted is a better facsimile of the past.
One thing I do see from Ukraine is that the Kruschevski concrete blocks of flats seem to have lasted better than our own 1950s and 60's blocks. At least until mother Russia came visiting.
Can you point to any evidence that such planners actually liked or understood humans, or were they just using them as some sort of funnel of reconstituted human fodder for their grand experiments, like liquidised meat in Subway's ham?
Some years ago, I was discussing a program on the Grand Vision architecture of the post-war period, with a friend who was a psychiatrist. Apparently she had been struck (as I was) with the relative absence of people in the models and designs for so many of the ideas - a few distant dots.
One which had people in, I remember as quite disturbing. It was a drawing with the buildings in crisp, certain lines but with the people drawn in that few-curves-to-suggest-a-vague-figure style. Ghosts wandering around The Machine For Living.
This is interesting, would like to see more of this. Tower blocks in Glasgow have gone through various revisions, originally the saviours of Gorbals dwellers (& seen as such by those folk), then sink holes for impoverished Glaswegians, now another revision seems in the pipeline. Getting away from knocking everything down & starting again would be a good move in any case I think.
Generally there seem to be very different attitudes to high rises. Paris (admittedly a city I hardly know) appears to see the banlieues as something to be forgotten about while Berlin seems to take some pride in them.
It depends how they are built and who they are aimed at. A friend was early into getting mortgages available for tower blocks in the UK - used to be that the big lenders wouldn't lend above floor X....
The demented social engineers who built unsafe "communal spaces" into their structures really achieved something special.
You should see the original plans for rebuilding Glasgow after WWII, which including razing the city centre (the greatest Victoria city in Europe - Betjeman), Speer and Germania had nothing on them. They still had a bloody good go, mind.
I must admit to a sneaking admiration of post war Town planners. There was a misplaced belief in the future, and that vibrant communities would thrive in these cities in the skies. Too much faith in human progress, I suppose, when it seems what is really wanted is a better facsimile of the past.
One thing I do see from Ukraine is that the Kruschevski concrete blocks of flats seem to have lasted better than our own 1950s and 60's blocks. At least until mother Russia came visiting.
With hindsight the truism that there are a shitload of difficult questions and no easy answers usually applies.
In the example I referred to, the alternative to the Bruce Plan was the Clyde Valley Regional Plan which involved moving much of Glasgow's population out to new towns. Most modern analysis believes that this was the major contributor to the Glasgow Effect, leaving as it did the older and less economically viable in the city. In practice the two visions kind of stumbled along in tandem to not necesarily the best effect; the M8 snaking through Glasgow is probably the main consequence of the Bruce Plan.
Still, Mother Glasgow endures.
There is a very good documentary called New Town Utopia that looks at some of the idealism of the time, set in Basildon.
Cumbernauld looked young and optimistic in Gregory's Girl too. I don't know how well that has aged either. Not as well as Clare Grogan I imagine.
There seems a paucity of ambition to solve our current housing crisis compared to the post war idealism, flawed as it was.
Don't know if you know that Cumbernauld town centre is getting the Hermann Goering treatment -
Never is such a long time. You could contrive many scenarios where it would be stupid not to.
Like we've pretty much fluked coronavirus being mild in children. If the next variant isn't then packing of thousands of unvaccinated kids into poorly ventilated rooms for several hours a day would be a pretty poor decision.
This is interesting, would like to see more of this. Tower blocks in Glasgow have gone through various revisions, originally the saviours of Gorbals dwellers (& seen as such by those folk), then sink holes for impoverished Glaswegians, now another revision seems in the pipeline. Getting away from knocking everything down & starting again would be a good move in any case I think.
Generally there seem to be very different attitudes to high rises. Paris (admittedly a city I hardly know) appears to see the banlieues as something to be forgotten about while Berlin seems to take some pride in them.
It depends how they are built and who they are aimed at. A friend was early into getting mortgages available for tower blocks in the UK - used to be that the big lenders wouldn't lend above floor X....
The demented social engineers who built unsafe "communal spaces" into their structures really achieved something special.
You should see the original plans for rebuilding Glasgow after WWII, which including razing the city centre (the greatest Victoria city in Europe - Betjeman), Speer and Germania had nothing on them. They still had a bloody good go, mind.
I must admit to a sneaking admiration of post war Town planners. There was a misplaced belief in the future, and that vibrant communities would thrive in these cities in the skies. Too much faith in human progress, I suppose, when it seems what is really wanted is a better facsimile of the past.
One thing I do see from Ukraine is that the Kruschevski concrete blocks of flats seem to have lasted better than our own 1950s and 60's blocks. At least until mother Russia came visiting.
With hindsight the truism that there are a shitload of difficult questions and no easy answers usually applies.
In the example I referred to, the alternative to the Bruce Plan was the Clyde Valley Regional Plan which involved moving much of Glasgow's population out to new towns. Most modern analysis believes that this was the major contributor to the Glasgow Effect, leaving as it did the older and less economically viable in the city. In practice the two visions kind of stumbled along in tandem to not necesarily the best effect; the M8 snaking through Glasgow is probably the main consequence of the Bruce Plan.
Still, Mother Glasgow endures.
There is a very good documentary called New Town Utopia that looks at some of the idealism of the time, set in Basildon.
Cumbernauld looked young and optimistic in Gregory's Girl too. I don't know how well that has aged either. Not as well as Clare Grogan I imagine.
There seems a paucity of ambition to solve our current housing crisis compared to the post war idealism, flawed as it was.
This is an interesting BBC programme about New Towns from 1979 IMO.
max seddon @maxseddon · 1h Russian deputy defense minister Yunus-Bek Evkurov gave a soldier who lost a leg fighting in Ukraine a medal yesterday and told him: “I hope you’ll get back on your feet”
One of my uncles lost a leg in Normandy. 100% medical discharge. At the time of Suez he was called up for a medical 'to see if he was now fit'.
Turned up on his crutches.
Shame he wasn’t living in Ancient Greece - he could have served as a Hoplite.
His elder brother, my father, was absolutely incandescent; all for calling on the Press, his MP etc. Uncle was more philosophical; just made sure he had to go on crutches along a route where he could be seen.
Apparently afterwards he could hear the sergeant who was supervising the reception swearing for some time!
HMG still try that today for "benefit" claimants from irreversible diseases and disabilities - but that isn't intended to detract from your uncle's situation. At least your uncle turned up; a lot of reservists didn't even respond to the Suez mobilisation AIUI.
No, Mr C, didn't think the for a moment. And yes, I too have heard of benefit claimants being 'barred' because they were physically unable to attend an interview. I was 18 at the time of Suez; worried that I could be serving too! Although still in VIth Form.
Just wondering, what arm of service was your uncle in? I assume infantry? And when did he lose his leg, if one might ask? Presumably they didn't want him for office work ...
He was a Gunner. Wounded outside Caen. Reconnoitring for gun sites I believe. Sad thing is, back at base there was an order recalling him for an OCTU. If he'd gone out half an hour later he wouldn't, if you see what I mean.
Thank you. Poor chap.
Things didn't turn out too badly for him, in fact. He recovered well enough to teach Maths in a rather tough area for 30+ years, marry and have two sons. Died at 70, after first a heart attack and then a stroke. British Legion did wonders for him. In his 30's he was a locally notable car-rally navigator.
This is interesting, would like to see more of this. Tower blocks in Glasgow have gone through various revisions, originally the saviours of Gorbals dwellers (& seen as such by those folk), then sink holes for impoverished Glaswegians, now another revision seems in the pipeline. Getting away from knocking everything down & starting again would be a good move in any case I think.
Generally there seem to be very different attitudes to high rises. Paris (admittedly a city I hardly know) appears to see the banlieues as something to be forgotten about while Berlin seems to take some pride in them.
It depends how they are built and who they are aimed at. A friend was early into getting mortgages available for tower blocks in the UK - used to be that the big lenders wouldn't lend above floor X....
The demented social engineers who built unsafe "communal spaces" into their structures really achieved something special.
You should see the original plans for rebuilding Glasgow after WWII, which including razing the city centre (the greatest Victoria city in Europe - Betjeman), Speer and Germania had nothing on them. They still had a bloody good go, mind.
I must admit to a sneaking admiration of post war Town planners. There was a misplaced belief in the future, and that vibrant communities would thrive in these cities in the skies. Too much faith in human progress, I suppose, when it seems what is really wanted is a better facsimile of the past.
One thing I do see from Ukraine is that the Kruschevski concrete blocks of flats seem to have lasted better than our own 1950s and 60's blocks. At least until mother Russia came visiting.
Can you point to any evidence that such planners actually liked or understood humans, or were they just using them as some sort of funnel of reconstituted human fodder for their grand experiments, like liquidised meat in Subway's ham?
They genuinely thought people would be happier in the sky. Low rise density was associated with pollution, squalor, bad air, bad sanitation.
They didn’t think about how humans really interact, nipping from door to door, down the road to the shops. They didn’t realize how you could upgrade low rise housing with much less effort, and much less destruction of communities (however poor)
Most of all, all of that was secondary to the vanity and arrogance of planners, architects and politicians, who wanted their names celebrated with big shiny towers not boring but careful redevelopment. Ooops
In the absence of @roger, I cannot see much value in the Oscar betting.
I have a couple of quid on The Worst Person in the World in original screenplay and international feature. It seems to have done well in mainstream cinemas in the USA.
I’ve got five quid on Power of the Dog winning “most long-drawn-out Woke piece of screamingly tedious but nicely-shot drivel directed by a woman so yay for Diversity”
I believe Nomadland won this last year
And they say the Oscars are dying?! Pff!
I tried so hard to watch power of the dog. Chewed through 1hr 30 mins and gave up and read the plot on Wikipedia to see if I missed anything.
I think it was trying to be “there will be blood”. Similar period, grumpy main character, money, misery, sharp practice etc etc except Cumberbatch is no Daniel Day Lewis and was just a bit of a “meh” character. No menace or real deep complexity.
I found There Will Be Blood similarly tedious, Daniel Day Lewis notwithstanding,
HYUFD, one man wrecking crew against Cameron approach to detoxification of the Tory brand....
Highest Tory voteshare under Cameron? 37% in 2015.
Tory voteshare under Boris? 43.6% in 2019.
I campaigned for Cameron but he always appealed more to the liberal upper middle class than the bigger group of the lower middle class and skilled working class. Boris is the reverse
Lets see where they are at the next GE, 37% might be a pipe dream and luckily for the Tories your personal campaign to tell every floating voter to f##k off and vote for somebody else is currently restricted to a niche message board and local politics.
No, I think young HY is onto something here. That is exactly the message that the country has been waiting for. And what we all need. I think young HY ought to be promoted to Chairman of the Conservative Party, and put in charge of campaigns.
2010 - “Change to Win” 2015 - “ Strong Leadership, Clear Economic Plan & a Brighter, More Secure Future” 2017 - “Strong and Stable Government” 2019 - “Get Brexit Done” 2024 - “If you’re not a real Tory you can F**k Off!”
I hesitate to define what was the high point of this process.
Shrewsbury was not an aberration, but the culmination of a drive across the NHS to reduce caesarean sections. Read this 2002 Parliament briefing: "Women have little freedom to express a preference for CS..." #Shrewsbury #maternity https://t.co/HsFIMw1FE5
The rest of that twitter thread is very interesting too. The number of maternity scandals across Britain has always suggested a systemic problem. Part of this was the drive to lowers caesarian rates. The financial penalties for having a high caesarian rate were introduced by Alan Milburn in 2002.
I left the Labour Party in the early noughties for two reasons. Blair's warmongering, but also Milburn's target culture distorting good medical practice.
A lot of that target culture distorting practice has become so normalised in the NHS that only us old codgers remember the time before, when clinical decision making was the norm.
Completely agree with Mike on this. I laid Sunak several months back at a very good profit. The odds on Starmer remain very attractive.
Meanwhile across the Irish Sea it is beginning to look possible that Sinn Fein will win most seats in the Stormont elections on May 5th, meaning the first ever Sinn Fein First Minister of Northern Ireland. I was lampooned by a couple of people for suggesting this might happen but it's now a real possibility.
You can get 2/1 on a Irish unification before 01/01/24 with Betfair which I'm probably not tempted by as it's too soon (I think) but the chances of it happening in our lifetimes are immeasurably closer. I was told that this was no big deal. Well it is a big deal. A seismic shift in United Kingdom politics. The seeds of this go back a long way but there's no doubt that Boris Johnson's sell-out of Northern Ireland provides the immediate catalyst. He sacrificed the union for his own political aspirations.
2/1 on Irish unification seems rather short in that time frame. It is looking increasingly likely over time though.
Hmm. Current Tory attitude to Scottish indyref is "who cares if there is a majority of votes and seats for pro-indy, pro-referendum parties? We still say no, we won't let you even have a democratic referendum". Which will be that much harder to justify if the Nirish get one on exactly that basis. Unless they argue that NI is somehow different from the rest of the UK, which is precisely what they have been denying all along while mishandling this aspect of Brexit ...
It’s a poor error of judgement on their part and one, I suspect, they will come to regret as it will make Indy more, not less, likely.
No it won't.
Grant an indyref2 now and it would be at best 50% No 50% Yes.
Refuse an indyref2 now and that guarantees Scotland stays in the UK.
If there is an indyref2 it will be a Labour government reliant on SNP support who has to take the risk, as long as this Tory government remains in power it will never allow an indyref2 anyway
In the short term you get your wish in the medium term I think this makes Indy far more likely than 50/50.
Not an ounce of diplomacy or understanding, just a no or the tanks will be sent to Berwick
Not really, more that Scottish Independence does not matter provided he can blame Labour.
Oh it does matter and if we have Tory governments forever you can guarantee it will not happen as indyref2 will not be allowed.
Indyref2 it is clear will only ever happen now with a UK Labour government reliant on SNP support and if they allow it it will be on them to win it
So the Tories wouldn’t allow IndyRef2 in 20 years time? What about all that ‘generation’ nonsense?
No, Boris has said not for 40 years at the earliest
Boris has said a lot of things. Quite a lot has been lies and a significant amount has been unintelligible. Just wondering which set I should put this into.
This is interesting, would like to see more of this. Tower blocks in Glasgow have gone through various revisions, originally the saviours of Gorbals dwellers (& seen as such by those folk), then sink holes for impoverished Glaswegians, now another revision seems in the pipeline. Getting away from knocking everything down & starting again would be a good move in any case I think.
Generally there seem to be very different attitudes to high rises. Paris (admittedly a city I hardly know) appears to see the banlieues as something to be forgotten about while Berlin seems to take some pride in them.
It depends how they are built and who they are aimed at. A friend was early into getting mortgages available for tower blocks in the UK - used to be that the big lenders wouldn't lend above floor X....
The demented social engineers who built unsafe "communal spaces" into their structures really achieved something special.
You should see the original plans for rebuilding Glasgow after WWII, which including razing the city centre (the greatest Victoria city in Europe - Betjeman), Speer and Germania had nothing on them. They still had a bloody good go, mind.
I must admit to a sneaking admiration of post war Town planners. There was a misplaced belief in the future, and that vibrant communities would thrive in these cities in the skies. Too much faith in human progress, I suppose, when it seems what is really wanted is a better facsimile of the past.
One thing I do see from Ukraine is that the Kruschevski concrete blocks of flats seem to have lasted better than our own 1950s and 60's blocks. At least until mother Russia came visiting.
Can you point to any evidence that such planners actually liked or understood humans, or were they just using them as some sort of funnel of reconstituted human fodder for their grand experiments, like liquidised meat in Subway's ham?
They genuinely thought people would be happier in the sky. Low rise density was associated with pollution, squalor, bad air, bad sanitation.
They didn’t think about how humans really interact, nipping from door to door, down the road to the shops. They didn’t realize how you could upgrade low rise housing with much less effort, and much less destruction of communities (however poor)
Most of all, all of that was secondary to the vanity and arrogance of planners, architects and politicians, who wanted their names celebrated with big shiny towers not boring but careful redevelopment. Ooops
What become quite clear is that many of them considered people as abstracts objects - a number of the visionaries hadn't actually looked at the communities they were shuffling like a deck of cards.
This is interesting, would like to see more of this. Tower blocks in Glasgow have gone through various revisions, originally the saviours of Gorbals dwellers (& seen as such by those folk), then sink holes for impoverished Glaswegians, now another revision seems in the pipeline. Getting away from knocking everything down & starting again would be a good move in any case I think.
Generally there seem to be very different attitudes to high rises. Paris (admittedly a city I hardly know) appears to see the banlieues as something to be forgotten about while Berlin seems to take some pride in them.
It depends how they are built and who they are aimed at. A friend was early into getting mortgages available for tower blocks in the UK - used to be that the big lenders wouldn't lend above floor X....
The demented social engineers who built unsafe "communal spaces" into their structures really achieved something special.
You should see the original plans for rebuilding Glasgow after WWII, which including razing the city centre (the greatest Victoria city in Europe - Betjeman), Speer and Germania had nothing on them. They still had a bloody good go, mind.
I must admit to a sneaking admiration of post war Town planners. There was a misplaced belief in the future, and that vibrant communities would thrive in these cities in the skies. Too much faith in human progress, I suppose, when it seems what is really wanted is a better facsimile of the past.
One thing I do see from Ukraine is that the Kruschevski concrete blocks of flats seem to have lasted better than our own 1950s and 60's blocks. At least until mother Russia came visiting.
Can you point to any evidence that such planners actually liked or understood humans, or were they just using them as some sort of funnel of reconstituted human fodder for their grand experiments, like liquidised meat in Subway's ham?
They genuinely thought people would be happier in the sky. Low rise density was associated with pollution, squalor, bad air, bad sanitation.
They didn’t think about how humans really interact, nipping from door to door, down the road to the shops. They didn’t realize how you could upgrade low rise housing with much less effort, and much less destruction of communities (however poor)
Most of all, all of that was secondary to the vanity and arrogance of planners, architects and politicians, who wanted their names celebrated with big shiny towers not boring but careful redevelopment. Ooops
But a lot of rich people still choose to live in high rise apartments. It seems to be something to do with whether or not you had a choice to live in a tower block.
This is interesting, would like to see more of this. Tower blocks in Glasgow have gone through various revisions, originally the saviours of Gorbals dwellers (& seen as such by those folk), then sink holes for impoverished Glaswegians, now another revision seems in the pipeline. Getting away from knocking everything down & starting again would be a good move in any case I think.
Generally there seem to be very different attitudes to high rises. Paris (admittedly a city I hardly know) appears to see the banlieues as something to be forgotten about while Berlin seems to take some pride in them.
It depends how they are built and who they are aimed at. A friend was early into getting mortgages available for tower blocks in the UK - used to be that the big lenders wouldn't lend above floor X....
The demented social engineers who built unsafe "communal spaces" into their structures really achieved something special.
You should see the original plans for rebuilding Glasgow after WWII, which including razing the city centre (the greatest Victoria city in Europe - Betjeman), Speer and Germania had nothing on them. They still had a bloody good go, mind.
I must admit to a sneaking admiration of post war Town planners. There was a misplaced belief in the future, and that vibrant communities would thrive in these cities in the skies. Too much faith in human progress, I suppose, when it seems what is really wanted is a better facsimile of the past.
One thing I do see from Ukraine is that the Kruschevski concrete blocks of flats seem to have lasted better than our own 1950s and 60's blocks. At least until mother Russia came visiting.
Can you point to any evidence that such planners actually liked or understood humans, or were they just using them as some sort of funnel of reconstituted human fodder for their grand experiments, like liquidised meat in Subway's ham?
They genuinely thought people would be happier in the sky. Low rise density was associated with pollution, squalor, bad air, bad sanitation.
They didn’t think about how humans really interact, nipping from door to door, down the road to the shops. They didn’t realize how you could upgrade low rise housing with much less effort, and much less destruction of communities (however poor)
Most of all, all of that was secondary to the vanity and arrogance of planners, architects and politicians, who wanted their names celebrated with big shiny towers not boring but careful redevelopment. Ooops
What become quite clear is that many of them considered people as abstracts objects - a number of the visionaries hadn't actually looked at the communities they were shuffling like a deck of cards.
Compare and contrast Harlow. Neighbourhoods with local shops around a town centre. Very few high-rises until later.
Shrewsbury was not an aberration, but the culmination of a drive across the NHS to reduce caesarean sections. Read this 2002 Parliament briefing: "Women have little freedom to express a preference for CS..." #Shrewsbury #maternity https://t.co/HsFIMw1FE5
The rest of that twitter thread is very interesting too. The number of maternity scandals across Britain has always suggested a systemic problem. Part of this was the drive to lowers caesarian rates. The financial penalties for having a high caesarian rate were introduced by Alan Milburn in 2002.
I left the Labour Party in the early noughties for two reasons. Blair's warmongering, but also Milburn's target culture distorting good medical practice.
A lot of that target culture distorting practice has become so normalised in the NHS that only us old codgers remember the time before, when clinical decision making was the norm.
This is interesting, would like to see more of this. Tower blocks in Glasgow have gone through various revisions, originally the saviours of Gorbals dwellers (& seen as such by those folk), then sink holes for impoverished Glaswegians, now another revision seems in the pipeline. Getting away from knocking everything down & starting again would be a good move in any case I think.
Generally there seem to be very different attitudes to high rises. Paris (admittedly a city I hardly know) appears to see the banlieues as something to be forgotten about while Berlin seems to take some pride in them.
It depends how they are built and who they are aimed at. A friend was early into getting mortgages available for tower blocks in the UK - used to be that the big lenders wouldn't lend above floor X....
The demented social engineers who built unsafe "communal spaces" into their structures really achieved something special.
You should see the original plans for rebuilding Glasgow after WWII, which including razing the city centre (the greatest Victoria city in Europe - Betjeman), Speer and Germania had nothing on them. They still had a bloody good go, mind.
I must admit to a sneaking admiration of post war Town planners. There was a misplaced belief in the future, and that vibrant communities would thrive in these cities in the skies. Too much faith in human progress, I suppose, when it seems what is really wanted is a better facsimile of the past.
One thing I do see from Ukraine is that the Kruschevski concrete blocks of flats seem to have lasted better than our own 1950s and 60's blocks. At least until mother Russia came visiting.
Can you point to any evidence that such planners actually liked or understood humans, or were they just using them as some sort of funnel of reconstituted human fodder for their grand experiments, like liquidised meat in Subway's ham?
Some years ago, I was discussing a program on the Grand Vision architecture of the post-war period, with a friend who was a psychiatrist. Apparently she had been struck (as I was) with the relative absence of people in the models and designs for so many of the ideas - a few distant dots.
One which had people in, I remember as quite disturbing. It was a drawing with the buildings in crisp, certain lines but with the people drawn in that few-curves-to-suggest-a-vague-figure style. Ghosts wandering around The Machine For Living.
Maas Man from Count Zero, perhaps....
A project I've always wanted to do is show the architect's vision of an area with what was actually built. Children and parents holding hands replaced with a homeless person sleeping; regularly-spaced trees replaced with haphazardly parked cars.
This is interesting, would like to see more of this. Tower blocks in Glasgow have gone through various revisions, originally the saviours of Gorbals dwellers (& seen as such by those folk), then sink holes for impoverished Glaswegians, now another revision seems in the pipeline. Getting away from knocking everything down & starting again would be a good move in any case I think.
Generally there seem to be very different attitudes to high rises. Paris (admittedly a city I hardly know) appears to see the banlieues as something to be forgotten about while Berlin seems to take some pride in them.
It depends how they are built and who they are aimed at. A friend was early into getting mortgages available for tower blocks in the UK - used to be that the big lenders wouldn't lend above floor X....
The demented social engineers who built unsafe "communal spaces" into their structures really achieved something special.
You should see the original plans for rebuilding Glasgow after WWII, which including razing the city centre (the greatest Victoria city in Europe - Betjeman), Speer and Germania had nothing on them. They still had a bloody good go, mind.
I must admit to a sneaking admiration of post war Town planners. There was a misplaced belief in the future, and that vibrant communities would thrive in these cities in the skies. Too much faith in human progress, I suppose, when it seems what is really wanted is a better facsimile of the past.
One thing I do see from Ukraine is that the Kruschevski concrete blocks of flats seem to have lasted better than our own 1950s and 60's blocks. At least until mother Russia came visiting.
Can you point to any evidence that such planners actually liked or understood humans, or were they just using them as some sort of funnel of reconstituted human fodder for their grand experiments, like liquidised meat in Subway's ham?
They genuinely thought people would be happier in the sky. Low rise density was associated with pollution, squalor, bad air, bad sanitation.
They didn’t think about how humans really interact, nipping from door to door, down the road to the shops. They didn’t realize how you could upgrade low rise housing with much less effort, and much less destruction of communities (however poor)
Most of all, all of that was secondary to the vanity and arrogance of planners, architects and politicians, who wanted their names celebrated with big shiny towers not boring but careful redevelopment. Ooops
But a lot of rich people still choose to live in high rise apartments. It seems to be something to do with whether or not you had a choice to live in a tower block.
The most common arrangement in Italian towns is a small-ish block of say six or eight apartments. If you get good neighbours this can work really well since you have the same sort of community as you might get in a small cul-de-sac, amplified by the need and opportunity to co-operate over the shared space and garden. Obviously if you have problem neighbours it doesn’t work so well - but then that’s true of any housing arrangement with a degree of proximity.
This is interesting, would like to see more of this. Tower blocks in Glasgow have gone through various revisions, originally the saviours of Gorbals dwellers (& seen as such by those folk), then sink holes for impoverished Glaswegians, now another revision seems in the pipeline. Getting away from knocking everything down & starting again would be a good move in any case I think.
Generally there seem to be very different attitudes to high rises. Paris (admittedly a city I hardly know) appears to see the banlieues as something to be forgotten about while Berlin seems to take some pride in them.
It depends how they are built and who they are aimed at. A friend was early into getting mortgages available for tower blocks in the UK - used to be that the big lenders wouldn't lend above floor X....
The demented social engineers who built unsafe "communal spaces" into their structures really achieved something special.
You should see the original plans for rebuilding Glasgow after WWII, which including razing the city centre (the greatest Victoria city in Europe - Betjeman), Speer and Germania had nothing on them. They still had a bloody good go, mind.
I must admit to a sneaking admiration of post war Town planners. There was a misplaced belief in the future, and that vibrant communities would thrive in these cities in the skies. Too much faith in human progress, I suppose, when it seems what is really wanted is a better facsimile of the past.
One thing I do see from Ukraine is that the Kruschevski concrete blocks of flats seem to have lasted better than our own 1950s and 60's blocks. At least until mother Russia came visiting.
Can you point to any evidence that such planners actually liked or understood humans, or were they just using them as some sort of funnel of reconstituted human fodder for their grand experiments, like liquidised meat in Subway's ham?
They genuinely thought people would be happier in the sky. Low rise density was associated with pollution, squalor, bad air, bad sanitation.
They didn’t think about how humans really interact, nipping from door to door, down the road to the shops. They didn’t realize how you could upgrade low rise housing with much less effort, and much less destruction of communities (however poor)
Most of all, all of that was secondary to the vanity and arrogance of planners, architects and politicians, who wanted their names celebrated with big shiny towers not boring but careful redevelopment. Ooops
We also forget some of the dreadful slums before the urban renewal programme.
A lot of the problems came from shoddy construction, something still extant in the cladding crisis.
They genuinely thought people would be happier in the sky. Low rise density was associated with pollution, squalor, bad air, bad sanitation.
They didn’t think about how humans really interact, nipping from door to door, down the road to the shops. They didn’t realize how you could upgrade low rise housing with much less effort, and much less destruction of communities (however poor)
Most of all, all of that was secondary to the vanity and arrogance of planners, architects and politicians, who wanted their names celebrated with big shiny towers not boring but careful redevelopment. Ooops
You're generalising too far, and arguably romanticising with Coronation Street and similar models in mind. By and large, modern life isn't like that. You've travelled more than me, but every capital city I've been in has had lots more residential skyscrapers than :London, and by and large people seem fine with them - it's simply what they're used to, and the big updside is that housing becomes cheaper. Conversely, I now live up a little side-road with lots of cottages of various sizes. Nobody interacts at all (but again, people are OK with it). Any more than they did in Nottingham or Holloway where I lived before - you got to know people enough to give a friendly smile, but that was it. Obviously some people do more - but I'd argue that's their choice and personality rather than the architecture. Offer people a well-built home that's 40% cheaper and they mostly won't care if it's a bungalow or the 7th floor.
A fascinating article on Why old buildings are generally more beautiful than new ones
One common answer is survivorship bias. Basically, the old ugly buildings get knocked down, we are left with a self-selecting group of the best. Yet this article quite convincingly argues that no, that might be A reason, but it is not The reason
For @Theuniondivvie there’s a poignant photo of the Gorbals, implying that with a bit of love and care it could have been the Islington or Notting Hill of Glasgow (both of those were London slums)
"PPE the government bought for £122m from a company linked to the Tory peer Michelle Mone was purchased from the Chinese manufacturer for just £46m.
The extraordinary profits apparently made by PPE Medpro and its partners in the supply chain are revealed in documents leaked to the Guardian, including contracts and an inspection report for sterile surgical gowns supplied by the firm.
Despite being bought at the start of the pandemic and delivered in 2020, the 25m gowns were never used by the NHS after government officials rejected them following an inspection.
The Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) has for months been seeking to recover money from PPE Medpro through a mediation process. The firm claims it is entitled to keep the money, arguing that DHSC “agents” approved the gowns after inspection."
This is interesting, would like to see more of this. Tower blocks in Glasgow have gone through various revisions, originally the saviours of Gorbals dwellers (& seen as such by those folk), then sink holes for impoverished Glaswegians, now another revision seems in the pipeline. Getting away from knocking everything down & starting again would be a good move in any case I think.
Generally there seem to be very different attitudes to high rises. Paris (admittedly a city I hardly know) appears to see the banlieues as something to be forgotten about while Berlin seems to take some pride in them.
It depends how they are built and who they are aimed at. A friend was early into getting mortgages available for tower blocks in the UK - used to be that the big lenders wouldn't lend above floor X....
The demented social engineers who built unsafe "communal spaces" into their structures really achieved something special.
You should see the original plans for rebuilding Glasgow after WWII, which including razing the city centre (the greatest Victoria city in Europe - Betjeman), Speer and Germania had nothing on them. They still had a bloody good go, mind.
I must admit to a sneaking admiration of post war Town planners. There was a misplaced belief in the future, and that vibrant communities would thrive in these cities in the skies. Too much faith in human progress, I suppose, when it seems what is really wanted is a better facsimile of the past.
One thing I do see from Ukraine is that the Kruschevski concrete blocks of flats seem to have lasted better than our own 1950s and 60's blocks. At least until mother Russia came visiting.
Can you point to any evidence that such planners actually liked or understood humans, or were they just using them as some sort of funnel of reconstituted human fodder for their grand experiments, like liquidised meat in Subway's ham?
They genuinely thought people would be happier in the sky. Low rise density was associated with pollution, squalor, bad air, bad sanitation.
They didn’t think about how humans really interact, nipping from door to door, down the road to the shops. They didn’t realize how you could upgrade low rise housing with much less effort, and much less destruction of communities (however poor)
Most of all, all of that was secondary to the vanity and arrogance of planners, architects and politicians, who wanted their names celebrated with big shiny towers not boring but careful redevelopment. Ooops
What become quite clear is that many of them considered people as abstracts objects - a number of the visionaries hadn't actually looked at the communities they were shuffling like a deck of cards.
That was the founding error. But in designing towns and buildings, we need to go further than just treat people as people, and understand how we see the world, interact with the environment, and the structural aspects of how we socialize.
This is interesting, would like to see more of this. Tower blocks in Glasgow have gone through various revisions, originally the saviours of Gorbals dwellers (& seen as such by those folk), then sink holes for impoverished Glaswegians, now another revision seems in the pipeline. Getting away from knocking everything down & starting again would be a good move in any case I think.
Generally there seem to be very different attitudes to high rises. Paris (admittedly a city I hardly know) appears to see the banlieues as something to be forgotten about while Berlin seems to take some pride in them.
It depends how they are built and who they are aimed at. A friend was early into getting mortgages available for tower blocks in the UK - used to be that the big lenders wouldn't lend above floor X....
The demented social engineers who built unsafe "communal spaces" into their structures really achieved something special.
You should see the original plans for rebuilding Glasgow after WWII, which including razing the city centre (the greatest Victoria city in Europe - Betjeman), Speer and Germania had nothing on them. They still had a bloody good go, mind.
I must admit to a sneaking admiration of post war Town planners. There was a misplaced belief in the future, and that vibrant communities would thrive in these cities in the skies. Too much faith in human progress, I suppose, when it seems what is really wanted is a better facsimile of the past.
One thing I do see from Ukraine is that the Kruschevski concrete blocks of flats seem to have lasted better than our own 1950s and 60's blocks. At least until mother Russia came visiting.
Can you point to any evidence that such planners actually liked or understood humans, or were they just using them as some sort of funnel of reconstituted human fodder for their grand experiments, like liquidised meat in Subway's ham?
They genuinely thought people would be happier in the sky. Low rise density was associated with pollution, squalor, bad air, bad sanitation.
They didn’t think about how humans really interact, nipping from door to door, down the road to the shops. They didn’t realize how you could upgrade low rise housing with much less effort, and much less destruction of communities (however poor)
Most of all, all of that was secondary to the vanity and arrogance of planners, architects and politicians, who wanted their names celebrated with big shiny towers not boring but careful redevelopment. Ooops
We also forget some of the dreadful slums before the urban renewal programme.
A lot of the problems came from shoddy construction, something still extant in the cladding crisis.
The Nash terraces, commencing 200 yards from where I write this, were notoriously badly built. They started falling down a few weeks after they went up. Yet now they are generally regarded as some of the finest, noblest, loveliest, most coherent urban housing in the entire world, and a decent house will cost you about £30 million
Let me recommend Tom Wolfe's "From Bauhaus to Our House" to anyone interested in how tower blocks for the poor failed in the US. Here's what happened at one famous such development in St. Louis:
Millions of dollars and scores of commission meetings and task-force projects were expended in a last-ditch attempt to make Pruitt-Igoe habitable. In 1971, the final task force called a general meeting of everyone still living in the project. They asked the residents for their suggestions. It was a historic moment for two reasons. One, for the first time in the fifty-year history of worker housing, someone had finally asked the client for his two cents' worth. Two, the chant. The chant began immediately: "Blow it . . . up! Blow it . . . up! Blow it . . . up! Blow it . . . up!" The next day the task force thought it over. The poor buggers were right. It was the only solution. (p. 64)
And so they did. (You should be able to find video of the demolition without much searching.)
In the late 1960s, I lived in Chicago and saw similar projects. At least one of them, the Robert Taylor Homes, was so dangerous that police officers went in at least four at a time. All of them would have had hand guns, and would have had access to either a shotgun or rifle in their police cars.
This is interesting, would like to see more of this. Tower blocks in Glasgow have gone through various revisions, originally the saviours of Gorbals dwellers (& seen as such by those folk), then sink holes for impoverished Glaswegians, now another revision seems in the pipeline. Getting away from knocking everything down & starting again would be a good move in any case I think.
Generally there seem to be very different attitudes to high rises. Paris (admittedly a city I hardly know) appears to see the banlieues as something to be forgotten about while Berlin seems to take some pride in them.
It depends how they are built and who they are aimed at. A friend was early into getting mortgages available for tower blocks in the UK - used to be that the big lenders wouldn't lend above floor X....
The demented social engineers who built unsafe "communal spaces" into their structures really achieved something special.
You should see the original plans for rebuilding Glasgow after WWII, which including razing the city centre (the greatest Victoria city in Europe - Betjeman), Speer and Germania had nothing on them. They still had a bloody good go, mind.
I must admit to a sneaking admiration of post war Town planners. There was a misplaced belief in the future, and that vibrant communities would thrive in these cities in the skies. Too much faith in human progress, I suppose, when it seems what is really wanted is a better facsimile of the past.
One thing I do see from Ukraine is that the Kruschevski concrete blocks of flats seem to have lasted better than our own 1950s and 60's blocks. At least until mother Russia came visiting.
Can you point to any evidence that such planners actually liked or understood humans, or were they just using them as some sort of funnel of reconstituted human fodder for their grand experiments, like liquidised meat in Subway's ham?
They genuinely thought people would be happier in the sky. Low rise density was associated with pollution, squalor, bad air, bad sanitation.
They didn’t think about how humans really interact, nipping from door to door, down the road to the shops. They didn’t realize how you could upgrade low rise housing with much less effort, and much less destruction of communities (however poor)
Most of all, all of that was secondary to the vanity and arrogance of planners, architects and politicians, who wanted their names celebrated with big shiny towers not boring but careful redevelopment. Ooops
But a lot of rich people still choose to live in high rise apartments. It seems to be something to do with whether or not you had a choice to live in a tower block.
The most common arrangement in Italian towns is a small-ish block of say six or eight apartments. If you get good neighbours this can work really well since you have the same sort of community as you might get in a small cul-de-sac, amplified by the need and opportunity to co-operate over the shared space and garden. Obviously if you have problem neighbours it doesn’t work so well - but then that’s true of any housing arrangement with a degree of proximity.
The London Square was another brilliant urban invention. Humane, friendly, generally beautiful
This is interesting, would like to see more of this. Tower blocks in Glasgow have gone through various revisions, originally the saviours of Gorbals dwellers (& seen as such by those folk), then sink holes for impoverished Glaswegians, now another revision seems in the pipeline. Getting away from knocking everything down & starting again would be a good move in any case I think.
Generally there seem to be very different attitudes to high rises. Paris (admittedly a city I hardly know) appears to see the banlieues as something to be forgotten about while Berlin seems to take some pride in them.
It depends how they are built and who they are aimed at. A friend was early into getting mortgages available for tower blocks in the UK - used to be that the big lenders wouldn't lend above floor X....
The demented social engineers who built unsafe "communal spaces" into their structures really achieved something special.
You should see the original plans for rebuilding Glasgow after WWII, which including razing the city centre (the greatest Victoria city in Europe - Betjeman), Speer and Germania had nothing on them. They still had a bloody good go, mind.
I must admit to a sneaking admiration of post war Town planners. There was a misplaced belief in the future, and that vibrant communities would thrive in these cities in the skies. Too much faith in human progress, I suppose, when it seems what is really wanted is a better facsimile of the past.
One thing I do see from Ukraine is that the Kruschevski concrete blocks of flats seem to have lasted better than our own 1950s and 60's blocks. At least until mother Russia came visiting.
Can you point to any evidence that such planners actually liked or understood humans, or were they just using them as some sort of funnel of reconstituted human fodder for their grand experiments, like liquidised meat in Subway's ham?
They genuinely thought people would be happier in the sky. Low rise density was associated with pollution, squalor, bad air, bad sanitation.
They didn’t think about how humans really interact, nipping from door to door, down the road to the shops. They didn’t realize how you could upgrade low rise housing with much less effort, and much less destruction of communities (however poor)
Most of all, all of that was secondary to the vanity and arrogance of planners, architects and politicians, who wanted their names celebrated with big shiny towers not boring but careful redevelopment. Ooops
What become quite clear is that many of them considered people as abstracts objects - a number of the visionaries hadn't actually looked at the communities they were shuffling like a deck of cards.
That was the founding error. But in designing towns and buildings, we need to go further than just treat people as people, and understand how we see the world, interact with the environment, and the structural aspects of how we socialize.
"understand how we see the world, interact with the environment, and the structural aspects of how we socialize."
But that is *exactly* treating people as people. Rather than inconvenient pegs of varying geometries which will be improved by bashing into a single type of hole.
This is interesting, would like to see more of this. Tower blocks in Glasgow have gone through various revisions, originally the saviours of Gorbals dwellers (& seen as such by those folk), then sink holes for impoverished Glaswegians, now another revision seems in the pipeline. Getting away from knocking everything down & starting again would be a good move in any case I think.
Generally there seem to be very different attitudes to high rises. Paris (admittedly a city I hardly know) appears to see the banlieues as something to be forgotten about while Berlin seems to take some pride in them.
It depends how they are built and who they are aimed at. A friend was early into getting mortgages available for tower blocks in the UK - used to be that the big lenders wouldn't lend above floor X....
The demented social engineers who built unsafe "communal spaces" into their structures really achieved something special.
You should see the original plans for rebuilding Glasgow after WWII, which including razing the city centre (the greatest Victoria city in Europe - Betjeman), Speer and Germania had nothing on them. They still had a bloody good go, mind.
I must admit to a sneaking admiration of post war Town planners. There was a misplaced belief in the future, and that vibrant communities would thrive in these cities in the skies. Too much faith in human progress, I suppose, when it seems what is really wanted is a better facsimile of the past.
One thing I do see from Ukraine is that the Kruschevski concrete blocks of flats seem to have lasted better than our own 1950s and 60's blocks. At least until mother Russia came visiting.
Can you point to any evidence that such planners actually liked or understood humans, or were they just using them as some sort of funnel of reconstituted human fodder for their grand experiments, like liquidised meat in Subway's ham?
They genuinely thought people would be happier in the sky. Low rise density was associated with pollution, squalor, bad air, bad sanitation.
They didn’t think about how humans really interact, nipping from door to door, down the road to the shops. They didn’t realize how you could upgrade low rise housing with much less effort, and much less destruction of communities (however poor)
Most of all, all of that was secondary to the vanity and arrogance of planners, architects and politicians, who wanted their names celebrated with big shiny towers not boring but careful redevelopment. Ooops
What become quite clear is that many of them considered people as abstracts objects - a number of the visionaries hadn't actually looked at the communities they were shuffling like a deck of cards.
That was the founding error. But in designing towns and buildings, we need to go further than just treat people as people, and understand how we see the world, interact with the environment, and the structural aspects of how we socialize.
As I often say: We don't need to build housing; we need to build communities.
This is interesting, would like to see more of this. Tower blocks in Glasgow have gone through various revisions, originally the saviours of Gorbals dwellers (& seen as such by those folk), then sink holes for impoverished Glaswegians, now another revision seems in the pipeline. Getting away from knocking everything down & starting again would be a good move in any case I think.
Generally there seem to be very different attitudes to high rises. Paris (admittedly a city I hardly know) appears to see the banlieues as something to be forgotten about while Berlin seems to take some pride in them.
It depends how they are built and who they are aimed at. A friend was early into getting mortgages available for tower blocks in the UK - used to be that the big lenders wouldn't lend above floor X....
The demented social engineers who built unsafe "communal spaces" into their structures really achieved something special.
You should see the original plans for rebuilding Glasgow after WWII, which including razing the city centre (the greatest Victoria city in Europe - Betjeman), Speer and Germania had nothing on them. They still had a bloody good go, mind.
I must admit to a sneaking admiration of post war Town planners. There was a misplaced belief in the future, and that vibrant communities would thrive in these cities in the skies. Too much faith in human progress, I suppose, when it seems what is really wanted is a better facsimile of the past.
One thing I do see from Ukraine is that the Kruschevski concrete blocks of flats seem to have lasted better than our own 1950s and 60's blocks. At least until mother Russia came visiting.
Can you point to any evidence that such planners actually liked or understood humans, or were they just using them as some sort of funnel of reconstituted human fodder for their grand experiments, like liquidised meat in Subway's ham?
They genuinely thought people would be happier in the sky. Low rise density was associated with pollution, squalor, bad air, bad sanitation.
They didn’t think about how humans really interact, nipping from door to door, down the road to the shops. They didn’t realize how you could upgrade low rise housing with much less effort, and much less destruction of communities (however poor)
Most of all, all of that was secondary to the vanity and arrogance of planners, architects and politicians, who wanted their names celebrated with big shiny towers not boring but careful redevelopment. Ooops
We also forget some of the dreadful slums before the urban renewal programme.
A lot of the problems came from shoddy construction, something still extant in the cladding crisis.
The Nash terraces, commencing 200 yards from where I write this, were notoriously badly built. They started falling down a few weeks after they went up. Yet now they are generally regarded as some of the finest, noblest, loveliest, most coherent urban housing in the entire world, and a decent house will cost you about £30 million
A fascinating article on Why old buildings are generally more beautiful than new ones
One common answer is survivorship bias. Basically, the old ugly buildings get knocked down, we are left with a self-selecting group of the best. Yet this article quite convincingly argues that no, that might be A reason, but it is not The reason
For @Theuniondivvie there’s a poignant photo of the Gorbals, implying that with a bit of love and care it could have been the Islington or Notting Hill of Glasgow (both of those were London slums)
Interesting the author uses Jericho in Oxford as an example. Victorian terraced housing, sort of place the workers inhabited with some lower middle class - but nowadays ... my friends who are professors live there ...
This is interesting, would like to see more of this. Tower blocks in Glasgow have gone through various revisions, originally the saviours of Gorbals dwellers (& seen as such by those folk), then sink holes for impoverished Glaswegians, now another revision seems in the pipeline. Getting away from knocking everything down & starting again would be a good move in any case I think.
Generally there seem to be very different attitudes to high rises. Paris (admittedly a city I hardly know) appears to see the banlieues as something to be forgotten about while Berlin seems to take some pride in them.
It depends how they are built and who they are aimed at. A friend was early into getting mortgages available for tower blocks in the UK - used to be that the big lenders wouldn't lend above floor X....
The demented social engineers who built unsafe "communal spaces" into their structures really achieved something special.
You should see the original plans for rebuilding Glasgow after WWII, which including razing the city centre (the greatest Victoria city in Europe - Betjeman), Speer and Germania had nothing on them. They still had a bloody good go, mind.
I must admit to a sneaking admiration of post war Town planners. There was a misplaced belief in the future, and that vibrant communities would thrive in these cities in the skies. Too much faith in human progress, I suppose, when it seems what is really wanted is a better facsimile of the past.
One thing I do see from Ukraine is that the Kruschevski concrete blocks of flats seem to have lasted better than our own 1950s and 60's blocks. At least until mother Russia came visiting.
Can you point to any evidence that such planners actually liked or understood humans, or were they just using them as some sort of funnel of reconstituted human fodder for their grand experiments, like liquidised meat in Subway's ham?
They genuinely thought people would be happier in the sky. Low rise density was associated with pollution, squalor, bad air, bad sanitation.
They didn’t think about how humans really interact, nipping from door to door, down the road to the shops. They didn’t realize how you could upgrade low rise housing with much less effort, and much less destruction of communities (however poor)
Most of all, all of that was secondary to the vanity and arrogance of planners, architects and politicians, who wanted their names celebrated with big shiny towers not boring but careful redevelopment. Ooops
We also forget some of the dreadful slums before the urban renewal programme.
A lot of the problems came from shoddy construction, something still extant in the cladding crisis.
Yes, because of the Soviet-like target-driven central planning from Macmillan and Wilson which made the number of houses built be everything, and quality be immaterial.
And also because they were built when architectural fashions were at their ugliest.
Together, those two facts have blighted our cities. They will take generations to recover.
A fascinating article on Why old buildings are generally more beautiful than new ones
One common answer is survivorship bias. Basically, the old ugly buildings get knocked down, we are left with a self-selecting group of the best. Yet this article quite convincingly argues that no, that might be A reason, but it is not The reason
For @Theuniondivvie there’s a poignant photo of the Gorbals, implying that with a bit of love and care it could have been the Islington or Notting Hill of Glasgow (both of those were London slums)
A fascinating article on Why old buildings are generally more beautiful than new ones
One common answer is survivorship bias. Basically, the old ugly buildings get knocked down, we are left with a self-selecting group of the best. Yet this article quite convincingly argues that no, that might be A reason, but it is not The reason
For @Theuniondivvie there’s a poignant photo of the Gorbals, implying that with a bit of love and care it could have been the Islington or Notting Hill of Glasgow (both of those were London slums)
Just to be picky I wouldn't say Eglinton St is/was the Gorbals, more a boundary, and is of course now the gateway to the Boho hipsterdom of the Southside.
Probably an element truth in what the Gorbals could have been. The line was always that the Gorbals tenements were beyond redemption and of such shoddy construction as to be unrecoverable, but they were extremely badly maintained and overcrowded by crappy landlords; I sense there was a mood at the time of just get the whole filthy mess cleared. Given the huge efforts made now to preserve rackety tenement buildings, I smell bullshit on the reason given.
This is interesting, would like to see more of this. Tower blocks in Glasgow have gone through various revisions, originally the saviours of Gorbals dwellers (& seen as such by those folk), then sink holes for impoverished Glaswegians, now another revision seems in the pipeline. Getting away from knocking everything down & starting again would be a good move in any case I think.
Generally there seem to be very different attitudes to high rises. Paris (admittedly a city I hardly know) appears to see the banlieues as something to be forgotten about while Berlin seems to take some pride in them.
It depends how they are built and who they are aimed at. A friend was early into getting mortgages available for tower blocks in the UK - used to be that the big lenders wouldn't lend above floor X....
The demented social engineers who built unsafe "communal spaces" into their structures really achieved something special.
You should see the original plans for rebuilding Glasgow after WWII, which including razing the city centre (the greatest Victoria city in Europe - Betjeman), Speer and Germania had nothing on them. They still had a bloody good go, mind.
I must admit to a sneaking admiration of post war Town planners. There was a misplaced belief in the future, and that vibrant communities would thrive in these cities in the skies. Too much faith in human progress, I suppose, when it seems what is really wanted is a better facsimile of the past.
One thing I do see from Ukraine is that the Kruschevski concrete blocks of flats seem to have lasted better than our own 1950s and 60's blocks. At least until mother Russia came visiting.
Can you point to any evidence that such planners actually liked or understood humans, or were they just using them as some sort of funnel of reconstituted human fodder for their grand experiments, like liquidised meat in Subway's ham?
They genuinely thought people would be happier in the sky. Low rise density was associated with pollution, squalor, bad air, bad sanitation.
They didn’t think about how humans really interact, nipping from door to door, down the road to the shops. They didn’t realize how you could upgrade low rise housing with much less effort, and much less destruction of communities (however poor)
Most of all, all of that was secondary to the vanity and arrogance of planners, architects and politicians, who wanted their names celebrated with big shiny towers not boring but careful redevelopment. Ooops
But a lot of rich people still choose to live in high rise apartments. It seems to be something to do with whether or not you had a choice to live in a tower block.
The most common arrangement in Italian towns is a small-ish block of say six or eight apartments. If you get good neighbours this can work really well since you have the same sort of community as you might get in a small cul-de-sac, amplified by the need and opportunity to co-operate over the shared space and garden. Obviously if you have problem neighbours it doesn’t work so well - but then that’s true of any housing arrangement with a degree of proximity.
The London Square was another brilliant urban invention. Humane, friendly, generally beautiful
Except that the green space in the middle is kept under lock and key, available to residents only, and comes with a long list of regulations in case anyone living there tries to use the common space to have any fun. And usually patrolled by some fierce WI type (or male equivalent) just to be sure.
A fascinating article on Why old buildings are generally more beautiful than new ones
One common answer is survivorship bias. Basically, the old ugly buildings get knocked down, we are left with a self-selecting group of the best. Yet this article quite convincingly argues that no, that might be A reason, but it is not The reason
For @Theuniondivvie there’s a poignant photo of the Gorbals, implying that with a bit of love and care it could have been the Islington or Notting Hill of Glasgow (both of those were London slums)
An interesting article that doesn't try to do too much.
As we've discussed and I've argued before, there are immutable laws of beauty in buildings and landscapes just as there are in humans. With good reason - they relate to the likelihood of our ancestors surving and being secure in such places.
Things we find intrinsically beautiful include ornate decoration, natural materials like stone and wood, deep set windows, arches, and pillars. The builders of the post-war era rejected beauty actively because it was considered old-hat (not that the hypocrites who built them would have considered living in them). Those who disagreed were mocked as luddites. These buildings are ugly because they're meant to be ugly - that's the crime of it.
"PPE the government bought for £122m from a company linked to the Tory peer Michelle Mone was purchased from the Chinese manufacturer for just £46m.
The extraordinary profits apparently made by PPE Medpro and its partners in the supply chain are revealed in documents leaked to the Guardian, including contracts and an inspection report for sterile surgical gowns supplied by the firm.
Despite being bought at the start of the pandemic and delivered in 2020, the 25m gowns were never used by the NHS after government officials rejected them following an inspection.
The Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) has for months been seeking to recover money from PPE Medpro through a mediation process. The firm claims it is entitled to keep the money, arguing that DHSC “agents” approved the gowns after inspection."
If that PPE was made in a factory alongside the A1 there wouldn't be the scope for profiteering by middlemen.
Which is perhaps why the establishment seems so happy to offshore manufacturing.
Nor would you pay for unusable items if they were made in a factory alongside the A1.
Never is such a long time. You could contrive many scenarios where it would be stupid not to.
Nuclear holocaust?
Or even just another pandemic that is much more deadly to kids. Would they really keep schools open if they were dropping like flies?
I’m a bit bothered by the way some people are trying to rewrite the last two years. I hope that the inquiry will be useful, fair and balanced. I hope that it answers some questions, but I fear minds have already been made up on many fronts. I have no problem with the decisions to try remote learning in the face of the pandemic in March 2020. It was a very strange time, and no one really knew what was happening and what would happen. You can make a case for trying harder to avoid later school closures, but it’s not easy. And of course as our teachers on pb will tell us, schools didn’t actually close, b3cause of the need to open for kids of those who still had to go out and work. The biggest mistake that I believe we made as a country was not locking down hard as soon as we had the vaccines. That would have had a clear purpose - to keep cases as low as possible until sufficient vaccination had occurred. Sadly the attempts to live with Covid pre vaccines, and after alpha, were a disaster. The benefit of hindsight.
A fascinating article on Why old buildings are generally more beautiful than new ones
One common answer is survivorship bias. Basically, the old ugly buildings get knocked down, we are left with a self-selecting group of the best. Yet this article quite convincingly argues that no, that might be A reason, but it is not The reason
For @Theuniondivvie there’s a poignant photo of the Gorbals, implying that with a bit of love and care it could have been the Islington or Notting Hill of Glasgow (both of those were London slums)
Interesting the author uses Jericho in Oxford as an example. Victorian terraced housing, sort of place the workers inhabited with some lower middle class - but nowadays ... my friends who are professors live there ...
Interestingly, the Dead of Jericho episode of Morse (filmed in 86) showed Jericho as still being rather rough then....
(The one with a gloriously grubby Patrick Troughton character.)
Shrewsbury was not an aberration, but the culmination of a drive across the NHS to reduce caesarean sections. Read this 2002 Parliament briefing: "Women have little freedom to express a preference for CS..." #Shrewsbury #maternity https://t.co/HsFIMw1FE5
The rest of that twitter thread is very interesting too. The number of maternity scandals across Britain has always suggested a systemic problem. Part of this was the drive to lowers caesarian rates. The financial penalties for having a high caesarian rate were introduced by Alan Milburn in 2002.
I left the Labour Party in the early noughties for two reasons. Blair's warmongering, but also Milburn's target culture distorting good medical practice.
A lot of that target culture distorting practice has become so normalised in the NHS that only us old codgers remember the time before, when clinical decision making was the norm.
The perils of targets and idees fixe combined to do great harm to mothers and babies."
Don't worry. The fix will be an obsession with C-sections.
Until the scandal where *that* is discovered to have killed bunch of mothers and children.
Then we can go back to All Natural Childbirth.
The impression I get is that we have worse maternal outcomes than some countries with much higher rates of C-sections, or other countries with much higher rates of home births.
One thing that I remember from the birth of my daughter was that in the lead-up there was an effort for her mother to see the same midwife, but when the birth started happening suddenly she was dealt with by a succession of different strangers who didn't have the time to spend with her, and there was an obsession with the rate at which dilation was occurring.
The whole experience was bewildering and stressful even for me as the father, to which pain, exhaustion and fear was added for the mother, and that can't have helped.
A fascinating article on Why old buildings are generally more beautiful than new ones
One common answer is survivorship bias. Basically, the old ugly buildings get knocked down, we are left with a self-selecting group of the best. Yet this article quite convincingly argues that no, that might be A reason, but it is not The reason
For @Theuniondivvie there’s a poignant photo of the Gorbals, implying that with a bit of love and care it could have been the Islington or Notting Hill of Glasgow (both of those were London slums)
Interesting the author uses Jericho in Oxford as an example. Victorian terraced housing, sort of place the workers inhabited with some lower middle class - but nowadays ... my friends who are professors live there ...
Interestingly, the Dead of Jericho episode of Morse (filmed in 86) showed Jericho as still being rather rough then....
(The one with a gloriously grubby Patrick Troughton character.)
Just thinking back to that era when my friends, then graduate students, also lived there - don't get that sense but maybe I am comparing it with the rougher areas such as St Ebbes (slum clearnace and only partly rebuilt) .
A fascinating article on Why old buildings are generally more beautiful than new ones
One common answer is survivorship bias. Basically, the old ugly buildings get knocked down, we are left with a self-selecting group of the best. Yet this article quite convincingly argues that no, that might be A reason, but it is not The reason
For @Theuniondivvie there’s a poignant photo of the Gorbals, implying that with a bit of love and care it could have been the Islington or Notting Hill of Glasgow (both of those were London slums)
“An interesting article that doesn't try to do too much.
As we've discussed and I've argued before, there are immutable laws of beauty in buildings and landscapes just as there are in humans. With good reason - they relate to the likelihood of our ancestors surving and being secure in such places.
Things we find intrinsically beautiful include ornate decoration, natural materials like stone and wood, deep set windows, arches, and pillars. The builders of the post-war era rejected beauty actively because it was considered old-hat (not that the hypocrites who built them would have considered living in them). Those who disagreed were mocked as luddites. These buildings are ugly because they're meant to be ugly - that's the crime of it.”
++++++
One of his most telling points is when he discusses old churches. There are about 8000 surviving English medieval churches. Not one is seriously ugly
A fascinating article on Why old buildings are generally more beautiful than new ones
One common answer is survivorship bias. Basically, the old ugly buildings get knocked down, we are left with a self-selecting group of the best. Yet this article quite convincingly argues that no, that might be A reason, but it is not The reason
For @Theuniondivvie there’s a poignant photo of the Gorbals, implying that with a bit of love and care it could have been the Islington or Notting Hill of Glasgow (both of those were London slums)
Interesting the author uses Jericho in Oxford as an example. Victorian terraced housing, sort of place the workers inhabited with some lower middle class - but nowadays ... my friends who are professors live there ...
Hammersmith is similar: pokey workers' cottages now commanding huge prices. And did not our own @Leon point out that Bob Cratchit's house in A Christmas Carol would now be around £1 million?
(Also a reminder that we need to careful with inflation calculators, or on the other hand concluding Henry VIII was a pauper because he did not have a big screen telly.)
This is interesting, would like to see more of this. Tower blocks in Glasgow have gone through various revisions, originally the saviours of Gorbals dwellers (& seen as such by those folk), then sink holes for impoverished Glaswegians, now another revision seems in the pipeline. Getting away from knocking everything down & starting again would be a good move in any case I think.
Generally there seem to be very different attitudes to high rises. Paris (admittedly a city I hardly know) appears to see the banlieues as something to be forgotten about while Berlin seems to take some pride in them.
It depends how they are built and who they are aimed at. A friend was early into getting mortgages available for tower blocks in the UK - used to be that the big lenders wouldn't lend above floor X....
The demented social engineers who built unsafe "communal spaces" into their structures really achieved something special.
You should see the original plans for rebuilding Glasgow after WWII, which including razing the city centre (the greatest Victoria city in Europe - Betjeman), Speer and Germania had nothing on them. They still had a bloody good go, mind.
I must admit to a sneaking admiration of post war Town planners. There was a misplaced belief in the future, and that vibrant communities would thrive in these cities in the skies. Too much faith in human progress, I suppose, when it seems what is really wanted is a better facsimile of the past.
One thing I do see from Ukraine is that the Kruschevski concrete blocks of flats seem to have lasted better than our own 1950s and 60's blocks. At least until mother Russia came visiting.
Can you point to any evidence that such planners actually liked or understood humans, or were they just using them as some sort of funnel of reconstituted human fodder for their grand experiments, like liquidised meat in Subway's ham?
They genuinely thought people would be happier in the sky. Low rise density was associated with pollution, squalor, bad air, bad sanitation.
They didn’t think about how humans really interact, nipping from door to door, down the road to the shops. They didn’t realize how you could upgrade low rise housing with much less effort, and much less destruction of communities (however poor)
Most of all, all of that was secondary to the vanity and arrogance of planners, architects and politicians, who wanted their names celebrated with big shiny towers not boring but careful redevelopment. Ooops
We also forget some of the dreadful slums before the urban renewal programme.
A lot of the problems came from shoddy construction, something still extant in the cladding crisis.
The Nash terraces, commencing 200 yards from where I write this, were notoriously badly built. They started falling down a few weeks after they went up. Yet now they are generally regarded as some of the finest, noblest, loveliest, most coherent urban housing in the entire world, and a decent house will cost you about £30 million
"PPE the government bought for £122m from a company linked to the Tory peer Michelle Mone was purchased from the Chinese manufacturer for just £46m.
The extraordinary profits apparently made by PPE Medpro and its partners in the supply chain are revealed in documents leaked to the Guardian, including contracts and an inspection report for sterile surgical gowns supplied by the firm.
Despite being bought at the start of the pandemic and delivered in 2020, the 25m gowns were never used by the NHS after government officials rejected them following an inspection.
The Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) has for months been seeking to recover money from PPE Medpro through a mediation process. The firm claims it is entitled to keep the money, arguing that DHSC “agents” approved the gowns after inspection."
A fascinating article on Why old buildings are generally more beautiful than new ones
One common answer is survivorship bias. Basically, the old ugly buildings get knocked down, we are left with a self-selecting group of the best. Yet this article quite convincingly argues that no, that might be A reason, but it is not The reason
For @Theuniondivvie there’s a poignant photo of the Gorbals, implying that with a bit of love and care it could have been the Islington or Notting Hill of Glasgow (both of those were London slums)
“An interesting article that doesn't try to do too much.
As we've discussed and I've argued before, there are immutable laws of beauty in buildings and landscapes just as there are in humans. With good reason - they relate to the likelihood of our ancestors surving and being secure in such places.
Things we find intrinsically beautiful include ornate decoration, natural materials like stone and wood, deep set windows, arches, and pillars. The builders of the post-war era rejected beauty actively because it was considered old-hat (not that the hypocrites who built them would have considered living in them). Those who disagreed were mocked as luddites. These buildings are ugly because they're meant to be ugly - that's the crime of it.”
++++++
One of his most telling points is when he discusses old churches. There are about 8000 surviving English medieval churches. Not one is seriously ugly
Even in Britain there are high rises that people want to live in: the Barbican Centre for one (although that might be because once you are in it is impossible to find your way out again).
The reason is that you have to be pretty wealthy to live in the Barbican and therefore it's kept in a fairly nice state most of the time.
That didn't used to be the case, though. In 1995/96, after I left University in 1995, I looked at buying an apartment there, and a studio flat was about 50k.
Those same studio flats are now 700k. They've gone from 3x average London salary, to 12x average London salary.
A fascinating article on Why old buildings are generally more beautiful than new ones
One common answer is survivorship bias. Basically, the old ugly buildings get knocked down, we are left with a self-selecting group of the best. Yet this article quite convincingly argues that no, that might be A reason, but it is not The reason
For @Theuniondivvie there’s a poignant photo of the Gorbals, implying that with a bit of love and care it could have been the Islington or Notting Hill of Glasgow (both of those were London slums)
“An interesting article that doesn't try to do too much.
As we've discussed and I've argued before, there are immutable laws of beauty in buildings and landscapes just as there are in humans. With good reason - they relate to the likelihood of our ancestors surving and being secure in such places.
Things we find intrinsically beautiful include ornate decoration, natural materials like stone and wood, deep set windows, arches, and pillars. The builders of the post-war era rejected beauty actively because it was considered old-hat (not that the hypocrites who built them would have considered living in them). Those who disagreed were mocked as luddites. These buildings are ugly because they're meant to be ugly - that's the crime of it.”
++++++
One of his most telling points is when he discusses old churches. There are about 8000 surviving English medieval churches. Not one is seriously ugly
Contrast with Clifton cathedral, 1970s Bristol
Long time since I've been there, but dim memory of a striking interior - albeit somewhat out fo place in the terraces and villas of Clifton. Perpendicular or Regency it ain't. Even BR Bristol Temple Meads looks more cathedraly.
Hmm, I was wondering how long it took to build. Turns out to be March 1970 - foundatiuon stone Sept 1970 - consecrated and opened June 1973, but knock off 6 months for a building strike. Two and a bit years for the superstructure. How long did it take mediaeval folk to build a cathedral ab initio?
A fascinating article on Why old buildings are generally more beautiful than new ones
One common answer is survivorship bias. Basically, the old ugly buildings get knocked down, we are left with a self-selecting group of the best. Yet this article quite convincingly argues that no, that might be A reason, but it is not The reason
For @Theuniondivvie there’s a poignant photo of the Gorbals, implying that with a bit of love and care it could have been the Islington or Notting Hill of Glasgow (both of those were London slums)
“An interesting article that doesn't try to do too much.
As we've discussed and I've argued before, there are immutable laws of beauty in buildings and landscapes just as there are in humans. With good reason - they relate to the likelihood of our ancestors surving and being secure in such places.
Things we find intrinsically beautiful include ornate decoration, natural materials like stone and wood, deep set windows, arches, and pillars. The builders of the post-war era rejected beauty actively because it was considered old-hat (not that the hypocrites who built them would have considered living in them). Those who disagreed were mocked as luddites. These buildings are ugly because they're meant to be ugly - that's the crime of it.”
++++++
One of his most telling points is when he discusses old churches. There are about 8000 surviving English medieval churches. Not one is seriously ugly
Contrast with Clifton cathedral, 1970s Bristol
Looks like something from Blake’s Seven.
I read somewhere that the human brain is most comforted/satisfied when seeing fractals (i.e. what we see in natural environments) and that the geometric, non-fractal images we are confronted with in man-made urban environments are inherently jarring. I imagine a study of medieval churches vs the Clifton cathedral shown would conclude that the medieval designs are way more fractal.
A fascinating article on Why old buildings are generally more beautiful than new ones
One common answer is survivorship bias. Basically, the old ugly buildings get knocked down, we are left with a self-selecting group of the best. Yet this article quite convincingly argues that no, that might be A reason, but it is not The reason
For @Theuniondivvie there’s a poignant photo of the Gorbals, implying that with a bit of love and care it could have been the Islington or Notting Hill of Glasgow (both of those were London slums)
“An interesting article that doesn't try to do too much.
As we've discussed and I've argued before, there are immutable laws of beauty in buildings and landscapes just as there are in humans. With good reason - they relate to the likelihood of our ancestors surving and being secure in such places.
Things we find intrinsically beautiful include ornate decoration, natural materials like stone and wood, deep set windows, arches, and pillars. The builders of the post-war era rejected beauty actively because it was considered old-hat (not that the hypocrites who built them would have considered living in them). Those who disagreed were mocked as luddites. These buildings are ugly because they're meant to be ugly - that's the crime of it.”
++++++
One of his most telling points is when he discusses old churches. There are about 8000 surviving English medieval churches. Not one is seriously ugly
Contrast with Clifton cathedral, 1970s Bristol
Jeez. That's a serious contender for a smiting by the Good Lord with a handy lightening bolt.
This is interesting, would like to see more of this. Tower blocks in Glasgow have gone through various revisions, originally the saviours of Gorbals dwellers (& seen as such by those folk), then sink holes for impoverished Glaswegians, now another revision seems in the pipeline. Getting away from knocking everything down & starting again would be a good move in any case I think.
Generally there seem to be very different attitudes to high rises. Paris (admittedly a city I hardly know) appears to see the banlieues as something to be forgotten about while Berlin seems to take some pride in them.
It depends how they are built and who they are aimed at. A friend was early into getting mortgages available for tower blocks in the UK - used to be that the big lenders wouldn't lend above floor X....
The demented social engineers who built unsafe "communal spaces" into their structures really achieved something special.
You should see the original plans for rebuilding Glasgow after WWII, which including razing the city centre (the greatest Victoria city in Europe - Betjeman), Speer and Germania had nothing on them. They still had a bloody good go, mind.
I must admit to a sneaking admiration of post war Town planners. There was a misplaced belief in the future, and that vibrant communities would thrive in these cities in the skies. Too much faith in human progress, I suppose, when it seems what is really wanted is a better facsimile of the past.
One thing I do see from Ukraine is that the Kruschevski concrete blocks of flats seem to have lasted better than our own 1950s and 60's blocks. At least until mother Russia came visiting.
Can you point to any evidence that such planners actually liked or understood humans, or were they just using them as some sort of funnel of reconstituted human fodder for their grand experiments, like liquidised meat in Subway's ham?
They genuinely thought people would be happier in the sky. Low rise density was associated with pollution, squalor, bad air, bad sanitation.
They didn’t think about how humans really interact, nipping from door to door, down the road to the shops. They didn’t realize how you could upgrade low rise housing with much less effort, and much less destruction of communities (however poor)
Most of all, all of that was secondary to the vanity and arrogance of planners, architects and politicians, who wanted their names celebrated with big shiny towers not boring but careful redevelopment. Ooops
But a lot of rich people still choose to live in high rise apartments. It seems to be something to do with whether or not you had a choice to live in a tower block.
The most common arrangement in Italian towns is a small-ish block of say six or eight apartments. If you get good neighbours this can work really well since you have the same sort of community as you might get in a small cul-de-sac, amplified by the need and opportunity to co-operate over the shared space and garden. Obviously if you have problem neighbours it doesn’t work so well - but then that’s true of any housing arrangement with a degree of proximity.
It's very similar in Germany: six to eight large apartments in one block with some communal space.
What's nice about that, is that it's a small enough number of people that you usually know everyone pretty well.
A fascinating article on Why old buildings are generally more beautiful than new ones
One common answer is survivorship bias. Basically, the old ugly buildings get knocked down, we are left with a self-selecting group of the best. Yet this article quite convincingly argues that no, that might be A reason, but it is not The reason
For @Theuniondivvie there’s a poignant photo of the Gorbals, implying that with a bit of love and care it could have been the Islington or Notting Hill of Glasgow (both of those were London slums)
“An interesting article that doesn't try to do too much.
As we've discussed and I've argued before, there are immutable laws of beauty in buildings and landscapes just as there are in humans. With good reason - they relate to the likelihood of our ancestors surving and being secure in such places.
Things we find intrinsically beautiful include ornate decoration, natural materials like stone and wood, deep set windows, arches, and pillars. The builders of the post-war era rejected beauty actively because it was considered old-hat (not that the hypocrites who built them would have considered living in them). Those who disagreed were mocked as luddites. These buildings are ugly because they're meant to be ugly - that's the crime of it.”
++++++
One of his most telling points is when he discusses old churches. There are about 8000 surviving English medieval churches. Not one is seriously ugly
Contrast with Clifton cathedral, 1970s Bristol
++++
Long time since I've been there, but dim memory of a striking interior - albeit somewhat out fo place in the terraces and villas of Clifton. Perpendicular or Regency it ain't. Even BR Bristol Temple Meads looks more cathedraly.
Hmm, I was wondering how long it took to build. Turns out to be March 1970 - foundatiuon stone Sept 1970 - consecrated and opened June 1973, but knock off 6 months for a building strike. Two and a bit years for the superstructure. How long did it take mediaeval folk to build a cathedral ab initio?
+++++
Yes the inside looks much better. Quite often hideous/boring modern buildings have lovely interiors. The monumentally mediocre British Library has a serene interior
And didn’t some PB-er claim that Edinburgh’s Turd is rather nice once you’re in?
A fascinating article on Why old buildings are generally more beautiful than new ones
One common answer is survivorship bias. Basically, the old ugly buildings get knocked down, we are left with a self-selecting group of the best. Yet this article quite convincingly argues that no, that might be A reason, but it is not The reason
For @Theuniondivvie there’s a poignant photo of the Gorbals, implying that with a bit of love and care it could have been the Islington or Notting Hill of Glasgow (both of those were London slums)
“An interesting article that doesn't try to do too much.
As we've discussed and I've argued before, there are immutable laws of beauty in buildings and landscapes just as there are in humans. With good reason - they relate to the likelihood of our ancestors surving and being secure in such places.
Things we find intrinsically beautiful include ornate decoration, natural materials like stone and wood, deep set windows, arches, and pillars. The builders of the post-war era rejected beauty actively because it was considered old-hat (not that the hypocrites who built them would have considered living in them). Those who disagreed were mocked as luddites. These buildings are ugly because they're meant to be ugly - that's the crime of it.”
++++++
One of his most telling points is when he discusses old churches. There are about 8000 surviving English medieval churches. Not one is seriously ugly
Contrast with Clifton cathedral, 1970s Bristol
Looks like something from Blake’s Seven.
My father was told during his architecture qualification in the 1960s that "buildings should be honest". i.e. that a building should visibly show the concrete and girders crucial to its structural integrity, and not try to pretty it up with decoration or covers to hide the ugly bits.
He was also told that the future of architecture should reject "bourgeois standards of beauty" for more proletarian forms of brutalism.
A fascinating article on Why old buildings are generally more beautiful than new ones
One common answer is survivorship bias. Basically, the old ugly buildings get knocked down, we are left with a self-selecting group of the best. Yet this article quite convincingly argues that no, that might be A reason, but it is not The reason
For @Theuniondivvie there’s a poignant photo of the Gorbals, implying that with a bit of love and care it could have been the Islington or Notting Hill of Glasgow (both of those were London slums)
Judging by the number of people out and about, today could be a superspreader event targeting grannies.
Yep. Number 1 son and partner came down with it yesterday.
There is a lot of it about.
I’m still laid up. No idea if it is bout 2 or 4 of Covid. It’s quite mild. But enough to make me sleep 15 hours a day
It’s just bloody boring now
I'm emerging but I still can't smell anything. Just now checked again, stuck my nose into a jar of marmite, right in there, and absolutely nothing. It's weird.
A fascinating article on Why old buildings are generally more beautiful than new ones
One common answer is survivorship bias. Basically, the old ugly buildings get knocked down, we are left with a self-selecting group of the best. Yet this article quite convincingly argues that no, that might be A reason, but it is not The reason
For @Theuniondivvie there’s a poignant photo of the Gorbals, implying that with a bit of love and care it could have been the Islington or Notting Hill of Glasgow (both of those were London slums)
“An interesting article that doesn't try to do too much.
As we've discussed and I've argued before, there are immutable laws of beauty in buildings and landscapes just as there are in humans. With good reason - they relate to the likelihood of our ancestors surving and being secure in such places.
Things we find intrinsically beautiful include ornate decoration, natural materials like stone and wood, deep set windows, arches, and pillars. The builders of the post-war era rejected beauty actively because it was considered old-hat (not that the hypocrites who built them would have considered living in them). Those who disagreed were mocked as luddites. These buildings are ugly because they're meant to be ugly - that's the crime of it.”
++++++
One of his most telling points is when he discusses old churches. There are about 8000 surviving English medieval churches. Not one is seriously ugly
Contrast with Clifton cathedral, 1970s Bristol
Looks like something from Blake’s Seven.
I read somewhere that the human brain is most comforted/satisfied when seeing fractals (i.e. what we see in natural environments) and that the geometric, non-fractal images we are confronted with in man-made urban environments are inherently jarring. I imagine a study of medieval churches vs the Clifton cathedral shown would conclude that the medieval designs are way more fractal.
Contrast the fractal-ness (or lack thereof) of Clifton vs this gem:
Even in Britain there are high rises that people want to live in: the Barbican Centre for one (although that might be because once you are in it is impossible to find your way out again).
The reason is that you have to be pretty wealthy to live in the Barbican and therefore it's kept in a fairly nice state most of the time.
That didn't used to be the case, though. In 1995/96, after I left University in 1995, I looked at buying an apartment there, and a studio flat was about 50k.
Those same studio flats are now 700k. They've gone from 3x average London salary, to 12x average London salary.
The most brutal of Brutalist architecture. Why would anyone with the money to live there want to live there?
A fascinating article on Why old buildings are generally more beautiful than new ones
One common answer is survivorship bias. Basically, the old ugly buildings get knocked down, we are left with a self-selecting group of the best. Yet this article quite convincingly argues that no, that might be A reason, but it is not The reason
For @Theuniondivvie there’s a poignant photo of the Gorbals, implying that with a bit of love and care it could have been the Islington or Notting Hill of Glasgow (both of those were London slums)
“An interesting article that doesn't try to do too much.
As we've discussed and I've argued before, there are immutable laws of beauty in buildings and landscapes just as there are in humans. With good reason - they relate to the likelihood of our ancestors surving and being secure in such places.
Things we find intrinsically beautiful include ornate decoration, natural materials like stone and wood, deep set windows, arches, and pillars. The builders of the post-war era rejected beauty actively because it was considered old-hat (not that the hypocrites who built them would have considered living in them). Those who disagreed were mocked as luddites. These buildings are ugly because they're meant to be ugly - that's the crime of it.”
++++++
One of his most telling points is when he discusses old churches. There are about 8000 surviving English medieval churches. Not one is seriously ugly
Contrast with Clifton cathedral, 1970s Bristol
++++
Long time since I've been there, but dim memory of a striking interior - albeit somewhat out fo place in the terraces and villas of Clifton. Perpendicular or Regency it ain't. Even BR Bristol Temple Meads looks more cathedraly.
Hmm, I was wondering how long it took to build. Turns out to be March 1970 - foundatiuon stone Sept 1970 - consecrated and opened June 1973, but knock off 6 months for a building strike. Two and a bit years for the superstructure. How long did it take mediaeval folk to build a cathedral ab initio?
+++++
Yes the inside looks much better. Quite often hideous/boring modern buildings have lovely interiors. The monumentally mediocre British Library has a serene interior
And didn’t some PB-er claim that Edinburgh’s Turd is rather nice once you’re in?
Possibly it was me suggesting that it was one of Edinburgh's better viewpoints on the grounds you can't see it from itself? But I had no opinion regarding the interior (indeed, i wonder if anyone claiming to have been in it might lose a great deal of painfully accumulated kudos on PB).
I’ve found a rival to Clifton cathedral. For “disappointing” modern churches. Poole Methodist church
This is the Victorian original. Nothing too exciting, but quietly dignified. Definitely a church. Could surely make gorgeous flats if converted. Magnificent gothic windows
Instead they decided to give it a magnificent extension. “The Spire”. Which harmonises deftly with the original while bringing a soaring new beauty of its own
A fascinating article on Why old buildings are generally more beautiful than new ones
One common answer is survivorship bias. Basically, the old ugly buildings get knocked down, we are left with a self-selecting group of the best. Yet this article quite convincingly argues that no, that might be A reason, but it is not The reason
For @Theuniondivvie there’s a poignant photo of the Gorbals, implying that with a bit of love and care it could have been the Islington or Notting Hill of Glasgow (both of those were London slums)
“An interesting article that doesn't try to do too much.
As we've discussed and I've argued before, there are immutable laws of beauty in buildings and landscapes just as there are in humans. With good reason - they relate to the likelihood of our ancestors surving and being secure in such places.
Things we find intrinsically beautiful include ornate decoration, natural materials like stone and wood, deep set windows, arches, and pillars. The builders of the post-war era rejected beauty actively because it was considered old-hat (not that the hypocrites who built them would have considered living in them). Those who disagreed were mocked as luddites. These buildings are ugly because they're meant to be ugly - that's the crime of it.”
++++++
One of his most telling points is when he discusses old churches. There are about 8000 surviving English medieval churches. Not one is seriously ugly
Contrast with Clifton cathedral, 1970s Bristol
++++
Long time since I've been there, but dim memory of a striking interior - albeit somewhat out fo place in the terraces and villas of Clifton. Perpendicular or Regency it ain't. Even BR Bristol Temple Meads looks more cathedraly.
Hmm, I was wondering how long it took to build. Turns out to be March 1970 - foundatiuon stone Sept 1970 - consecrated and opened June 1973, but knock off 6 months for a building strike. Two and a bit years for the superstructure. How long did it take mediaeval folk to build a cathedral ab initio?
+++++
Yes the inside looks much better. Quite often hideous/boring modern buildings have lovely interiors. The monumentally mediocre British Library has a serene interior
And didn’t some PB-er claim that Edinburgh’s Turd is rather nice once you’re in?
Because it's the one place in Edinburgh from where you can't see it.
A fascinating article on Why old buildings are generally more beautiful than new ones
One common answer is survivorship bias. Basically, the old ugly buildings get knocked down, we are left with a self-selecting group of the best. Yet this article quite convincingly argues that no, that might be A reason, but it is not The reason
For @Theuniondivvie there’s a poignant photo of the Gorbals, implying that with a bit of love and care it could have been the Islington or Notting Hill of Glasgow (both of those were London slums)
“An interesting article that doesn't try to do too much.
As we've discussed and I've argued before, there are immutable laws of beauty in buildings and landscapes just as there are in humans. With good reason - they relate to the likelihood of our ancestors surving and being secure in such places.
Things we find intrinsically beautiful include ornate decoration, natural materials like stone and wood, deep set windows, arches, and pillars. The builders of the post-war era rejected beauty actively because it was considered old-hat (not that the hypocrites who built them would have considered living in them). Those who disagreed were mocked as luddites. These buildings are ugly because they're meant to be ugly - that's the crime of it.”
++++++
One of his most telling points is when he discusses old churches. There are about 8000 surviving English medieval churches. Not one is seriously ugly
Contrast with Clifton cathedral, 1970s Bristol
Looks like something from Blake’s Seven.
My father was told during his architecture qualification in the 1960s that "buildings should be honest". i.e. that a building should visibly show the concrete and girders crucial to its structural integrity, and not try to pretty it up with decoration or covers to hide the ugly bits.
He was also told that the future of architecture should reject "bourgeois standards of beauty" for more proletarian forms of brutalism.
I wonder if he had ever asked any proletarians what they wanted from architecture.
I’ve found a rival to Clifton cathedral. For “disappointing” modern churches. Poole Methodist church
This is the Victorian original. Nothing too exciting, but quietly dignified. Definitely a church. Could surely make gorgeous flats if converted. Magnificent gothic windows
Instead they decided to give it a magnificent extension. “The Spire”. Which harmonises deftly with the original while bringing a soaring new beauty of its own
A fascinating article on Why old buildings are generally more beautiful than new ones
One common answer is survivorship bias. Basically, the old ugly buildings get knocked down, we are left with a self-selecting group of the best. Yet this article quite convincingly argues that no, that might be A reason, but it is not The reason
For @Theuniondivvie there’s a poignant photo of the Gorbals, implying that with a bit of love and care it could have been the Islington or Notting Hill of Glasgow (both of those were London slums)
Just to be picky I wouldn't say Eglinton St is/was the Gorbals, more a boundary, and is of course now the gateway to the Boho hipsterdom of the Southside.
Probably an element truth in what the Gorbals could have been. The line was always that the Gorbals tenements were beyond redemption and of such shoddy construction as to be unrecoverable, but they were extremely badly maintained and overcrowded by crappy landlords; I sense there was a mood at the time of just get the whole filthy mess cleared. Given the huge efforts made now to preserve rackety tenement buildings, I smell bullshit on the reason given.
This is interesting, would like to see more of this. Tower blocks in Glasgow have gone through various revisions, originally the saviours of Gorbals dwellers (& seen as such by those folk), then sink holes for impoverished Glaswegians, now another revision seems in the pipeline. Getting away from knocking everything down & starting again would be a good move in any case I think.
Generally there seem to be very different attitudes to high rises. Paris (admittedly a city I hardly know) appears to see the banlieues as something to be forgotten about while Berlin seems to take some pride in them.
It depends how they are built and who they are aimed at. A friend was early into getting mortgages available for tower blocks in the UK - used to be that the big lenders wouldn't lend above floor X....
The demented social engineers who built unsafe "communal spaces" into their structures really achieved something special.
You should see the original plans for rebuilding Glasgow after WWII, which including razing the city centre (the greatest Victoria city in Europe - Betjeman), Speer and Germania had nothing on them. They still had a bloody good go, mind.
I must admit to a sneaking admiration of post war Town planners. There was a misplaced belief in the future, and that vibrant communities would thrive in these cities in the skies. Too much faith in human progress, I suppose, when it seems what is really wanted is a better facsimile of the past.
One thing I do see from Ukraine is that the Kruschevski concrete blocks of flats seem to have lasted better than our own 1950s and 60's blocks. At least until mother Russia came visiting.
Can you point to any evidence that such planners actually liked or understood humans, or were they just using them as some sort of funnel of reconstituted human fodder for their grand experiments, like liquidised meat in Subway's ham?
They genuinely thought people would be happier in the sky. Low rise density was associated with pollution, squalor, bad air, bad sanitation.
They didn’t think about how humans really interact, nipping from door to door, down the road to the shops. They didn’t realize how you could upgrade low rise housing with much less effort, and much less destruction of communities (however poor)
Most of all, all of that was secondary to the vanity and arrogance of planners, architects and politicians, who wanted their names celebrated with big shiny towers not boring but careful redevelopment. Ooops
But a lot of rich people still choose to live in high rise apartments. It seems to be something to do with whether or not you had a choice to live in a tower block.
The most common arrangement in Italian towns is a small-ish block of say six or eight apartments. If you get good neighbours this can work really well since you have the same sort of community as you might get in a small cul-de-sac, amplified by the need and opportunity to co-operate over the shared space and garden. Obviously if you have problem neighbours it doesn’t work so well - but then that’s true of any housing arrangement with a degree of proximity.
It's very similar in Germany: six to eight large apartments in one block with some communal space.
What's nice about that, is that it's a small enough number of people that you usually know everyone pretty well.
Dunbar numbers: 150 = a village (the maximum number of relationships a person can maintain); 1,500 = the corporate division/the regiment (the number of faces to which you can put a name).
Even in Britain there are high rises that people want to live in: the Barbican Centre for one (although that might be because once you are in it is impossible to find your way out again).
The reason is that you have to be pretty wealthy to live in the Barbican and therefore it's kept in a fairly nice state most of the time.
That didn't used to be the case, though. In 1995/96, after I left University in 1995, I looked at buying an apartment there, and a studio flat was about 50k.
Those same studio flats are now 700k. They've gone from 3x average London salary, to 12x average London salary.
The most brutal of Brutalist architecture. Why would anyone with the money to live there want to live there?
I’ve got a few friends who live in the towers. The flats are great. Very spacious by London standards. Glorious views. Great gardens and an arboretum and cafes and bars and superb restaurants at the bottom. Plus a world class arts centre. And the City
If you want to live high rise in London, the Barbican is the place to do it. Hence the prices
I’ve found a rival to Clifton cathedral. For “disappointing” modern churches. Poole Methodist church
This is the Victorian original. Nothing too exciting, but quietly dignified. Definitely a church. Could surely make gorgeous flats if converted. Magnificent gothic windows
Instead they decided to give it a magnificent extension. “The Spire”. Which harmonises deftly with the original while bringing a soaring new beauty of its own
Warwick Shire Hall, is similar, but there it's worse because they've stuck the carbuncle to the side so you can see it from everywhere.
Judging by the number of people out and about, today could be a superspreader event targeting grannies.
Why do you deny older women agency; why do you not credit them with the intelligence to make their own decisions about who they want to see on any given day.
Isn't that the, erm. FOH staff? The beer and chips shovellers. The offie counter staff.
But in aircraft the cabin crew are also key emergency workers. So ....
They would be the people who would organise your evacuation in an emergency, yes, who you would hope knew what they were doing once you were in the lifeboats.
Even in Britain there are high rises that people want to live in: the Barbican Centre for one (although that might be because once you are in it is impossible to find your way out again).
The reason is that you have to be pretty wealthy to live in the Barbican and therefore it's kept in a fairly nice state most of the time.
That didn't used to be the case, though. In 1995/96, after I left University in 1995, I looked at buying an apartment there, and a studio flat was about 50k.
Those same studio flats are now 700k. They've gone from 3x average London salary, to 12x average London salary.
The most brutal of Brutalist architecture. Why would anyone with the money to live there want to live there?
I’ve got a few friends who live in the towers. The flats are great. Very spacious by London standards. Glorious views. Great gardens and an arboretum and cafes and bars and superb restaurants at the bottom. Plus a world class arts centre. And the City
If you want to live high rise in London, the Barbican is the place to do it. Hence the prices
I know. Ironically the only person who I know who lives there edits 'Wallpaper' so it's obviously liked by the right people.
Interesting article in the Atlantic. Sounds like things are extremely grim for the average Russian grunt in Ukraine. Nothing we did not know, of course, but it sounds even worse than I imagined:
This is interesting, would like to see more of this. Tower blocks in Glasgow have gone through various revisions, originally the saviours of Gorbals dwellers (& seen as such by those folk), then sink holes for impoverished Glaswegians, now another revision seems in the pipeline. Getting away from knocking everything down & starting again would be a good move in any case I think.
Generally there seem to be very different attitudes to high rises. Paris (admittedly a city I hardly know) appears to see the banlieues as something to be forgotten about while Berlin seems to take some pride in them.
It depends how they are built and who they are aimed at. A friend was early into getting mortgages available for tower blocks in the UK - used to be that the big lenders wouldn't lend above floor X....
The demented social engineers who built unsafe "communal spaces" into their structures really achieved something special.
When I lived in New York, I never had the heating on in my apartment, even during the coldest days of winter. Indeed, rather the opposite, I had to crack at least one window most of the time to cool the place down. My energy consumption was highest in the hottest days of summer.
I know there is a theory that humans don't like living structures that fall outside our range of vision, i.e. tall structures beyond something like 6 storeys. But, I wonder. How does that theory mesh with the reality of high rent skyscrapers in NYC and other big cities. I don't recall any particular social horrors associated with buildings in nice neighbourhoods (although clearly there is little sense of community in the buildings).
The "high end" tower blocks tend to be built to work, rather than as social engineering experiments.
That and not having a minority of very, very anti-social people living there helps, of course.
Imagine living in the same building as people who did this....
Is it just me, or is that pot in middle distance grinning satanically at us?
This is interesting, would like to see more of this. Tower blocks in Glasgow have gone through various revisions, originally the saviours of Gorbals dwellers (& seen as such by those folk), then sink holes for impoverished Glaswegians, now another revision seems in the pipeline. Getting away from knocking everything down & starting again would be a good move in any case I think.
Generally there seem to be very different attitudes to high rises. Paris (admittedly a city I hardly know) appears to see the banlieues as something to be forgotten about while Berlin seems to take some pride in them.
It depends how they are built and who they are aimed at. A friend was early into getting mortgages available for tower blocks in the UK - used to be that the big lenders wouldn't lend above floor X....
The demented social engineers who built unsafe "communal spaces" into their structures really achieved something special.
You should see the original plans for rebuilding Glasgow after WWII, which including razing the city centre (the greatest Victoria city in Europe - Betjeman), Speer and Germania had nothing on them. They still had a bloody good go, mind.
I must admit to a sneaking admiration of post war Town planners. There was a misplaced belief in the future, and that vibrant communities would thrive in these cities in the skies. Too much faith in human progress, I suppose, when it seems what is really wanted is a better facsimile of the past.
One thing I do see from Ukraine is that the Kruschevski concrete blocks of flats seem to have lasted better than our own 1950s and 60's blocks. At least until mother Russia came visiting.
Can you point to any evidence that such planners actually liked or understood humans, or were they just using them as some sort of funnel of reconstituted human fodder for their grand experiments, like liquidised meat in Subway's ham?
They genuinely thought people would be happier in the sky. Low rise density was associated with pollution, squalor, bad air, bad sanitation.
They didn’t think about how humans really interact, nipping from door to door, down the road to the shops. They didn’t realize how you could upgrade low rise housing with much less effort, and much less destruction of communities (however poor)
Most of all, all of that was secondary to the vanity and arrogance of planners, architects and politicians, who wanted their names celebrated with big shiny towers not boring but careful redevelopment. Ooops
But a lot of rich people still choose to live in high rise apartments. It seems to be something to do with whether or not you had a choice to live in a tower block.
The most common arrangement in Italian towns is a small-ish block of say six or eight apartments. If you get good neighbours this can work really well since you have the same sort of community as you might get in a small cul-de-sac, amplified by the need and opportunity to co-operate over the shared space and garden. Obviously if you have problem neighbours it doesn’t work so well - but then that’s true of any housing arrangement with a degree of proximity.
It's very similar in Germany: six to eight large apartments in one block with some communal space.
What's nice about that, is that it's a small enough number of people that you usually know everyone pretty well.
Dunbar numbers: 150 = a village (the maximum number of relationships a person can maintain); 1,500 = the corporate division/the regiment (the number of faces to which you can put a name).
Your second number is interesting: does that mean that the growth of celebrity is meaning that we can recognise fewer people we might actually know, because all of our face slots are taking by Z list celebrities?
A fascinating article on Why old buildings are generally more beautiful than new ones
One common answer is survivorship bias. Basically, the old ugly buildings get knocked down, we are left with a self-selecting group of the best. Yet this article quite convincingly argues that no, that might be A reason, but it is not The reason
For @Theuniondivvie there’s a poignant photo of the Gorbals, implying that with a bit of love and care it could have been the Islington or Notting Hill of Glasgow (both of those were London slums)
“An interesting article that doesn't try to do too much.
As we've discussed and I've argued before, there are immutable laws of beauty in buildings and landscapes just as there are in humans. With good reason - they relate to the likelihood of our ancestors surving and being secure in such places.
Things we find intrinsically beautiful include ornate decoration, natural materials like stone and wood, deep set windows, arches, and pillars. The builders of the post-war era rejected beauty actively because it was considered old-hat (not that the hypocrites who built them would have considered living in them). Those who disagreed were mocked as luddites. These buildings are ugly because they're meant to be ugly - that's the crime of it.”
++++++
One of his most telling points is when he discusses old churches. There are about 8000 surviving English medieval churches. Not one is seriously ugly
Contrast with Clifton cathedral, 1970s Bristol
++++
Long time since I've been there, but dim memory of a striking interior - albeit somewhat out fo place in the terraces and villas of Clifton. Perpendicular or Regency it ain't. Even BR Bristol Temple Meads looks more cathedraly.
Hmm, I was wondering how long it took to build. Turns out to be March 1970 - foundatiuon stone Sept 1970 - consecrated and opened June 1973, but knock off 6 months for a building strike. Two and a bit years for the superstructure. How long did it take mediaeval folk to build a cathedral ab initio?
+++++
Yes the inside looks much better. Quite often hideous/boring modern buildings have lovely interiors. The monumentally mediocre British Library has a serene interior
And didn’t some PB-er claim that Edinburgh’s Turd is rather nice once you’re in?
You may be referring to a jocular comment I made about it having the best views in Edinburgh.
This is interesting, would like to see more of this. Tower blocks in Glasgow have gone through various revisions, originally the saviours of Gorbals dwellers (& seen as such by those folk), then sink holes for impoverished Glaswegians, now another revision seems in the pipeline. Getting away from knocking everything down & starting again would be a good move in any case I think.
Generally there seem to be very different attitudes to high rises. Paris (admittedly a city I hardly know) appears to see the banlieues as something to be forgotten about while Berlin seems to take some pride in them.
It depends how they are built and who they are aimed at. A friend was early into getting mortgages available for tower blocks in the UK - used to be that the big lenders wouldn't lend above floor X....
The demented social engineers who built unsafe "communal spaces" into their structures really achieved something special.
You should see the original plans for rebuilding Glasgow after WWII, which including razing the city centre (the greatest Victoria city in Europe - Betjeman), Speer and Germania had nothing on them. They still had a bloody good go, mind.
I must admit to a sneaking admiration of post war Town planners. There was a misplaced belief in the future, and that vibrant communities would thrive in these cities in the skies. Too much faith in human progress, I suppose, when it seems what is really wanted is a better facsimile of the past.
One thing I do see from Ukraine is that the Kruschevski concrete blocks of flats seem to have lasted better than our own 1950s and 60's blocks. At least until mother Russia came visiting.
Can you point to any evidence that such planners actually liked or understood humans, or were they just using them as some sort of funnel of reconstituted human fodder for their grand experiments, like liquidised meat in Subway's ham?
They genuinely thought people would be happier in the sky. Low rise density was associated with pollution, squalor, bad air, bad sanitation.
They didn’t think about how humans really interact, nipping from door to door, down the road to the shops. They didn’t realize how you could upgrade low rise housing with much less effort, and much less destruction of communities (however poor)
Most of all, all of that was secondary to the vanity and arrogance of planners, architects and politicians, who wanted their names celebrated with big shiny towers not boring but careful redevelopment. Ooops
But a lot of rich people still choose to live in high rise apartments. It seems to be something to do with whether or not you had a choice to live in a tower block.
The most common arrangement in Italian towns is a small-ish block of say six or eight apartments. If you get good neighbours this can work really well since you have the same sort of community as you might get in a small cul-de-sac, amplified by the need and opportunity to co-operate over the shared space and garden. Obviously if you have problem neighbours it doesn’t work so well - but then that’s true of any housing arrangement with a degree of proximity.
It's very similar in Germany: six to eight large apartments in one block with some communal space.
What's nice about that, is that it's a small enough number of people that you usually know everyone pretty well.
Dunbar numbers: 150 = a village (the maximum number of relationships a person can maintain); 1,500 = the corporate division/the regiment (the number of faces to which you can put a name).
Your second number is interesting: does that mean that the growth of celebrity is meaning that we can recognise fewer people we might actually know, because all of our face slots are taking by Z list celebrities?
All the past, present and future Cabinet Ministers that I can recognise reduce the number of people in real-life that I can put a name to, and might thereby have a chance of developing a relationship with.
Perhaps Sunil has it right and I'd be better off memorising trains to identify, as my nerd activity of choice...
Comments
https://www2.politicalbetting.com/index.php/archives/2022/02/05/soon-to-be-sunak/
And so his Budget this week proved.
Ukraine war: With a single sentence Joe Biden has given a gift to Moscow's propaganda machine
The US President may well be wishing his own verbal flourish about his desire for president Putin's political demise does not come back to haunt him as he returns to Washington.
Deborah Haynes"
https://news.sky.com/story/ukraine-war-biden-may-wish-his-putin-demise-remarks-do-not-come-back-to-haunt-him-12576144
2015 - “ Strong Leadership, Clear Economic Plan & a Brighter, More Secure Future”
2017 - “Strong and Stable Government”
2019 - “Get Brexit Done”
2024 - “If you’re not a real Tory you can F**k Off!”
Cumbernauld looked young and optimistic in Gregory's Girl too. I don't know how well that has aged either. Not as well as Clare Grogan I imagine.
There seems a paucity of ambition to solve our current housing crisis compared to the post war idealism, flawed as it was.
One which had people in, I remember as quite disturbing. It was a drawing with the buildings in crisp, certain lines but with the people drawn in that few-curves-to-suggest-a-vague-figure style. Ghosts wandering around The Machine For Living.
Maas Man from Count Zero, perhaps....
https://www.thenational.scot/culture/19987268.cumbernauld-town-centre-miss-gone/
https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p01rk56y/where-we-live-now-3-new-town-home-town
In his 30's he was a locally notable car-rally navigator.
They didn’t think about how humans really interact, nipping from door to door, down the road to the shops. They didn’t realize how you could upgrade low rise housing with much less effort, and much less destruction of communities (however poor)
Most of all, all of that was secondary to the vanity and arrogance of planners, architects and politicians, who wanted their names celebrated with big shiny towers not boring but careful redevelopment. Ooops
"I wrote a header about this the other day - https://www2.politicalbetting.com/index.php/archives/2022/03/19/not-again/
But the details in this story about maternity care failures at Shrewsbury are truly shocking and saddening.
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/fatal-nhs-obsession-with-natural-births-nxdsvxn5v
The perils of targets and idees fixe combined to do great harm to mothers and babies."
Until the scandal where *that* is discovered to have killed bunch of mothers and children.
Then we can go back to All Natural Childbirth.
Chocolates?
Why not give Omicron BA2 this Mothering Sunday?
Judging by the number of people out and about, today could be a superspreader event targeting grannies.
A lot of the problems came from shoddy construction, something still extant in the cladding crisis.
There is a lot of it about.
One common answer is survivorship bias. Basically, the old ugly buildings get knocked down, we are left with a self-selecting group of the best. Yet this article quite convincingly argues that no, that might be A reason, but it is not The reason
For @Theuniondivvie there’s a poignant photo of the Gorbals, implying that with a bit of love and care it could have been the Islington or Notting Hill of Glasgow (both of those were London slums)
https://www.worksinprogress.co/issue/against-the-survival-of-the-prettiest/
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2022/mar/27/government-paid-firm-linked-to-tory-peer-122m-for-ppe-bought-for-46m
"PPE the government bought for £122m from a company linked to the Tory peer Michelle Mone was purchased from the Chinese manufacturer for just £46m.
The extraordinary profits apparently made by PPE Medpro and its partners in the supply chain are revealed in documents leaked to the Guardian, including contracts and an inspection report for sterile surgical gowns supplied by the firm.
Despite being bought at the start of the pandemic and delivered in 2020, the 25m gowns were never used by the NHS after government officials rejected them following an inspection.
The Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) has for months been seeking to recover money from PPE Medpro through a mediation process. The firm claims it is entitled to keep the money, arguing that DHSC “agents” approved the gowns after inspection."
https://www.rightmove.co.uk/properties/119281460
It’s just bloody boring now
In the late 1960s, I lived in Chicago and saw similar projects. At least one of them, the Robert Taylor Homes, was so dangerous that police officers went in at least four at a time. All of them would have had hand guns, and would have had access to either a shotgun or rifle in their police cars.
But that is *exactly* treating people as people. Rather than inconvenient pegs of varying geometries which will be improved by bashing into a single type of hole.
We don't need to build housing; we need to build communities.
Inside Irpin as Civilians Flee Russian Attack
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KOao41OlzaU
And also because they were built when architectural fashions were at their ugliest.
Together, those two facts have blighted our cities. They will take generations to recover.
Although no parents would be sending their kids to school anyway.
Probably an element truth in what the Gorbals could have been. The line was always that the Gorbals tenements were beyond redemption and of such shoddy construction as to be unrecoverable, but they were extremely badly maintained and overcrowded by crappy landlords; I sense there was a mood at the time of just get the whole filthy mess cleared. Given the huge efforts made now to preserve rackety tenement buildings, I smell bullshit on the reason given.
As we've discussed and I've argued before, there are immutable laws of beauty in buildings and landscapes just as there are in humans. With good reason - they relate to the likelihood of our ancestors surving and being secure in such places.
Things we find intrinsically beautiful include ornate decoration, natural materials like stone and wood, deep set windows, arches, and pillars. The builders of the post-war era rejected beauty actively because it was considered old-hat (not that the hypocrites who built them would have considered living in them). Those who disagreed were mocked as luddites. These buildings are ugly because they're meant to be ugly - that's the crime of it.
Which is perhaps why the establishment seems so happy to offshore manufacturing.
Nor would you pay for unusable items if they were made in a factory alongside the A1.
I have no problem with the decisions to try remote learning in the face of the pandemic in March 2020. It was a very strange time, and no one really knew what was happening and what would happen. You can make a case for trying harder to avoid later school closures, but it’s not easy.
And of course as our teachers on pb will tell us, schools didn’t actually close, b3cause of the need to open for kids of those who still had to go out and work.
The biggest mistake that I believe we made as a country was not locking down hard as soon as we had the vaccines. That would have had a clear purpose - to keep cases as low as possible until sufficient vaccination had occurred. Sadly the attempts to live with Covid pre vaccines, and after alpha, were a disaster. The benefit of hindsight.
(The one with a gloriously grubby Patrick Troughton character.)
One thing that I remember from the birth of my daughter was that in the lead-up there was an effort for her mother to see the same midwife, but when the birth started happening suddenly she was dealt with by a succession of different strangers who didn't have the time to spend with her, and there was an obsession with the rate at which dilation was occurring.
The whole experience was bewildering and stressful even for me as the father, to which pain, exhaustion and fear was added for the mother, and that can't have helped.
As we've discussed and I've argued before, there are immutable laws of beauty in buildings and landscapes just as there are in humans. With good reason - they relate to the likelihood of our ancestors surving and being secure in such places.
Things we find intrinsically beautiful include ornate decoration, natural materials like stone and wood, deep set windows, arches, and pillars. The builders of the post-war era rejected beauty actively because it was considered old-hat (not that the hypocrites who built them would have considered living in them). Those who disagreed were mocked as luddites. These buildings are ugly because they're meant to be ugly - that's the crime of it.”
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One of his most telling points is when he discusses old churches. There are about 8000 surviving English medieval churches. Not one is seriously ugly
Contrast with Clifton cathedral, 1970s Bristol
(Also a reminder that we need to careful with inflation calculators, or on the other hand concluding Henry VIII was a pauper because he did not have a big screen telly.)
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One of his most telling points is when he discusses old churches. There are about 8000 surviving English medieval churches. Not one is seriously ugly
Contrast with Clifton cathedral, 1970s Bristol
Looks like something from Blake’s Seven.
Those same studio flats are now 700k. They've gone from 3x average London salary, to 12x average London salary.
...and the Telegraph has chosen to illustrate their story with a shot of Villefranche
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/property/abroad/post-brexit-20000-tax-windfall-second-home-france/?li_source=LI&li_medium=liftigniter-rhr
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One of his most telling points is when he discusses old churches. There are about 8000 surviving English medieval churches. Not one is seriously ugly
Contrast with Clifton cathedral, 1970s Bristol
Long time since I've been there, but dim memory of a striking interior - albeit somewhat out fo place in the terraces and villas of Clifton. Perpendicular or Regency it ain't. Even BR Bristol Temple Meads looks more cathedraly.
Hmm, I was wondering how long it took to build. Turns out to be March 1970 - foundatiuon stone Sept 1970 - consecrated and opened June 1973, but knock off 6 months for a building strike. Two and a bit years for the superstructure. How long did it take mediaeval folk to build a cathedral ab initio?
I read somewhere that the human brain is most comforted/satisfied when seeing fractals (i.e. what we see in natural environments) and that the geometric, non-fractal images we are confronted with in man-made urban environments are inherently jarring. I imagine a study of medieval churches vs the Clifton cathedral shown would conclude that the medieval designs are way more fractal.
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One of his most telling points is when he discusses old churches. There are about 8000 surviving English medieval churches. Not one is seriously ugly
Contrast with Clifton cathedral, 1970s Bristol
Jeez. That's a serious contender for a smiting by the Good Lord with a handy lightening bolt.
What's nice about that, is that it's a small enough number of people that you usually know everyone pretty well.
Long time since I've been there, but dim memory of a striking interior - albeit somewhat out fo place in the terraces and villas of Clifton. Perpendicular or Regency it ain't. Even BR Bristol Temple Meads looks more cathedraly.
Hmm, I was wondering how long it took to build. Turns out to be March 1970 - foundatiuon stone Sept 1970 - consecrated and opened June 1973, but knock off 6 months for a building strike. Two and a bit years for the superstructure. How long did it take mediaeval folk to build a cathedral ab initio?
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Yes the inside looks much better. Quite often hideous/boring modern buildings have lovely interiors. The monumentally mediocre British Library has a serene interior
And didn’t some PB-er claim that Edinburgh’s Turd is rather nice once you’re in?
My father was told during his architecture qualification in the 1960s that "buildings should be honest". i.e. that a building should visibly show the concrete and girders crucial to its structural integrity, and not try to pretty it up with decoration or covers to hide the ugly bits.
He was also told that the future of architecture should reject "bourgeois standards of beauty" for more proletarian forms of brutalism.
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2022/mar/27/no-sea-experience-needed-says-po-agency-ad-for-crews
Contrast the fractal-ness (or lack thereof) of Clifton vs this gem:
https://media.tacdn.com/media/attractions-splice-spp-674x446/0b/39/91/b0.jpg
https://download.offset.com/gatekeeper/W3siZCI6ICJvcGFsLW1lZGlhIiwgImsiOiAicGhvdG9zLzVhZGE1N2FkMTdmYjE1NmU0ODA3ZWM0ZC9wcmV2aWV3X3cuanBnIiwgImUiOiAxNjQ4NDI0MTMxLCAibSI6IDAsICJjIjogIl9waG90b19zZXNzaW9uX2lkIn0sICJ4dU01ckZLVCt5ZFFjc3hydksxK05DMVBrNmsiXQ==/offset_691299.jpg
Yes the inside looks much better. Quite often hideous/boring modern buildings have lovely interiors. The monumentally mediocre British Library has a serene interior
And didn’t some PB-er claim that Edinburgh’s Turd is rather nice once you’re in?
Possibly it was me suggesting that it was one of Edinburgh's better viewpoints on the grounds you can't see it from itself? But I had no opinion regarding the interior (indeed, i wonder if anyone claiming to have been in it might lose a great deal of painfully accumulated kudos on PB).
This is the Victorian original. Nothing too exciting, but quietly dignified. Definitely a church. Could surely make gorgeous flats if converted. Magnificent gothic windows
Instead they decided to give it a magnificent extension. “The Spire”. Which harmonises deftly with the original while bringing a soaring new beauty of its own
Yes the inside looks much better. Quite often hideous/boring modern buildings have lovely interiors. The monumentally mediocre British Library has a serene interior
And didn’t some PB-er claim that Edinburgh’s Turd is rather nice once you’re in?
Because it's the one place in Edinburgh from where you can't see it.
He was also told that the future of architecture should reject "bourgeois standards of beauty" for more proletarian forms of brutalism.
I wonder if he had ever asked any proletarians what they wanted from architecture.
But in aircraft the cabin crew are also key emergency workers. So ....
https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m0015tw6
If you want to live high rise in London, the Barbican is the place to do it. Hence the prices
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exeter_Cathedral
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/03/american-volunteer-foreign-fighters-ukraine-russia-war/627604/
Yes the inside looks much better. Quite often hideous/boring modern buildings have lovely interiors. The monumentally mediocre British Library has a serene interior
And didn’t some PB-er claim that Edinburgh’s Turd is rather nice once you’re in?
You may be referring to a jocular comment I made about it having the best views in Edinburgh.
Perhaps Sunil has it right and I'd be better off memorising trains to identify, as my nerd activity of choice...