Thanks everyone, I'm glad that everyone has come through the other side unscathed plus Spurs got Champions League on the same day she arrived which has got to be a good omen of some kind.
I know we're in for a big change to our lives but I'm looking forwards to it!
It's going to be a huge change. You'll have to improve the squad for starters and then ensure that Kane and Son stay where they are although Levy as we know never lets anyone leave.
My advice is to surrender all hope of a “normal life” until she’s at least 2 and a half. Otherwise you’ll be frustrated.
Secondly, kids seem to have a kind of developmental model. They change at six weeks; then twelve; then twenty-four; then fifty-two.
This is important to remember when you are sick to fuck of trying to get them sleep etc; they do get there eventually.
Nappies are more expensive than you think. Breast-feeding mums allow dad more sleep but not necessarily an easier life. There was something about stroking babies' eyebrows that went viral — makes them sleep or stop crying or something. And the most fun milestone is when her toes go forwards rather than back when you tickle her feet. Baby food comes in all sorts of exotic flavours now. That's pretty much all there is to it.
As many of you have probably guessed, the Elizabeth Line has been rushed into opening in time for the Platinum Jubilee without it all functioning as one cohesive service.
So, from tomorrow, the central section east of Paddington (low level) including the branch from Whitechapel to Canary Wharf, Custom House, Woolwich and Abbey Wood, will not yet be connected to Stratford in the east, and Acton in the west. Bond Street platforms are also not ready. But the connections and Bond Street should be ready "by the autumn". Hmmm,,, we'll see!
Also, if you're into trying to take pics of trains arriving/leaving at the stations from Paddington to Canary Wharf, as well as Woolwich - don't bother! Platform edge doors similar to those on the Jubilee line will prevent you having a clear view of the trains or the tracks!
Best places to see the trains on the section that's opening tomorrow are Custom House and Abbey Wood, which are out in the open. Also, there's a footbridge at Silvertown, near LCY Airport, affording views of the route.
Journey time is 29 minutes from Paddington to Abbey Wood. And the frequency is every 5 minutes. Not bad at all for a "main line" service.
Personally, travelling in from Ilford, I aim to change trains at Liverpool Street, head southeast to Abbey Wood, then visit each station on the way back to Liverpool Street, head west through to Paddington (low level), then visit the remaining two stations in Zone 1 (Tottenham Court Road and Farringdon) on the way back to Liverpool Street, thereby doing the route and all nine stations opening tomorrow.
Also, it's bound to be full of media-people and fucking Youtubers tomorrow, so I'm seriously mulling delaying my expedition until Wednesday when it's bound to be less busy. But then, that's just me!
So good to see London get yet another massive transport link while the rest of us make do with crap buses and ancient trains on shit and non-electrified lines.
Public transport requires a critical mass of passengers to be plausible - and this mass is much bigger for rail systems than buses.
Most of the country is just too small. I live in a conurbation of ~400k, and even a tram route has AFAIK never been seriously discussed. You need millions.
Home ownership is a real issue. But we are a crowded island and countryside is precious. The answer is surely towers in the SE esp London. Build UP, build lots and lots of towers until flats in them are affordable for 20-somethings
Young people really don’t mind living in towers if the location is decent. Towers can be glamorous. Manhattan is glamorous, so is Hong Kong. They just want to own not rent
Then when they move into their 30s and 40s the youngsters will already be on the property ladder and they can shift to something suburban with a garden for the kids
Some older people - childless or empty-nesters - would be quite happy with towers as well. IF the location is right
There. Sorted
Not sorted until you can persuade the banks to offer mortgages on high rise flats.
Set up a national mortgage lender if the private ones won’t do it. This is a massive national issue and a generational problem for the Tories. We need to get home ownership rising again. We need it heading to 80% not sliding to 50%
Let the young buy flats in sexy towers. Problem solved. Now I’m off for a haircut
How do you stop buy to let in your new towers?
Change the law. This isn’t hard. The builders only get planning permission if the flats are sold to owner occupiers. SORTED
Yes this will piss off the class of rentier landlords, but, you know, World’s Tiniest Violin etc
There is at least one nice development in central Manchester which is only available to owner occupiers. I don't know how they police it but it is not without precedent.
Most young Londoners would jump at the chance of owning rather than renting. They wouldn’t give a damn if it’s a flat on floor 23. Just make it a reasonably cool location. East London is the obvious place, especially with the Liz Line
Build a million flats in 10,000 towers. Build so many the price of an E London 2 bed falls to £150,000 and anyone on an average salary can buy one, certainly any young couple
Build them in proper elegant clusters, with one or two super tall central towers, and shorter towers surrounding. Build the infrastructure to go with them, from pubs to shops to gyms. Forget about providing car parking. These are for young urbanites who don’t want to drive
Also relax the insanely cautious height restrictions in London, allow towers up to 1500 feet
I could sort this all out over a brief lunch
Point of order, most flats are leasehold, therefore you don't own them. You just have a very long lease, coupled with unlimited service charges and unlimited liability when things go wrong (as people caught up in the cladding scandal have found out).
There's a reason why the housing market is booming but leasehold flats aren't selling.
Get rid of leasehold. Fuck the landlords
Make everything freehold from now on, make it insanely easy to change from leasehold to freehold if that’s where you are now
Yep.
That would be the system that literally THE ENTIRE WORLD has apart from England (and yes, Scotland doesn't have it either).
This is the best thread I have ever read on leasehold that pretty much sums up what a grift it is.
Again, England is the ONLY place in the entire world that still has this stupid grift. The fact that we don't change it tells you everything you need to know about who donates to what political party and why.
Home ownership is a real issue. But we are a crowded island and countryside is precious. The answer is surely towers in the SE esp London. Build UP, build lots and lots of towers until flats in them are affordable for 20-somethings
Young people really don’t mind living in towers if the location is decent. Towers can be glamorous. Manhattan is glamorous, so is Hong Kong. They just want to own not rent
Then when they move into their 30s and 40s the youngsters will already be on the property ladder and they can shift to something suburban with a garden for the kids
Some older people - childless or empty-nesters - would be quite happy with towers as well. IF the location is right
There. Sorted
I’ve been saying something similar for years. London is exceptionally low-rise.
Paris says hello!
It does. Paris has less green space than I’d like, but nobody is saying Paris (inside the periphique) is some kind of dystopian hellhole.
There are loads of tower blocks (office and residential) in London.
Not by global standards.
It depends what standards you choose to compare to. If you only want to compare against Manhattan that's going to be very different of course.
If you compare to Sydney, Auckland, Melbourne, Calgary or Toronto you might get a very different answer in the opposite direction.
Europe and the North East seaboard of the United States are fair comparators for London.
I know you want to concrete over the entire countryside, but basically nobody agrees with you.
I don't want to concrete over the entire countryside.
At present 4% of the UK is urban housing and 70% is farming. Even if the stock of housing increased by 25% so that those figures became 5% and 69% respectively, that's pissing in the ocean as far as concreting over the countryside is concerned.
Even if you eliminated all planning tomorrow, the overwhelming majority of the countryside wouldn't be concreted over as there's frankly next to nobody who wants to live there for the overwhelming majority of it.
You seem to have a fundamental misconception about what planning laws actually do.
Practically none of them are either designed to or actually do stop development. What they do is ensure that the development meets certain basic standards and that if they will damage something - for example a natural resource or archaeology - then the developer pays the costs of mitigation. When developers moan about planning what they are actually moaning about is having to spend money doing stuff that puts right the damage they do and making sure the houses they build are fit to live in. Sadly even with the current planning laws many new builds barely reach those basic standards.
Home ownership is a real issue. But we are a crowded island and countryside is precious. The answer is surely towers in the SE esp London. Build UP, build lots and lots of towers until flats in them are affordable for 20-somethings
Young people really don’t mind living in towers if the location is decent. Towers can be glamorous. Manhattan is glamorous, so is Hong Kong. They just want to own not rent
Then when they move into their 30s and 40s the youngsters will already be on the property ladder and they can shift to something suburban with a garden for the kids
Some older people - childless or empty-nesters - would be quite happy with towers as well. IF the location is right
There. Sorted
Not sorted until you can persuade the banks to offer mortgages on high rise flats.
Set up a national mortgage lender if the private ones won’t do it. This is a massive national issue and a generational problem for the Tories. We need to get home ownership rising again. We need it heading to 80% not sliding to 50%
Let the young buy flats in sexy towers. Problem solved. Now I’m off for a haircut
How do you stop buy to let in your new towers?
Change the law. This isn’t hard. The builders only get planning permission if the flats are sold to owner occupiers. SORTED
Yes this will piss off the class of rentier landlords, but, you know, World’s Tiniest Violin etc
There is at least one nice development in central Manchester which is only available to owner occupiers. I don't know how they police it but it is not without precedent.
Most young Londoners would jump at the chance of owning rather than renting. They wouldn’t give a damn if it’s a flat on floor 23. Just make it a reasonably cool location. East London is the obvious place, especially with the Liz Line
Build a million flats in 10,000 towers. Build so many the price of an E London 2 bed falls to £150,000 and anyone on an average salary can buy one, certainly any young couple
Build them in proper elegant clusters, with one or two super tall central towers, and shorter towers surrounding. Build the infrastructure to go with them, from pubs to shops to gyms. Forget about providing car parking. These are for young urbanites who don’t want to drive
Also relax the insanely cautious height restrictions in London, allow towers up to 1500 feet
I could sort this all out over a brief lunch
Point of order, most flats are leasehold, therefore you don't own them. You just have a very long lease, coupled with unlimited service charges and unlimited liability when things go wrong (as people caught up in the cladding scandal have found out).
There's a reason why the housing market is booming but leasehold flats aren't selling.
Yep. 20+ years ago I balked at the opportunity to buy a flat. "I will only own the front door key" was my thought. And now that we have had Grenfell followed by the outrage of so many buildings being clad in "BurnKwik" cladding which the government is happy to leave in place (having taken bungs from property companies) its hardly a surprise that leasehold isn't selling.
I think we do need to build more higher-density housing and that means more blocks. But surely leased is the way to go.
I bought a leasehold flat in London as, at the time, it was all I could afford. It's been a non-stop nightmare of bills, charges and assorted grifters posing as managing agents ever since. If I could do it all over again, I'd simply rent until I could afford to buy a house. Never again.
Leasehold, and all that shit, needs proper regulation.
It’s the sort of micro-economic improvement that make everyone’s life easier and indeed help inflation, and in which the government is profoundly uninterested.
You need to check the freeholder (avoid any building that's managed by Freshwater Group or Estates and Management) and ensure that your solicitor tells you the wording of the lease is okay.
There are technical reasons of land law why long leases are the best means to operate blocks of flats. The wisest course of action is for the leaseholders to club together to buy the freehold (since 1993,freholders can be compelled to sell),
Home ownership is a real issue. But we are a crowded island and countryside is precious. The answer is surely towers in the SE esp London. Build UP, build lots and lots of towers until flats in them are affordable for 20-somethings
Young people really don’t mind living in towers if the location is decent. Towers can be glamorous. Manhattan is glamorous, so is Hong Kong. They just want to own not rent
Then when they move into their 30s and 40s the youngsters will already be on the property ladder and they can shift to something suburban with a garden for the kids
Some older people - childless or empty-nesters - would be quite happy with towers as well. IF the location is right
There. Sorted
Not sorted until you can persuade the banks to offer mortgages on high rise flats.
Set up a national mortgage lender if the private ones won’t do it. This is a massive national issue and a generational problem for the Tories. We need to get home ownership rising again. We need it heading to 80% not sliding to 50%
Let the young buy flats in sexy towers. Problem solved. Now I’m off for a haircut
How do you stop buy to let in your new towers?
Change the law. This isn’t hard. The builders only get planning permission if the flats are sold to owner occupiers. SORTED
Yes this will piss off the class of rentier landlords, but, you know, World’s Tiniest Violin etc
There is at least one nice development in central Manchester which is only available to owner occupiers. I don't know how they police it but it is not without precedent.
Most young Londoners would jump at the chance of owning rather than renting. They wouldn’t give a damn if it’s a flat on floor 23. Just make it a reasonably cool location. East London is the obvious place, especially with the Liz Line
Build a million flats in 10,000 towers. Build so many the price of an E London 2 bed falls to £150,000 and anyone on an average salary can buy one, certainly any young couple
Build them in proper elegant clusters, with one or two super tall central towers, and shorter towers surrounding. Build the infrastructure to go with them, from pubs to shops to gyms. Forget about providing car parking. These are for young urbanites who don’t want to drive
Also relax the insanely cautious height restrictions in London, allow towers up to 1500 feet
I could sort this all out over a brief lunch
Point of order, most flats are leasehold, therefore you don't own them. You just have a very long lease, coupled with unlimited service charges and unlimited liability when things go wrong (as people caught up in the cladding scandal have found out).
There's a reason why the housing market is booming but leasehold flats aren't selling.
Yep. 20+ years ago I balked at the opportunity to buy a flat. "I will only own the front door key" was my thought. And now that we have had Grenfell followed by the outrage of so many buildings being clad in "BurnKwik" cladding which the government is happy to leave in place (having taken bungs from property companies) its hardly a surprise that leasehold isn't selling.
I think we do need to build more higher-density housing and that means more blocks. But surely leased is the way to go.
I bought a leasehold flat in London as, at the time, it was all I could afford. It's been a non-stop nightmare of bills, charges and assorted grifters posing as managing agents ever since. If I could do it all over again, I'd simply rent until I could afford to buy a house. Never again.
I have a lease - very long, 130 years or something.
I find the arrangement quite useful. I pay a few hundred quid a year but they have to sort out any problems in the common areas, deal with nuisance tenant elsewhere, do the common decorating, check the insurance, and if I get a problem from another flat in my house (like a leak), they have to get it fixed (and they do, quite promptly)
For me, it is well worth it
However for many it is a grind and a scam, and I would do away with it for anyone that prefers freehold
We don’t necessarily need high rise, but we do need 6-8 storey medium density housing to maximise the use of space while keeping the scale human.
As an aside, tower blocks may not be very liveable for everyone. In my first year at uni, I lived on the ninth floor of a student tower block in South Woodford. I was on crutches for the last term, and when the lift broke down (frequently, for prolonged periods), I would have to go up and down the stairs on crutches.
Not too bad for an otherwise fit 19-year old, but if you are elderly or infirm you are somewhat reliant on 100% working lifts.
So fix the lift, don’t use this as a reason to build two bed semis across the entire country.
I am surrounded by elderly, infirm Jewish people. It is likely the densest concentration of such outside of Tel Aviv.
They all live in apartments.
The special pleading on here is laughable.
It is ridiculous. “The British won’t live in flats, and what if you break an ankle”
Young families ideally need gardens, for everyone else they are nice-to-have, that is all
And given a choice between a flat on floor 28 with a spectacular view of Shoreditch - a flat that you OWN - compared to perpetually renting a bedsit in south Croydon in a low rise ex council block, then 99% of young people will say LET ME OWN
I doubt Jeremiah Jessop has ever been to London.
Fuck off. And when you fucked off there, fuck off some more. The go and fuck off some more.
These are some of the guys most forcibly arguing abortion bans. This would seem to indicate their utter disregard for women's interests.
Southern Baptist leaders covered up sex abuse, kept secret database, report says Among the findings was a previously unknown case of a pastor who was credibly accused of assaulting a woman a month after leaving the presidency of the Southern Baptist Convention https://www.washingtonpost.com/religion/2022/05/22/southern-baptist-sex-abuse-report/
There is nothing new about bad people attaching themselves to a cause. Nor are ad hominem points a novelty.
The interesting discussion, as always, is between decent people, who apply rules to themselves as well as others, think there is a case for both sides on tricky questions, don't demonise others as extremists and are prepared to change their minds.
Religious people who support choice and feminists who are anti abortion are more interesting places to look than narcissistic fundamentalists.
The problem with seeking balance here is there isn't any. The situation is inherently unbalanced because one of the extremes (Abortion = Murder so the unhappily pregnant woman must be completely subjugated to the foetus she carries) has become a realistic legislative target in many parts of the US.
The fact that extreme views exist and are promoted shows the importance of the discussion also taking place between non extremes. The denial of the validity of any view apart from one's own is itself an extreme mindset. I think we are agreed about that in all probability. So I don't really see your point, though I share your angst.
My point is that the debate for all practical purposes is between an extreme position of banning abortion and a moderate nuanced consensus position of not banning it but having some controls. The opposite extreme - abortion totally fine in all circumstances and right up to point of natural delivery - has no real world traction. Hence the equivalence between the 2 extremes is there only in theory. In practice it isn't. The 'Pro Life' extreme is the one to worry about because its proponents are numerous and influential and are hell bent on implementing it. It's an extreme that's gone mainstream in many US states and in one of that country's 2 main political parties.
No doubt all this happens. I pay political attention to it but not philosophical/ethical attention - there is nothing much to attend to. The discussion as between moderates who take differing positions needs to be carried on despite the rhetoric from all quarters.
There is also a sub-question of who decides the balance to be struck. For the UK it is parliament. In the US the SC has a decisive role. SFAICS they can, if they wish, effectively ban women's rights or compel women's rights in the matter. This encourages militancy. I prefer our tradition. It should be for parliament.
BTW, in the USA it is impossible in practice in the long run to ignore the voters. It is a democracy. Unless people are prepared to defend their liberal positions by turning up and voting they will lose out to extremes. It is not the job of courts, even the SC, to do the voters' job for them.
Home ownership is a real issue. But we are a crowded island and countryside is precious. The answer is surely towers in the SE esp London. Build UP, build lots and lots of towers until flats in them are affordable for 20-somethings
Young people really don’t mind living in towers if the location is decent. Towers can be glamorous. Manhattan is glamorous, so is Hong Kong. They just want to own not rent
Then when they move into their 30s and 40s the youngsters will already be on the property ladder and they can shift to something suburban with a garden for the kids
Some older people - childless or empty-nesters - would be quite happy with towers as well. IF the location is right
There. Sorted
Not sorted until you can persuade the banks to offer mortgages on high rise flats.
Set up a national mortgage lender if the private ones won’t do it. This is a massive national issue and a generational problem for the Tories. We need to get home ownership rising again. We need it heading to 80% not sliding to 50%
Let the young buy flats in sexy towers. Problem solved. Now I’m off for a haircut
How do you stop buy to let in your new towers?
Change the law. This isn’t hard. The builders only get planning permission if the flats are sold to owner occupiers. SORTED
Yes this will piss off the class of rentier landlords, but, you know, World’s Tiniest Violin etc
There is at least one nice development in central Manchester which is only available to owner occupiers. I don't know how they police it but it is not without precedent.
Most young Londoners would jump at the chance of owning rather than renting. They wouldn’t give a damn if it’s a flat on floor 23. Just make it a reasonably cool location. East London is the obvious place, especially with the Liz Line
Build a million flats in 10,000 towers. Build so many the price of an E London 2 bed falls to £150,000 and anyone on an average salary can buy one, certainly any young couple
Build them in proper elegant clusters, with one or two super tall central towers, and shorter towers surrounding. Build the infrastructure to go with them, from pubs to shops to gyms. Forget about providing car parking. These are for young urbanites who don’t want to drive
Also relax the insanely cautious height restrictions in London, allow towers up to 1500 feet
I could sort this all out over a brief lunch
Point of order, most flats are leasehold, therefore you don't own them. You just have a very long lease, coupled with unlimited service charges and unlimited liability when things go wrong (as people caught up in the cladding scandal have found out).
There's a reason why the housing market is booming but leasehold flats aren't selling.
Get rid of leasehold. Fuck the landlords
Make everything freehold from now on, make it insanely easy to change from leasehold to freehold if that’s where you are now
Yep.
That would be the system that literally THE ENTIRE WORLD has apart from England (and yes, Scotland doesn't have it either).
This is the best thread I have ever read on leasehold that pretty much sums up what a grift it is.
Again, England is the ONLY place in the entire world that still has this stupid grift. The fact that we don't change it tells you everything you need to know about who donates to what political party and why.
We have, on this thread, proposed more interesting policies than Keir Starmer has managed in his entire tenure in Shadow Cabinet, whether as LOTO or shadow minister for Fuck Democracy Let’s Have a “2nd” Vote
Why aren’t labour coming up with eye-catching idea like this? I might even vote for them if they showed a bit of imagination and energy. They are inert
We don’t necessarily need high rise, but we do need 6-8 storey medium density housing to maximise the use of space while keeping the scale human.
As an aside, tower blocks may not be very liveable for everyone. In my first year at uni, I lived on the ninth floor of a student tower block in South Woodford. I was on crutches for the last term, and when the lift broke down (frequently, for prolonged periods), I would have to go up and down the stairs on crutches.
Not too bad for an otherwise fit 19-year old, but if you are elderly or infirm you are somewhat reliant on 100% working lifts.
So fix the lift, don’t use this as a reason to build two bed semis across the entire country.
I am surrounded by elderly, infirm Jewish people. It is likely the densest concentration of such outside of Tel Aviv.
They all live in apartments.
The special pleading on here is laughable.
I'm not saying it's a reason not to do it, but am pointing out an issue they have. And 'So fix the lift' is rather silly thing to say when a) these things take time, and b) the person needs to get out and about in that time. But you evidently don't care about that.
And it's not 'special pleading'. It's a point that needs addressing in a more realistic way than your stupid one-liner.
I stayed regularly at an 8-floor hotel in London. Lifts are important to a hotel since you have guests with luggage regularly coming and going. Their lifts were frequently broken, but they always had at least one working because they recognised the importance and had provided three.
A developer will argue that they can only make a profit with a single lift, so that they have more floorspace to sell. I believe a variant of this argument has recently happened so that tall tower blocks are now being built with only one staircase - one of the contributory factors to the Grenfell disaster.
The government would have to enforce provision of redundant lifts so that lift availability would survive anticipated maintenance. Recent governments have a poor record of maintaining high building standards in the face of industry special pleading.
Home ownership is a real issue. But we are a crowded island and countryside is precious. The answer is surely towers in the SE esp London. Build UP, build lots and lots of towers until flats in them are affordable for 20-somethings
Young people really don’t mind living in towers if the location is decent. Towers can be glamorous. Manhattan is glamorous, so is Hong Kong. They just want to own not rent
Then when they move into their 30s and 40s the youngsters will already be on the property ladder and they can shift to something suburban with a garden for the kids
Some older people - childless or empty-nesters - would be quite happy with towers as well. IF the location is right
There. Sorted
Not sorted until you can persuade the banks to offer mortgages on high rise flats.
Set up a national mortgage lender if the private ones won’t do it. This is a massive national issue and a generational problem for the Tories. We need to get home ownership rising again. We need it heading to 80% not sliding to 50%
Let the young buy flats in sexy towers. Problem solved. Now I’m off for a haircut
How do you stop buy to let in your new towers?
Change the law. This isn’t hard. The builders only get planning permission if the flats are sold to owner occupiers. SORTED
Yes this will piss off the class of rentier landlords, but, you know, World’s Tiniest Violin etc
There is at least one nice development in central Manchester which is only available to owner occupiers. I don't know how they police it but it is not without precedent.
Most young Londoners would jump at the chance of owning rather than renting. They wouldn’t give a damn if it’s a flat on floor 23. Just make it a reasonably cool location. East London is the obvious place, especially with the Liz Line
Build a million flats in 10,000 towers. Build so many the price of an E London 2 bed falls to £150,000 and anyone on an average salary can buy one, certainly any young couple
Build them in proper elegant clusters, with one or two super tall central towers, and shorter towers surrounding. Build the infrastructure to go with them, from pubs to shops to gyms. Forget about providing car parking. These are for young urbanites who don’t want to drive
Also relax the insanely cautious height restrictions in London, allow towers up to 1500 feet
I could sort this all out over a brief lunch
Point of order, most flats are leasehold, therefore you don't own them. You just have a very long lease, coupled with unlimited service charges and unlimited liability when things go wrong (as people caught up in the cladding scandal have found out).
There's a reason why the housing market is booming but leasehold flats aren't selling.
Yep. 20+ years ago I balked at the opportunity to buy a flat. "I will only own the front door key" was my thought. And now that we have had Grenfell followed by the outrage of so many buildings being clad in "BurnKwik" cladding which the government is happy to leave in place (having taken bungs from property companies) its hardly a surprise that leasehold isn't selling.
I think we do need to build more higher-density housing and that means more blocks. But surely leased is the way to go.
I bought a leasehold flat in London as, at the time, it was all I could afford. It's been a non-stop nightmare of bills, charges and assorted grifters posing as managing agents ever since. If I could do it all over again, I'd simply rent until I could afford to buy a house. Never again.
I have a lease - very long, 130 years or something.
I find the arrangement quite useful. I pay a few hundred quid a year but they have to sort out any problems in the common areas, deal with nuisance tenant elsewhere, do the common decorating, check the insurance, and if I get a problem from another flat in my house (like a leak), they have to get it fixed (and they do, quite promptly)
For me, it is well worth it
However for many it is a grind and a scam, and I would do away with it for anyone that prefers freehold
It is probably just about OK if, say, you are one of three flats in a converted Victorian terrace, but for modern large blocks it is simply not fit for purpose.
I have lost track of the number of over-inflated bills I have been charged for over the years via the managing agent and their grifting sub-contractors.
Different building, but even so-called brand new luxury developments are not immune to the grift.
As I say, I will never, ever, ever buy a leasehold flat again. Nor vote Conservative until they do something about it and start looking after property "owners" instead of property developers.
This from the mail today Of course Russia is no nuclear threat
Russia will soon have 50 '14-storey high' Satan-2 nukes capable of reducing Western enemies into 'radioactive craters', Putin's space agency chief says in new threat
By Will Stewart for MailOnline07:55, 23 May 2022 , updated 09:08, 23 May 2022
You do realise that we are all laughing at you. You are about as convincing as your military
i dont care to be honest. When you are right about things against the consensus people tend to laugh at you. So i welcome your laughter. Please laugh more
More now on Russia’s counsellor to the UN in Geneva resigning over the war in Ukraine.
Boris Bondarev has spoken to the BBC's Russia Editor Steve Rosenberg about why he became the country's most senior diplomat to defect over the war.
"The reason is that I strongly disagree and disapprove of what my government is doing and has been doing at least since February, and I don’t want to be associated with that any longer," he said.
Home ownership is a real issue. But we are a crowded island and countryside is precious. The answer is surely towers in the SE esp London. Build UP, build lots and lots of towers until flats in them are affordable for 20-somethings
Young people really don’t mind living in towers if the location is decent. Towers can be glamorous. Manhattan is glamorous, so is Hong Kong. They just want to own not rent
Then when they move into their 30s and 40s the youngsters will already be on the property ladder and they can shift to something suburban with a garden for the kids
Some older people - childless or empty-nesters - would be quite happy with towers as well. IF the location is right
There. Sorted
Not sorted until you can persuade the banks to offer mortgages on high rise flats.
Set up a national mortgage lender if the private ones won’t do it. This is a massive national issue and a generational problem for the Tories. We need to get home ownership rising again. We need it heading to 80% not sliding to 50%
Let the young buy flats in sexy towers. Problem solved. Now I’m off for a haircut
How do you stop buy to let in your new towers?
Change the law. This isn’t hard. The builders only get planning permission if the flats are sold to owner occupiers. SORTED
Yes this will piss off the class of rentier landlords, but, you know, World’s Tiniest Violin etc
There is at least one nice development in central Manchester which is only available to owner occupiers. I don't know how they police it but it is not without precedent.
Most young Londoners would jump at the chance of owning rather than renting. They wouldn’t give a damn if it’s a flat on floor 23. Just make it a reasonably cool location. East London is the obvious place, especially with the Liz Line
Build a million flats in 10,000 towers. Build so many the price of an E London 2 bed falls to £150,000 and anyone on an average salary can buy one, certainly any young couple
Build them in proper elegant clusters, with one or two super tall central towers, and shorter towers surrounding. Build the infrastructure to go with them, from pubs to shops to gyms. Forget about providing car parking. These are for young urbanites who don’t want to drive
Also relax the insanely cautious height restrictions in London, allow towers up to 1500 feet
I could sort this all out over a brief lunch
Point of order, most flats are leasehold, therefore you don't own them. You just have a very long lease, coupled with unlimited service charges and unlimited liability when things go wrong (as people caught up in the cladding scandal have found out).
There's a reason why the housing market is booming but leasehold flats aren't selling.
Get rid of leasehold. Fuck the landlords
Make everything freehold from now on, make it insanely easy to change from leasehold to freehold if that’s where you are now
Yep.
That would be the system that literally THE ENTIRE WORLD has apart from England (and yes, Scotland doesn't have it either).
This is the best thread I have ever read on leasehold that pretty much sums up what a grift it is.
Again, England is the ONLY place in the entire world that still has this stupid grift. The fact that we don't change it tells you everything you need to know about who donates to what political party and why.
TBF we had feudal law still operating in Scotland - basically had to pay the landowner so as not to have to be turning up with horse and armour, bow, or billhook on demand (yes, really). It could be abused like Leasehold.
For sone reason which I can't possibly imagine it was not sorted out till after devolution - the 5th act of the reconvened Parliament at Holyrood was to abolish it.
My advice is to surrender all hope of a “normal life” until she’s at least 2 and a half. Otherwise you’ll be frustrated.
Secondly, kids seem to have a kind of developmental model. They change at six weeks; then twelve; then twenty-four; then fifty-two.
This is important to remember when you are sick to fuck of trying to get them sleep etc; they do get there eventually.
Nappies are more expensive than you think. Breast-feeding mums allow dad more sleep but not necessarily an easier life. There was something about stroking babies' eyebrows that went viral — makes them sleep or stop crying or something. And the most fun milestone is when her toes go forwards rather than back when you tickle her feet. Baby food comes in all sorts of exotic flavours now. That's pretty much all there is to it.
I still clearly recall the morning our 'firstborn' arrived. Almost 59 years ago. He was very premature, so it wasn't all plain sailing by any means.
Home ownership is a real issue. But we are a crowded island and countryside is precious. The answer is surely towers in the SE esp London. Build UP, build lots and lots of towers until flats in them are affordable for 20-somethings
Young people really don’t mind living in towers if the location is decent. Towers can be glamorous. Manhattan is glamorous, so is Hong Kong. They just want to own not rent
Then when they move into their 30s and 40s the youngsters will already be on the property ladder and they can shift to something suburban with a garden for the kids
Some older people - childless or empty-nesters - would be quite happy with towers as well. IF the location is right
There. Sorted
I’ve been saying something similar for years. London is exceptionally low-rise.
Paris says hello!
It does. Paris has less green space than I’d like, but nobody is saying Paris (inside the periphique) is some kind of dystopian hellhole.
There are loads of tower blocks (office and residential) in London.
Not by global standards.
It depends what standards you choose to compare to. If you only want to compare against Manhattan that's going to be very different of course.
If you compare to Sydney, Auckland, Melbourne, Calgary or Toronto you might get a very different answer in the opposite direction.
Europe and the North East seaboard of the United States are fair comparators for London.
I know you want to concrete over the entire countryside, but basically nobody agrees with you.
I don't want to concrete over the entire countryside.
At present 4% of the UK is urban housing and 70% is farming. Even if the stock of housing increased by 25% so that those figures became 5% and 69% respectively, that's pissing in the ocean as far as concreting over the countryside is concerned.
Even if you eliminated all planning tomorrow, the overwhelming majority of the countryside wouldn't be concreted over as there's frankly next to nobody who wants to live there for the overwhelming majority of it.
You seem to have a fundamental misconception about what planning laws actually do.
Practically none of them are either designed to or actually do stop development. What they do is ensure that the development meets certain basic standards and that if they will damage something - for example a natural resource or archaeology - then the developer pays the costs of mitigation. When developers moan about planning what they are actually moaning about is having to spend money doing stuff that puts right the damage they do and making sure the houses they build are fit to live in. Sadly even with the current planning laws many new builds barely reach those basic standards.
Bravo. This is so right. There is so much appalling development going on which could be so much better if there was at least a nod towards decent design and context. Spreadsheet architecture only makes sense if the only people who count are the shareholders of developers.
We all have an interest in the quality of the built environment because it uses up a non-renewable resource (ie land), and will be there for generations. People grow up, and live out their lives in far too many wretched dehumanising developments. But, unfortunately, politicians of all parties are far too receptive to special pleading from the builders. Do we really want everywhere to look like a suburb of Milton Keynes?
This from the mail today Of course Russia is no nuclear threat
Russia will soon have 50 '14-storey high' Satan-2 nukes capable of reducing Western enemies into 'radioactive craters', Putin's space agency chief says in new threat
By Will Stewart for MailOnline07:55, 23 May 2022 , updated 09:08, 23 May 2022
You do realise that we are all laughing at you. You are about as convincing as your military
Let's suppose he's posting from Moscow. Isn't this a great opportunity to discuss with a Russian about all this. Why the insecurity of having to dismiss him. I mean in this case he is simply quoting the MailOnline. Or did he make that up?
Bots don't really do discussion, they don't answer peoples' questions. Their sole purpose is to spread Russian disinformation. No offence intended but I think your response is politically naive
I am surprised that the sentence is only 18 months (seems on the lower end even by the standards of the day). Won't quite be out for Christmas, but will enjoy Eid 2023 as a free man.
We don’t necessarily need high rise, but we do need 6-8 storey medium density housing to maximise the use of space while keeping the scale human.
As an aside, tower blocks may not be very liveable for everyone. In my first year at uni, I lived on the ninth floor of a student tower block in South Woodford. I was on crutches for the last term, and when the lift broke down (frequently, for prolonged periods), I would have to go up and down the stairs on crutches.
Not too bad for an otherwise fit 19-year old, but if you are elderly or infirm you are somewhat reliant on 100% working lifts.
So fix the lift, don’t use this as a reason to build two bed semis across the entire country.
I am surrounded by elderly, infirm Jewish people. It is likely the densest concentration of such outside of Tel Aviv.
They all live in apartments.
The special pleading on here is laughable.
It is ridiculous. “The British won’t live in flats, and what if you break an ankle”
Young families ideally need gardens, for everyone else they are nice-to-have, that is all
And given a choice between a flat on floor 28 with a spectacular view of Shoreditch - a flat that you OWN - compared to perpetually renting a bedsit in south Croydon in a low rise ex council block, then 99% of young people will say LET ME OWN
I doubt Jeremiah Jessop has ever been to London.
To give you an answer you don't deserve:
I spent four and a half/five years living in London.
A year in South Woodford. A year in Stepney Green. A year at the northern end of the Isle of Dogs. A few months in a flat on the Old Kent Road. About a year in a room in Chelsea.
As many of you have probably guessed, the Elizabeth Line has been rushed into opening in time for the Platinum Jubilee without it all functioning as one cohesive service.
So, from tomorrow, the central section east of Paddington (low level) including the branch from Whitechapel to Canary Wharf, Custom House, Woolwich and Abbey Wood, will not yet be connected to Stratford in the east, and Acton in the west. Bond Street platforms are also not ready. But the connections and Bond Street should be ready "by the autumn". Hmmm,,, we'll see!
Also, if you're into trying to take pics of trains arriving/leaving at the stations from Paddington to Canary Wharf, as well as Woolwich - don't bother! Platform edge doors similar to those on the Jubilee line will prevent you having a clear view of the trains or the tracks!
Best places to see the trains on the section that's opening tomorrow are Custom House and Abbey Wood, which are out in the open. Also, there's a footbridge at Silvertown, near LCY Airport, affording views of the route.
Journey time is 29 minutes from Paddington to Abbey Wood. And the frequency is every 5 minutes. Not bad at all for a "main line" service.
Personally, travelling in from Ilford, I aim to change trains at Liverpool Street, head southeast to Abbey Wood, then visit each station on the way back to Liverpool Street, head west through to Paddington (low level), then visit the remaining two stations in Zone 1 (Tottenham Court Road and Farringdon) on the way back to Liverpool Street, thereby doing the route and all nine stations opening tomorrow.
Also, it's bound to be full of media-people and fucking Youtubers tomorrow, so I'm seriously mulling delaying my expedition until Wednesday when it's bound to be less busy. But then, that's just me!
Have been reading about the typical British stupidity with regards to ticketing. Its a National Rail service which means their Conditions of Travel apply. In parallel pricing in the core is the same as tube fares. But despite the NRCoT rules being clear and absolute I am already reading that confusion means that people trying to do break of journey will be stopped, that x to London Terminals tickets won't be valid from say Greenhithe to Liverpool Street despite LST being a London Terminal etc etc etc.
Supposedly Great British Railways was supposed to do a big fares bonfire to fix all this. Instead its on an indefinite delay with only a long list of Tory MPs trying to secure its HQ to their constituency to show it even exists.
This from the mail today Of course Russia is no nuclear threat
Russia will soon have 50 '14-storey high' Satan-2 nukes capable of reducing Western enemies into 'radioactive craters', Putin's space agency chief says in new threat
By Will Stewart for MailOnline07:55, 23 May 2022 , updated 09:08, 23 May 2022
You do realise that we are all laughing at you. You are about as convincing as your military
Let's suppose he's posting from Moscow. Isn't this a great opportunity to discuss with a Russian about all this. Why the insecurity of having to dismiss him. I mean in this case he is simply quoting the MailOnline. Or did he make that up?
Bots don't really do discussion, they don't answer peoples' questions. Their sole purpose is to spread Russian disinformation. No offence intended but I think your response is politically naive
This from the mail today Of course Russia is no nuclear threat
Russia will soon have 50 '14-storey high' Satan-2 nukes capable of reducing Western enemies into 'radioactive craters', Putin's space agency chief says in new threat
By Will Stewart for MailOnline07:55, 23 May 2022 , updated 09:08, 23 May 2022
You do realise that we are all laughing at you. You are about as convincing as your military
Let's suppose he's posting from Moscow. Isn't this a great opportunity to discuss with a Russian about all this. Why the insecurity of having to dismiss him. I mean in this case he is simply quoting the MailOnline. Or did he make that up?
Bots don't really do discussion, they don't answer peoples' questions. Their sole purpose is to spread Russian disinformation. No offence intended but I think your response is politically naive
The only people you are offending are those you think will in some way be influenced by a post from @GaryL .
I mean you are smart enough to see through it all so why shouldn't everyone else.
We don’t necessarily need high rise, but we do need 6-8 storey medium density housing to maximise the use of space while keeping the scale human.
As an aside, tower blocks may not be very liveable for everyone. In my first year at uni, I lived on the ninth floor of a student tower block in South Woodford. I was on crutches for the last term, and when the lift broke down (frequently, for prolonged periods), I would have to go up and down the stairs on crutches.
Not too bad for an otherwise fit 19-year old, but if you are elderly or infirm you are somewhat reliant on 100% working lifts.
So fix the lift, don’t use this as a reason to build two bed semis across the entire country.
I am surrounded by elderly, infirm Jewish people. It is likely the densest concentration of such outside of Tel Aviv.
They all live in apartments.
The special pleading on here is laughable.
It is ridiculous. “The British won’t live in flats, and what if you break an ankle”
Young families ideally need gardens, for everyone else they are nice-to-have, that is all
And given a choice between a flat on floor 28 with a spectacular view of Shoreditch - a flat that you OWN - compared to perpetually renting a bedsit in south Croydon in a low rise ex council block, then 99% of young people will say LET ME OWN
I doubt Jeremiah Jessop has ever been to London.
Fuck off. And when you fucked off there, fuck off some more. The go and fuck off some more.
This from the mail today Of course Russia is no nuclear threat
Russia will soon have 50 '14-storey high' Satan-2 nukes capable of reducing Western enemies into 'radioactive craters', Putin's space agency chief says in new threat
By Will Stewart for MailOnline07:55, 23 May 2022 , updated 09:08, 23 May 2022
You do realise that we are all laughing at you. You are about as convincing as your military
Let's suppose he's posting from Moscow. Isn't this a great opportunity to discuss with a Russian about all this. Why the insecurity of having to dismiss him. I mean in this case he is simply quoting the MailOnline. Or did he make that up?
Bots don't really do discussion, they don't answer peoples' questions. Their sole purpose is to spread Russian disinformation. No offence intended but I think your response is politically naive
i think you are succumbing to paranoid conspiracy therories here. Maybe go and get some help
This from the mail today Of course Russia is no nuclear threat
Russia will soon have 50 '14-storey high' Satan-2 nukes capable of reducing Western enemies into 'radioactive craters', Putin's space agency chief says in new threat
By Will Stewart for MailOnline07:55, 23 May 2022 , updated 09:08, 23 May 2022
Soon. Just as "soon" as they have managed to find a way round the missile components that they used to buy from Ukraine.
The need for Satan2 willy waving is very telling. Maybe somebody from Moscow has done an audit of the existing stock of nukes. And found them to wanting.
How many Russian subs are "on patrol" loaded with duds, I wonder...
It doesn't really matter, unless Putin is mad enough to launch a first strike.
That apart, they continue to provide a deterrent with more credibility than our own.
We don’t necessarily need high rise, but we do need 6-8 storey medium density housing to maximise the use of space while keeping the scale human.
As an aside, tower blocks may not be very liveable for everyone. In my first year at uni, I lived on the ninth floor of a student tower block in South Woodford. I was on crutches for the last term, and when the lift broke down (frequently, for prolonged periods), I would have to go up and down the stairs on crutches.
Not too bad for an otherwise fit 19-year old, but if you are elderly or infirm you are somewhat reliant on 100% working lifts.
So fix the lift, don’t use this as a reason to build two bed semis across the entire country.
I am surrounded by elderly, infirm Jewish people. It is likely the densest concentration of such outside of Tel Aviv.
They all live in apartments.
The special pleading on here is laughable.
It is ridiculous. “The British won’t live in flats, and what if you break an ankle”
Young families ideally need gardens, for everyone else they are nice-to-have, that is all
And given a choice between a flat on floor 28 with a spectacular view of Shoreditch - a flat that you OWN - compared to perpetually renting a bedsit in south Croydon in a low rise ex council block, then 99% of young people will say LET ME OWN
I doubt Jeremiah Jessop has ever been to London.
Fuck off. And when you fucked off there, fuck off some more. The go and fuck off some more.
Closest I’ve been to central London was Wembley Arena, and that was 23 years ago. I’m 44 now, I wonder if I’ll ever actually make it.
Home ownership is a real issue. But we are a crowded island and countryside is precious. The answer is surely towers in the SE esp London. Build UP, build lots and lots of towers until flats in them are affordable for 20-somethings
Young people really don’t mind living in towers if the location is decent. Towers can be glamorous. Manhattan is glamorous, so is Hong Kong. They just want to own not rent
Then when they move into their 30s and 40s the youngsters will already be on the property ladder and they can shift to something suburban with a garden for the kids
Some older people - childless or empty-nesters - would be quite happy with towers as well. IF the location is right
There. Sorted
Not sorted until you can persuade the banks to offer mortgages on high rise flats.
Set up a national mortgage lender if the private ones won’t do it. This is a massive national issue and a generational problem for the Tories. We need to get home ownership rising again. We need it heading to 80% not sliding to 50%
Let the young buy flats in sexy towers. Problem solved. Now I’m off for a haircut
How do you stop buy to let in your new towers?
Change the law. This isn’t hard. The builders only get planning permission if the flats are sold to owner occupiers. SORTED
Yes this will piss off the class of rentier landlords, but, you know, World’s Tiniest Violin etc
There is at least one nice development in central Manchester which is only available to owner occupiers. I don't know how they police it but it is not without precedent.
Most young Londoners would jump at the chance of owning rather than renting. They wouldn’t give a damn if it’s a flat on floor 23. Just make it a reasonably cool location. East London is the obvious place, especially with the Liz Line
Build a million flats in 10,000 towers. Build so many the price of an E London 2 bed falls to £150,000 and anyone on an average salary can buy one, certainly any young couple
Build them in proper elegant clusters, with one or two super tall central towers, and shorter towers surrounding. Build the infrastructure to go with them, from pubs to shops to gyms. Forget about providing car parking. These are for young urbanites who don’t want to drive
Also relax the insanely cautious height restrictions in London, allow towers up to 1500 feet
I could sort this all out over a brief lunch
Point of order, most flats are leasehold, therefore you don't own them. You just have a very long lease, coupled with unlimited service charges and unlimited liability when things go wrong (as people caught up in the cladding scandal have found out).
There's a reason why the housing market is booming but leasehold flats aren't selling.
Get rid of leasehold. Fuck the landlords
Make everything freehold from now on, make it insanely easy to change from leasehold to freehold if that’s where you are now
How do you freehold a flat? You can't own the land. Or the building. You could have each flat owner have an equal share in both of those things but that would just ensure that nothing got agreed and done?
Its not having an owner / leaseholder that is the issue. Its the laws regulating what they can do to their "clients" who own a yale door key in their building.
Home ownership is a real issue. But we are a crowded island and countryside is precious. The answer is surely towers in the SE esp London. Build UP, build lots and lots of towers until flats in them are affordable for 20-somethings
Young people really don’t mind living in towers if the location is decent. Towers can be glamorous. Manhattan is glamorous, so is Hong Kong. They just want to own not rent
Then when they move into their 30s and 40s the youngsters will already be on the property ladder and they can shift to something suburban with a garden for the kids
Some older people - childless or empty-nesters - would be quite happy with towers as well. IF the location is right
There. Sorted
I’ve been saying something similar for years. London is exceptionally low-rise.
Paris says hello!
It does. Paris has less green space than I’d like, but nobody is saying Paris (inside the periphique) is some kind of dystopian hellhole.
There are loads of tower blocks (office and residential) in London.
Not by global standards.
It depends what standards you choose to compare to. If you only want to compare against Manhattan that's going to be very different of course.
If you compare to Sydney, Auckland, Melbourne, Calgary or Toronto you might get a very different answer in the opposite direction.
Europe and the North East seaboard of the United States are fair comparators for London.
I know you want to concrete over the entire countryside, but basically nobody agrees with you.
I don't want to concrete over the entire countryside.
At present 4% of the UK is urban housing and 70% is farming. Even if the stock of housing increased by 25% so that those figures became 5% and 69% respectively, that's pissing in the ocean as far as concreting over the countryside is concerned.
Even if you eliminated all planning tomorrow, the overwhelming majority of the countryside wouldn't be concreted over as there's frankly next to nobody who wants to live there for the overwhelming majority of it.
You seem to have a fundamental misconception about what planning laws actually do.
Practically none of them are either designed to or actually do stop development. What they do is ensure that the development meets certain basic standards and that if they will damage something - for example a natural resource or archaeology - then the developer pays the costs of mitigation. When developers moan about planning what they are actually moaning about is having to spend money doing stuff that puts right the damage they do and making sure the houses they build are fit to live in. Sadly even with the current planning laws many new builds barely reach those basic standards.
Hm, a quibble with the above: planning laws, more widely, are mildly effective at preventing development on greenfield sites, and very effective at preventing development on Green Belt sites. You could realise massive amounts of development if you relaxed the latter. I disagree with Bart on the wisdom of doing so (to some extent), but agree with him that these rules have an effect. There is a massive demand to build on the Green Belt, but it is very very hard to do so. Note greenfield <> Green Belt.
We don’t necessarily need high rise, but we do need 6-8 storey medium density housing to maximise the use of space while keeping the scale human.
As an aside, tower blocks may not be very liveable for everyone. In my first year at uni, I lived on the ninth floor of a student tower block in South Woodford. I was on crutches for the last term, and when the lift broke down (frequently, for prolonged periods), I would have to go up and down the stairs on crutches.
Not too bad for an otherwise fit 19-year old, but if you are elderly or infirm you are somewhat reliant on 100% working lifts.
So fix the lift, don’t use this as a reason to build two bed semis across the entire country.
I am surrounded by elderly, infirm Jewish people. It is likely the densest concentration of such outside of Tel Aviv.
They all live in apartments.
The special pleading on here is laughable.
It is ridiculous. “The British won’t live in flats, and what if you break an ankle”
Young families ideally need gardens, for everyone else they are nice-to-have, that is all
And given a choice between a flat on floor 28 with a spectacular view of Shoreditch - a flat that you OWN - compared to perpetually renting a bedsit in south Croydon in a low rise ex council block, then 99% of young people will say LET ME OWN
I doubt Jeremiah Jessop has ever been to London.
To give you an answer you don't deserve:
I spent four and a half/five years living in London.
A year in South Woodford. A year in Stepney Green. A year at the northern end of the Isle of Dogs. A few months in a flat on the Old Kent Road. About a year in a room in Chelsea.
My advice is to surrender all hope of a “normal life” until she’s at least 2 and a half. Otherwise you’ll be frustrated.
Secondly, kids seem to have a kind of developmental model. They change at six weeks; then twelve; then twenty-four; then fifty-two.
This is important to remember when you are sick to fuck of trying to get them sleep etc; they do get there eventually.
Nappies are more expensive than you think. Breast-feeding mums allow dad more sleep but not necessarily an easier life. There was something about stroking babies' eyebrows that went viral — makes them sleep or stop crying or something. And the most fun milestone is when her toes go forwards rather than back when you tickle her feet. Baby food comes in all sorts of exotic flavours now. That's pretty much all there is to it.
I still clearly recall the morning our 'firstborn' arrived. Almost 59 years ago. He was very premature, so it wasn't all plain sailing by any means.
My favourite early stage was "just when you think you are getting the hang of it, they learn to move on their own"
We don’t necessarily need high rise, but we do need 6-8 storey medium density housing to maximise the use of space while keeping the scale human.
As an aside, tower blocks may not be very liveable for everyone. In my first year at uni, I lived on the ninth floor of a student tower block in South Woodford. I was on crutches for the last term, and when the lift broke down (frequently, for prolonged periods), I would have to go up and down the stairs on crutches.
Not too bad for an otherwise fit 19-year old, but if you are elderly or infirm you are somewhat reliant on 100% working lifts.
So fix the lift, don’t use this as a reason to build two bed semis across the entire country.
I am surrounded by elderly, infirm Jewish people. It is likely the densest concentration of such outside of Tel Aviv.
They all live in apartments.
The special pleading on here is laughable.
It is ridiculous. “The British won’t live in flats, and what if you break an ankle”
Young families ideally need gardens, for everyone else they are nice-to-have, that is all
And given a choice between a flat on floor 28 with a spectacular view of Shoreditch - a flat that you OWN - compared to perpetually renting a bedsit in south Croydon in a low rise ex council block, then 99% of young people will say LET ME OWN
I doubt Jeremiah Jessop has ever been to London.
Fuck off. And when you fucked off there, fuck off some more. The go and fuck off some more.
Is FuckOffSomeMore a stop on the new Elizabeth line?
I am surprised that the sentence is only 18 months (seems on the lower end even by the standards of the day). Won't quite be out for Christmas, but will enjoy Eid 2023 as a free man.
In one of the stabbing incidents, a while back, two boys held the victim down, while another stabbed him. The victim died.
They got 12 months, early in the year. So literally out by Christmas.
More now on Russia’s counsellor to the UN in Geneva resigning over the war in Ukraine.
Boris Bondarev has spoken to the BBC's Russia Editor Steve Rosenberg about why he became the country's most senior diplomat to defect over the war.
"The reason is that I strongly disagree and disapprove of what my government is doing and has been doing at least since February, and I don’t want to be associated with that any longer," he said.
I hope he uses gloves to open his door handles for the foreseeable.
We don’t necessarily need high rise, but we do need 6-8 storey medium density housing to maximise the use of space while keeping the scale human.
As an aside, tower blocks may not be very liveable for everyone. In my first year at uni, I lived on the ninth floor of a student tower block in South Woodford. I was on crutches for the last term, and when the lift broke down (frequently, for prolonged periods), I would have to go up and down the stairs on crutches.
Not too bad for an otherwise fit 19-year old, but if you are elderly or infirm you are somewhat reliant on 100% working lifts.
So fix the lift, don’t use this as a reason to build two bed semis across the entire country.
I am surrounded by elderly, infirm Jewish people. It is likely the densest concentration of such outside of Tel Aviv.
They all live in apartments.
The special pleading on here is laughable.
I'm not saying it's a reason not to do it, but am pointing out an issue they have. And 'So fix the lift' is rather silly thing to say when a) these things take time, and b) the person needs to get out and about in that time. But you evidently don't care about that.
And it's not 'special pleading'. It's a point that needs addressing in a more realistic way than your stupid one-liner.
It is special pleading.
You were - as an aside - pearl clutching about invalids who might suffer when a lift breaks down.
How old are you, 100?
Many of my neighbours seem to be. And they are not moaning about imaginary lift breakdowns.
No, I gave an example of where there can be issues. It isn't 'pearl clutching', and it happened to me; fortunately when I was young and relatively fit (aside from being on crutches). Disbelieve me if you want, but I'm telling the truth - and I've given enough of my backstory on here for people to fit in the pieces.
Your attitude is exactly the one that leads to unliveable spaces. Architects and planners seeing the way they want people to live, rather than how people live.
The worst thing about you attitude is you *can* design out these issues. But they cost - and are therefore sadly often dropped. But you want to ignore it because the way people are (or can be) does not fit in with your ideology.
This from the mail today Of course Russia is no nuclear threat
Russia will soon have 50 '14-storey high' Satan-2 nukes capable of reducing Western enemies into 'radioactive craters', Putin's space agency chief says in new threat
By Will Stewart for MailOnline07:55, 23 May 2022 , updated 09:08, 23 May 2022
You do realise that we are all laughing at you. You are about as convincing as your military
Let's suppose he's posting from Moscow. Isn't this a great opportunity to discuss with a Russian about all this. Why the insecurity of having to dismiss him. I mean in this case he is simply quoting the MailOnline. Or did he make that up?
I thought the usual argument was that the MailOnline makes it up?
Well, no, Sarmat exists. And doesn't not work because of 40 years of skimped maintenance or because Russia doesn't do rockets.
Gary's posts may lack conviction but a lot of the responses to him are in "your mum smells of wee" country.
We don’t necessarily need high rise, but we do need 6-8 storey medium density housing to maximise the use of space while keeping the scale human.
As an aside, tower blocks may not be very liveable for everyone. In my first year at uni, I lived on the ninth floor of a student tower block in South Woodford. I was on crutches for the last term, and when the lift broke down (frequently, for prolonged periods), I would have to go up and down the stairs on crutches.
Not too bad for an otherwise fit 19-year old, but if you are elderly or infirm you are somewhat reliant on 100% working lifts.
So fix the lift, don’t use this as a reason to build two bed semis across the entire country.
I am surrounded by elderly, infirm Jewish people. It is likely the densest concentration of such outside of Tel Aviv.
They all live in apartments.
The special pleading on here is laughable.
It is ridiculous. “The British won’t live in flats, and what if you break an ankle”
Young families ideally need gardens, for everyone else they are nice-to-have, that is all
And given a choice between a flat on floor 28 with a spectacular view of Shoreditch - a flat that you OWN - compared to perpetually renting a bedsit in south Croydon in a low rise ex council block, then 99% of young people will say LET ME OWN
I doubt Jeremiah Jessop has ever been to London.
Fuck off. And when you fucked off there, fuck off some more. The go and fuck off some more.
Is FuckOffSomeMore a stop on the new Elizabeth line?
It's where you change for Slough - although that might be a bit too much punishment.
We don’t necessarily need high rise, but we do need 6-8 storey medium density housing to maximise the use of space while keeping the scale human.
As an aside, tower blocks may not be very liveable for everyone. In my first year at uni, I lived on the ninth floor of a student tower block in South Woodford. I was on crutches for the last term, and when the lift broke down (frequently, for prolonged periods), I would have to go up and down the stairs on crutches.
Not too bad for an otherwise fit 19-year old, but if you are elderly or infirm you are somewhat reliant on 100% working lifts.
So fix the lift, don’t use this as a reason to build two bed semis across the entire country.
I am surrounded by elderly, infirm Jewish people. It is likely the densest concentration of such outside of Tel Aviv.
They all live in apartments.
The special pleading on here is laughable.
It is ridiculous. “The British won’t live in flats, and what if you break an ankle”
Young families ideally need gardens, for everyone else they are nice-to-have, that is all
And given a choice between a flat on floor 28 with a spectacular view of Shoreditch - a flat that you OWN - compared to perpetually renting a bedsit in south Croydon in a low rise ex council block, then 99% of young people will say LET ME OWN
I doubt Jeremiah Jessop has ever been to London.
To give you an answer you don't deserve:
I spent four and a half/five years living in London.
A year in South Woodford. A year in Stepney Green. A year at the northern end of the Isle of Dogs. A few months in a flat on the Old Kent Road. About a year in a room in Chelsea.
So yeah, I've never been to London. Evidently.
As someone who has lived in land for 25+ years - people are assuming that flats are being bought because that is what people want. In many cases, flats are what they are settling for. Owning a house is a mad dream.
They are building towers just about every bit of land in central London, incidentally.
Home ownership is a real issue. But we are a crowded island and countryside is precious. The answer is surely towers in the SE esp London. Build UP, build lots and lots of towers until flats in them are affordable for 20-somethings
Young people really don’t mind living in towers if the location is decent. Towers can be glamorous. Manhattan is glamorous, so is Hong Kong. They just want to own not rent
Then when they move into their 30s and 40s the youngsters will already be on the property ladder and they can shift to something suburban with a garden for the kids
Some older people - childless or empty-nesters - would be quite happy with towers as well. IF the location is right
There. Sorted
Not sorted until you can persuade the banks to offer mortgages on high rise flats.
Set up a national mortgage lender if the private ones won’t do it. This is a massive national issue and a generational problem for the Tories. We need to get home ownership rising again. We need it heading to 80% not sliding to 50%
Let the young buy flats in sexy towers. Problem solved. Now I’m off for a haircut
How do you stop buy to let in your new towers?
Change the law. This isn’t hard. The builders only get planning permission if the flats are sold to owner occupiers. SORTED
Yes this will piss off the class of rentier landlords, but, you know, World’s Tiniest Violin etc
There is at least one nice development in central Manchester which is only available to owner occupiers. I don't know how they police it but it is not without precedent.
Most young Londoners would jump at the chance of owning rather than renting. They wouldn’t give a damn if it’s a flat on floor 23. Just make it a reasonably cool location. East London is the obvious place, especially with the Liz Line
Build a million flats in 10,000 towers. Build so many the price of an E London 2 bed falls to £150,000 and anyone on an average salary can buy one, certainly any young couple
Build them in proper elegant clusters, with one or two super tall central towers, and shorter towers surrounding. Build the infrastructure to go with them, from pubs to shops to gyms. Forget about providing car parking. These are for young urbanites who don’t want to drive
Also relax the insanely cautious height restrictions in London, allow towers up to 1500 feet
I could sort this all out over a brief lunch
Point of order, most flats are leasehold, therefore you don't own them. You just have a very long lease, coupled with unlimited service charges and unlimited liability when things go wrong (as people caught up in the cladding scandal have found out).
There's a reason why the housing market is booming but leasehold flats aren't selling.
Get rid of leasehold. Fuck the landlords
Make everything freehold from now on, make it insanely easy to change from leasehold to freehold if that’s where you are now
Yep.
That would be the system that literally THE ENTIRE WORLD has apart from England (and yes, Scotland doesn't have it either).
This is the best thread I have ever read on leasehold that pretty much sums up what a grift it is.
Again, England is the ONLY place in the entire world that still has this stupid grift. The fact that we don't change it tells you everything you need to know about who donates to what political party and why.
TBF we had feudal law still operating in Scotland - basically had to pay the landowner so as not to have to be turning up with horse and armour, bow, or billhook on demand (yes, really). It could be abused like Leasehold.
For sone reason which I can't possibly imagine it was not sorted out till after devolution - the 5th act of the reconvened Parliament at Holyrood was to abolish it.
We don’t necessarily need high rise, but we do need 6-8 storey medium density housing to maximise the use of space while keeping the scale human.
As an aside, tower blocks may not be very liveable for everyone. In my first year at uni, I lived on the ninth floor of a student tower block in South Woodford. I was on crutches for the last term, and when the lift broke down (frequently, for prolonged periods), I would have to go up and down the stairs on crutches.
Not too bad for an otherwise fit 19-year old, but if you are elderly or infirm you are somewhat reliant on 100% working lifts.
So fix the lift, don’t use this as a reason to build two bed semis across the entire country.
I am surrounded by elderly, infirm Jewish people. It is likely the densest concentration of such outside of Tel Aviv.
They all live in apartments.
The special pleading on here is laughable.
It is ridiculous. “The British won’t live in flats, and what if you break an ankle”
Young families ideally need gardens, for everyone else they are nice-to-have, that is all
And given a choice between a flat on floor 28 with a spectacular view of Shoreditch - a flat that you OWN - compared to perpetually renting a bedsit in south Croydon in a low rise ex council block, then 99% of young people will say LET ME OWN
I doubt Jeremiah Jessop has ever been to London.
Fuck off. And when you fucked off there, fuck off some more. The go and fuck off some more.
Closest I’ve been to central London was Wembley Arena, and that was 23 years ago. I’m 44 now, I wonder if I’ll ever actually make it.
It's worth it, for the museums alone. It's a fantastic place, and I love it. There's also some surprisingly pleasant walks; the Thames Path; Regent's Canal; and the many parks.
But when I go in rush hour, I realise one reason that I wanted to get out.
We don’t necessarily need high rise, but we do need 6-8 storey medium density housing to maximise the use of space while keeping the scale human.
As an aside, tower blocks may not be very liveable for everyone. In my first year at uni, I lived on the ninth floor of a student tower block in South Woodford. I was on crutches for the last term, and when the lift broke down (frequently, for prolonged periods), I would have to go up and down the stairs on crutches.
Not too bad for an otherwise fit 19-year old, but if you are elderly or infirm you are somewhat reliant on 100% working lifts.
So fix the lift, don’t use this as a reason to build two bed semis across the entire country.
I am surrounded by elderly, infirm Jewish people. It is likely the densest concentration of such outside of Tel Aviv.
They all live in apartments.
The special pleading on here is laughable.
It is ridiculous. “The British won’t live in flats, and what if you break an ankle”
Young families ideally need gardens, for everyone else they are nice-to-have, that is all
And given a choice between a flat on floor 28 with a spectacular view of Shoreditch - a flat that you OWN - compared to perpetually renting a bedsit in south Croydon in a low rise ex council block, then 99% of young people will say LET ME OWN
I doubt Jeremiah Jessop has ever been to London.
To give you an answer you don't deserve:
I spent four and a half/five years living in London.
A year in South Woodford. A year in Stepney Green. A year at the northern end of the Isle of Dogs. A few months in a flat on the Old Kent Road. About a year in a room in Chelsea.
So yeah, I've never been to London. Evidently.
Great London credentials.
He wasn't what you'd call a blushing flower As a matter of fact he rented by the hour
These are some of the guys most forcibly arguing abortion bans. This would seem to indicate their utter disregard for women's interests.
Southern Baptist leaders covered up sex abuse, kept secret database, report says Among the findings was a previously unknown case of a pastor who was credibly accused of assaulting a woman a month after leaving the presidency of the Southern Baptist Convention https://www.washingtonpost.com/religion/2022/05/22/southern-baptist-sex-abuse-report/
There is nothing new about bad people attaching themselves to a cause. Nor are ad hominem points a novelty.
The interesting discussion, as always, is between decent people, who apply rules to themselves as well as others, think there is a case for both sides on tricky questions, don't demonise others as extremists and are prepared to change their minds.
Religious people who support choice and feminists who are anti abortion are more interesting places to look than narcissistic fundamentalists.
The problem with seeking balance here is there isn't any. The situation is inherently unbalanced because one of the extremes (Abortion = Murder so the unhappily pregnant woman must be completely subjugated to the foetus she carries) has become a realistic legislative target in many parts of the US.
The fact that extreme views exist and are promoted shows the importance of the discussion also taking place between non extremes. The denial of the validity of any view apart from one's own is itself an extreme mindset. I think we are agreed about that in all probability. So I don't really see your point, though I share your angst.
My point is that the debate for all practical purposes is between an extreme position of banning abortion and a moderate nuanced consensus position of not banning it but having some controls. The opposite extreme - abortion totally fine in all circumstances and right up to point of natural delivery - has no real world traction. Hence the equivalence between the 2 extremes is there only in theory. In practice it isn't. The 'Pro Life' extreme is the one to worry about because its proponents are numerous and influential and are hell bent on implementing it. It's an extreme that's gone mainstream in many US states and in one of that country's 2 main political parties.
Except that’s not really the case. The extremes are on both sides. Hence the Democrats in Virginia wanted to push a bill effectively allowing abortion until the point of birth only to withdraw it, claiming it had been “miscommunicated”. Which, by the way, is a logical extension of the “My Body, My Choice” argument - if the baby is still in your body, why not have the right to abort until it exits.
You also have the ‘Shout Out Your Abortion’ crowd and those who boast about how many abortions they have had. It’s a clear attempt to wind up the pro-Life side by celebrating abortion. If a bunch of BNP nutjobs stood outside a mosque with a bunch of sausages and talked about celebrating pork, you’d claim they were being deliberately offensive. The only difference is that in the first case, it’s not your side so you view it as acceptable and, no doubt, moderate, whilst you hate the other side, so it’s deemed offensive. In fact, both cases are offensive.
Hillary Clinton used to say abortion should be ‘safe, legal and rare’. That’s an entirely sensible viewpoint. But it’s not where today’s Democrats are.
We don’t necessarily need high rise, but we do need 6-8 storey medium density housing to maximise the use of space while keeping the scale human.
As an aside, tower blocks may not be very liveable for everyone. In my first year at uni, I lived on the ninth floor of a student tower block in South Woodford. I was on crutches for the last term, and when the lift broke down (frequently, for prolonged periods), I would have to go up and down the stairs on crutches.
Not too bad for an otherwise fit 19-year old, but if you are elderly or infirm you are somewhat reliant on 100% working lifts.
So fix the lift, don’t use this as a reason to build two bed semis across the entire country.
I am surrounded by elderly, infirm Jewish people. It is likely the densest concentration of such outside of Tel Aviv.
They all live in apartments.
The special pleading on here is laughable.
It is ridiculous. “The British won’t live in flats, and what if you break an ankle”
Young families ideally need gardens, for everyone else they are nice-to-have, that is all
And given a choice between a flat on floor 28 with a spectacular view of Shoreditch - a flat that you OWN - compared to perpetually renting a bedsit in south Croydon in a low rise ex council block, then 99% of young people will say LET ME OWN
I doubt Jeremiah Jessop has ever been to London.
To give you an answer you don't deserve:
I spent four and a half/five years living in London.
A year in South Woodford. A year in Stepney Green. A year at the northern end of the Isle of Dogs. A few months in a flat on the Old Kent Road. About a year in a room in Chelsea.
So yeah, I've never been to London. Evidently.
I don’t doubt it. I am deliberately being scabrous because I think your arguments against higher density development is petty.
There are certainly things that need to be sorted out (my 16 floor block has a normal lift and a service lift) but if other countries can sort it out, I’m sure Britain can.
Home ownership is a real issue. But we are a crowded island and countryside is precious. The answer is surely towers in the SE esp London. Build UP, build lots and lots of towers until flats in them are affordable for 20-somethings
Young people really don’t mind living in towers if the location is decent. Towers can be glamorous. Manhattan is glamorous, so is Hong Kong. They just want to own not rent
Then when they move into their 30s and 40s the youngsters will already be on the property ladder and they can shift to something suburban with a garden for the kids
Some older people - childless or empty-nesters - would be quite happy with towers as well. IF the location is right
There. Sorted
Not sorted until you can persuade the banks to offer mortgages on high rise flats.
Set up a national mortgage lender if the private ones won’t do it. This is a massive national issue and a generational problem for the Tories. We need to get home ownership rising again. We need it heading to 80% not sliding to 50%
Let the young buy flats in sexy towers. Problem solved. Now I’m off for a haircut
How do you stop buy to let in your new towers?
Change the law. This isn’t hard. The builders only get planning permission if the flats are sold to owner occupiers. SORTED
Yes this will piss off the class of rentier landlords, but, you know, World’s Tiniest Violin etc
There is at least one nice development in central Manchester which is only available to owner occupiers. I don't know how they police it but it is not without precedent.
Most young Londoners would jump at the chance of owning rather than renting. They wouldn’t give a damn if it’s a flat on floor 23. Just make it a reasonably cool location. East London is the obvious place, especially with the Liz Line
Build a million flats in 10,000 towers. Build so many the price of an E London 2 bed falls to £150,000 and anyone on an average salary can buy one, certainly any young couple
Build them in proper elegant clusters, with one or two super tall central towers, and shorter towers surrounding. Build the infrastructure to go with them, from pubs to shops to gyms. Forget about providing car parking. These are for young urbanites who don’t want to drive
Also relax the insanely cautious height restrictions in London, allow towers up to 1500 feet
I could sort this all out over a brief lunch
Point of order, most flats are leasehold, therefore you don't own them. You just have a very long lease, coupled with unlimited service charges and unlimited liability when things go wrong (as people caught up in the cladding scandal have found out).
There's a reason why the housing market is booming but leasehold flats aren't selling.
Get rid of leasehold. Fuck the landlords
Make everything freehold from now on, make it insanely easy to change from leasehold to freehold if that’s where you are now
Yep.
That would be the system that literally THE ENTIRE WORLD has apart from England (and yes, Scotland doesn't have it either).
This is the best thread I have ever read on leasehold that pretty much sums up what a grift it is.
Again, England is the ONLY place in the entire world that still has this stupid grift. The fact that we don't change it tells you everything you need to know about who donates to what political party and why.
Thanks for posting that - very interesting! I can only imagine the fun to be had from the "condo / co-op" model proposed. There's bound to be one bastard who objects to everything even if they get outvoted. Just to be a Crispin Blunt.
We don’t necessarily need high rise, but we do need 6-8 storey medium density housing to maximise the use of space while keeping the scale human.
As an aside, tower blocks may not be very liveable for everyone. In my first year at uni, I lived on the ninth floor of a student tower block in South Woodford. I was on crutches for the last term, and when the lift broke down (frequently, for prolonged periods), I would have to go up and down the stairs on crutches.
Not too bad for an otherwise fit 19-year old, but if you are elderly or infirm you are somewhat reliant on 100% working lifts.
So fix the lift, don’t use this as a reason to build two bed semis across the entire country.
I am surrounded by elderly, infirm Jewish people. It is likely the densest concentration of such outside of Tel Aviv.
They all live in apartments.
The special pleading on here is laughable.
It is ridiculous. “The British won’t live in flats, and what if you break an ankle”
Young families ideally need gardens, for everyone else they are nice-to-have, that is all
And given a choice between a flat on floor 28 with a spectacular view of Shoreditch - a flat that you OWN - compared to perpetually renting a bedsit in south Croydon in a low rise ex council block, then 99% of young people will say LET ME OWN
I doubt Jeremiah Jessop has ever been to London.
Fuck off. And when you fucked off there, fuck off some more. The go and fuck off some more.
This from the mail today Of course Russia is no nuclear threat
Russia will soon have 50 '14-storey high' Satan-2 nukes capable of reducing Western enemies into 'radioactive craters', Putin's space agency chief says in new threat
By Will Stewart for MailOnline07:55, 23 May 2022 , updated 09:08, 23 May 2022
You do realise that we are all laughing at you. You are about as convincing as your military
Let's suppose he's posting from Moscow. Isn't this a great opportunity to discuss with a Russian about all this. Why the insecurity of having to dismiss him. I mean in this case he is simply quoting the MailOnline. Or did he make that up?
Bots don't really do discussion, they don't answer peoples' questions. Their sole purpose is to spread Russian disinformation. No offence intended but I think your response is politically naive
The only people you are offending are those you think will in some way be influenced by a post from @GaryL .
I mean you are smart enough to see through it all so why shouldn't everyone else.
Fair enough but if that is the case why does the site ban them pretty quickly? Spreading disinformation is a serious issue for western democracies. If it were so harmless I doubt that regimes like Russia would invest so much time and effort doing it.
I am surprised that the sentence is only 18 months (seems on the lower end even by the standards of the day). Won't quite be out for Christmas, but will enjoy Eid 2023 as a free man.
In one of the stabbing incidents, a while back, two boys held the victim down, while another stabbed him. The victim died.
They got 12 months, early in the year. So literally out by Christmas.
Citation (and explanation) needed. The two guilty males in the recent Bute Park murder got 30 plus years each minimum tariffs. The 16 year old girl, 17 years minimum.
i think the best place for leons towers is where prices in london are already cheapest. So put them all in Barking and Dagenham improve the look of the place
We don’t necessarily need high rise, but we do need 6-8 storey medium density housing to maximise the use of space while keeping the scale human.
As an aside, tower blocks may not be very liveable for everyone. In my first year at uni, I lived on the ninth floor of a student tower block in South Woodford. I was on crutches for the last term, and when the lift broke down (frequently, for prolonged periods), I would have to go up and down the stairs on crutches.
Not too bad for an otherwise fit 19-year old, but if you are elderly or infirm you are somewhat reliant on 100% working lifts.
So fix the lift, don’t use this as a reason to build two bed semis across the entire country.
I am surrounded by elderly, infirm Jewish people. It is likely the densest concentration of such outside of Tel Aviv.
They all live in apartments.
The special pleading on here is laughable.
It is ridiculous. “The British won’t live in flats, and what if you break an ankle”
Young families ideally need gardens, for everyone else they are nice-to-have, that is all
And given a choice between a flat on floor 28 with a spectacular view of Shoreditch - a flat that you OWN - compared to perpetually renting a bedsit in south Croydon in a low rise ex council block, then 99% of young people will say LET ME OWN
I doubt Jeremiah Jessop has ever been to London.
Fuck off. And when you fucked off there, fuck off some more. The go and fuck off some more.
Is FuckOffSomeMore a stop on the new Elizabeth line?
It's where you change for Slough - although that might be a bit too much punishment.
I had a mate who went back to live with his dad in Slough. Ran him back there a few times - what a dreadful place. So there we have it. When you get banished to FuckOffSomeMore its really Slough. On the Elizabeth Line.
This from the mail today Of course Russia is no nuclear threat
Russia will soon have 50 '14-storey high' Satan-2 nukes capable of reducing Western enemies into 'radioactive craters', Putin's space agency chief says in new threat
By Will Stewart for MailOnline07:55, 23 May 2022 , updated 09:08, 23 May 2022
You do realise that we are all laughing at you. You are about as convincing as your military
Let's suppose he's posting from Moscow. Isn't this a great opportunity to discuss with a Russian about all this. Why the insecurity of having to dismiss him. I mean in this case he is simply quoting the MailOnline. Or did he make that up?
I thought the usual argument was that the MailOnline makes it up?
Well, no, Sarmat exists. And doesn't not work because of 40 years of skimped maintenance or because Russia doesn't do rockets.
Gary's posts may lack conviction but a lot of the responses to him are in "your mum smells of wee" country.
In this case, Rogozin is boasting about having 50 nuclear missiles that will work. It is rather childish, comic book style boasting. Which is par for the course for Rogozin
As a matter of interest, the UK has 58 Trident missiles - not all are on submarines. But it kinda shows the scale of things.
Home ownership is a real issue. But we are a crowded island and countryside is precious. The answer is surely towers in the SE esp London. Build UP, build lots and lots of towers until flats in them are affordable for 20-somethings
Young people really don’t mind living in towers if the location is decent. Towers can be glamorous. Manhattan is glamorous, so is Hong Kong. They just want to own not rent
Then when they move into their 30s and 40s the youngsters will already be on the property ladder and they can shift to something suburban with a garden for the kids
Some older people - childless or empty-nesters - would be quite happy with towers as well. IF the location is right
There. Sorted
Not sorted until you can persuade the banks to offer mortgages on high rise flats.
Set up a national mortgage lender if the private ones won’t do it. This is a massive national issue and a generational problem for the Tories. We need to get home ownership rising again. We need it heading to 80% not sliding to 50%
Let the young buy flats in sexy towers. Problem solved. Now I’m off for a haircut
How do you stop buy to let in your new towers?
Change the law. This isn’t hard. The builders only get planning permission if the flats are sold to owner occupiers. SORTED
Yes this will piss off the class of rentier landlords, but, you know, World’s Tiniest Violin etc
There is at least one nice development in central Manchester which is only available to owner occupiers. I don't know how they police it but it is not without precedent.
Most young Londoners would jump at the chance of owning rather than renting. They wouldn’t give a damn if it’s a flat on floor 23. Just make it a reasonably cool location. East London is the obvious place, especially with the Liz Line
Build a million flats in 10,000 towers. Build so many the price of an E London 2 bed falls to £150,000 and anyone on an average salary can buy one, certainly any young couple
Build them in proper elegant clusters, with one or two super tall central towers, and shorter towers surrounding. Build the infrastructure to go with them, from pubs to shops to gyms. Forget about providing car parking. These are for young urbanites who don’t want to drive
Also relax the insanely cautious height restrictions in London, allow towers up to 1500 feet
I could sort this all out over a brief lunch
Point of order, most flats are leasehold, therefore you don't own them. You just have a very long lease, coupled with unlimited service charges and unlimited liability when things go wrong (as people caught up in the cladding scandal have found out).
There's a reason why the housing market is booming but leasehold flats aren't selling.
Get rid of leasehold. Fuck the landlords
Make everything freehold from now on, make it insanely easy to change from leasehold to freehold if that’s where you are now
Yep.
That would be the system that literally THE ENTIRE WORLD has apart from England (and yes, Scotland doesn't have it either).
This is the best thread I have ever read on leasehold that pretty much sums up what a grift it is.
Again, England is the ONLY place in the entire world that still has this stupid grift. The fact that we don't change it tells you everything you need to know about who donates to what political party and why.
We have, on this thread, proposed more interesting policies than Keir Starmer has managed in his entire tenure in Shadow Cabinet, whether as LOTO or shadow minister for Fuck Democracy Let’s Have a “2nd” Vote
Why aren’t labour coming up with eye-catching idea like this? I might even vote for them if they showed a bit of imagination and energy. They are inert
Commonhold is no panacea. It's been available since 2002, but few people opt for it.
The twitter thread is simplistic, and inaccurate in places. And, honestly, if you choose to buy a flat in a building that's 75% commercial, you own that mistake.
The best course of action is for tenants to buy out the freeholder, by way of a private limited company, in which they have shares. It's not very difficult, these days.
The plot thickens. @GaryL might be a really OLD gay Russian, or he is parodying an old gay Russian?
This is fun
“I’ve been spending a fair bit of time recently with the comma ellipsis, which is three commas (,,,) instead of dot-dot-dot. I’ve been looking at it for over a year and I’m still figuring out what’s going on there. There seems to be something but possibly several somethings.
One use is by older people who, in some cases where they would use the classic ellipsis, use commas instead. It’s not quite clear if that’s a typo in some cases, but it seems to be more systematic than that. Maybe they’re preferring the comma because it’s a little bit easier to see if you’re on the older side, and your vision is not what it once was. Or maybe they just see the two as equivalent. It then seems to have jumped the shark into parody form. There’s a Facebook group in which younger people pretend to be to be baby boomers, and one of the features people use there is this comma ellipsis. And then in some circles there also seems to be a use of comma ellipses that is very, very heavily ironic. But what exactly the nature is of that heavy irony is still something that I’m working on figuring out”
I suspect there is a great deal in the visibility hypothesis rather than linguistic innovation. Certainly, I use far more dashes online because colons are near-invisible and semi-colons not much better. And at work, I recall some had gone back to the older style of using a space before exclamation marks to make them stand out more. It is surprising that professional typographers have not done more to help us here with new fonts.
It’s both. Surely. Young people ARE using punctuation differently. The resistance to full stops is real - they are seen as overly emphatic, rude, passive aggressive, especially in texts and messages. And that’s where language is changing now
See, I didn’t put a full stop there. I’ve caught the bug
Where @GaryL has got it wrong is that he’s ceased using full stops WITHIN paragraphs so it looks strange
I stand by my belief he’s a young possibly gay Russian who has learned a lot of his English online through social media
As I power confidently into middle age, I am of course fully of the view that 'young people' are uniformly awful, their ideas plain wrong and their innovations lamentable. And yet I rather like this one. A classic ellipsis can now focus purely on 'I am tailing off here because I am bored of this thought and no doubt you are too', leaving the newfangled comm ellipsis to do the exciting new job of 'meaningful glance to camera, possibly accompanied by dramatic music'. So well done young people.
You are doing it again. An ellipsis is leaving something out, tailing off is aposiopesis...
As many of you have probably guessed, the Elizabeth Line has been rushed into opening in time for the Platinum Jubilee without it all functioning as one cohesive service.
So, from tomorrow, the central section east of Paddington (low level) including the branch from Whitechapel to Canary Wharf, Custom House, Woolwich and Abbey Wood, will not yet be connected to Stratford in the east, and Acton in the west. Bond Street platforms are also not ready. But the connections and Bond Street should be ready "by the autumn". Hmmm,,, we'll see!
Also, if you're into trying to take pics of trains arriving/leaving at the stations from Paddington to Canary Wharf, as well as Woolwich - don't bother! Platform edge doors similar to those on the Jubilee line will prevent you having a clear view of the trains or the tracks!
Best places to see the trains on the section that's opening tomorrow are Custom House and Abbey Wood, which are out in the open. Also, there's a footbridge at Silvertown, near LCY Airport, affording views of the route.
Journey time is 29 minutes from Paddington to Abbey Wood. And the frequency is every 5 minutes. Not bad at all for a "main line" service.
Personally, travelling in from Ilford, I aim to change trains at Liverpool Street, head southeast to Abbey Wood, then visit each station on the way back to Liverpool Street, head west through to Paddington (low level), then visit the remaining two stations in Zone 1 (Tottenham Court Road and Farringdon) on the way back to Liverpool Street, thereby doing the route and all nine stations opening tomorrow.
Also, it's bound to be full of media-people and fucking Youtubers tomorrow, so I'm seriously mulling delaying my expedition until Wednesday when it's bound to be less busy. But then, that's just me!
Have been reading about the typical British stupidity with regards to ticketing. Its a National Rail service which means their Conditions of Travel apply. In parallel pricing in the core is the same as tube fares. But despite the NRCoT rules being clear and absolute I am already reading that confusion means that people trying to do break of journey will be stopped, that x to London Terminals tickets won't be valid from say Greenhithe to Liverpool Street despite LST being a London Terminal etc etc etc.
Supposedly Great British Railways was supposed to do a big fares bonfire to fix all this. Instead its on an indefinite delay with only a long list of Tory MPs trying to secure its HQ to their constituency to show it even exists.
London Terminals has always meant "only London Terminals you can reach directly" - based on Thameslink I would expect Abbey Wood to Liverpool Street would be fine on a London Terminals ticket but Paddington wouldn't. Unless NR have changed their rules to exclude this - however from some reading I've done it seems more likely that TFL's media people don't understand London Terminals tickets.
We don’t necessarily need high rise, but we do need 6-8 storey medium density housing to maximise the use of space while keeping the scale human.
As an aside, tower blocks may not be very liveable for everyone. In my first year at uni, I lived on the ninth floor of a student tower block in South Woodford. I was on crutches for the last term, and when the lift broke down (frequently, for prolonged periods), I would have to go up and down the stairs on crutches.
Not too bad for an otherwise fit 19-year old, but if you are elderly or infirm you are somewhat reliant on 100% working lifts.
So fix the lift, don’t use this as a reason to build two bed semis across the entire country.
I am surrounded by elderly, infirm Jewish people. It is likely the densest concentration of such outside of Tel Aviv.
They all live in apartments.
The special pleading on here is laughable.
It is ridiculous. “The British won’t live in flats, and what if you break an ankle”
Young families ideally need gardens, for everyone else they are nice-to-have, that is all
And given a choice between a flat on floor 28 with a spectacular view of Shoreditch - a flat that you OWN - compared to perpetually renting a bedsit in south Croydon in a low rise ex council block, then 99% of young people will say LET ME OWN
I doubt Jeremiah Jessop has ever been to London.
Fuck off. And when you fucked off there, fuck off some more. The go and fuck off some more.
Closest I’ve been to central London was Wembley Arena, and that was 23 years ago. I’m 44 now, I wonder if I’ll ever actually make it.
It's worth it, for the museums alone. It's a fantastic place, and I love it. There's also some surprisingly pleasant walks; the Thames Path; Regent's Canal; and the many parks.
But when I go in rush hour, I realise one reason that I wanted to get out.
I’m not avoiding it, I just have never quite managed to get there. I should go, the museums would be a big thing for me too.
My other half used to live in Bedford, we could stay there with her friends for nothing and catch the train in, just never quite got round to it.
I am surprised that the sentence is only 18 months (seems on the lower end even by the standards of the day). Won't quite be out for Christmas, but will enjoy Eid 2023 as a free man.
In one of the stabbing incidents, a while back, two boys held the victim down, while another stabbed him. The victim died.
They got 12 months, early in the year. So literally out by Christmas.
Citation (and explanation) needed. The two guilty males in the recent Bute Park murder got 30 plus years each minimum tariffs. The 16 year old girl, 17 years minimum.
I'll have to dig it out - they were minors and weren't charged with murder, but a much lesser charge.
The more recent sentences are because the problem has hit the headlines - charging everyone involved with murder has suddenly become fashionable.
We don’t necessarily need high rise, but we do need 6-8 storey medium density housing to maximise the use of space while keeping the scale human.
As an aside, tower blocks may not be very liveable for everyone. In my first year at uni, I lived on the ninth floor of a student tower block in South Woodford. I was on crutches for the last term, and when the lift broke down (frequently, for prolonged periods), I would have to go up and down the stairs on crutches.
Not too bad for an otherwise fit 19-year old, but if you are elderly or infirm you are somewhat reliant on 100% working lifts.
So fix the lift, don’t use this as a reason to build two bed semis across the entire country.
I am surrounded by elderly, infirm Jewish people. It is likely the densest concentration of such outside of Tel Aviv.
They all live in apartments.
The special pleading on here is laughable.
It is ridiculous. “The British won’t live in flats, and what if you break an ankle”
Young families ideally need gardens, for everyone else they are nice-to-have, that is all
And given a choice between a flat on floor 28 with a spectacular view of Shoreditch - a flat that you OWN - compared to perpetually renting a bedsit in south Croydon in a low rise ex council block, then 99% of young people will say LET ME OWN
I doubt Jeremiah Jessop has ever been to London.
Fuck off. And when you fucked off there, fuck off some more. The go and fuck off some more.
Let’s face it, you’re no MalcolmG.
Fuck off, you twat.
Is that better?
No, there’s no humour to it. It’s the bungalow in you; essentially suburban and dull.
Home ownership is a real issue. But we are a crowded island and countryside is precious. The answer is surely towers in the SE esp London. Build UP, build lots and lots of towers until flats in them are affordable for 20-somethings
Young people really don’t mind living in towers if the location is decent. Towers can be glamorous. Manhattan is glamorous, so is Hong Kong. They just want to own not rent
Then when they move into their 30s and 40s the youngsters will already be on the property ladder and they can shift to something suburban with a garden for the kids
Some older people - childless or empty-nesters - would be quite happy with towers as well. IF the location is right
There. Sorted
Not sorted until you can persuade the banks to offer mortgages on high rise flats.
Set up a national mortgage lender if the private ones won’t do it. This is a massive national issue and a generational problem for the Tories. We need to get home ownership rising again. We need it heading to 80% not sliding to 50%
Let the young buy flats in sexy towers. Problem solved. Now I’m off for a haircut
How do you stop buy to let in your new towers?
Change the law. This isn’t hard. The builders only get planning permission if the flats are sold to owner occupiers. SORTED
Yes this will piss off the class of rentier landlords, but, you know, World’s Tiniest Violin etc
There is at least one nice development in central Manchester which is only available to owner occupiers. I don't know how they police it but it is not without precedent.
Most young Londoners would jump at the chance of owning rather than renting. They wouldn’t give a damn if it’s a flat on floor 23. Just make it a reasonably cool location. East London is the obvious place, especially with the Liz Line
Build a million flats in 10,000 towers. Build so many the price of an E London 2 bed falls to £150,000 and anyone on an average salary can buy one, certainly any young couple
Build them in proper elegant clusters, with one or two super tall central towers, and shorter towers surrounding. Build the infrastructure to go with them, from pubs to shops to gyms. Forget about providing car parking. These are for young urbanites who don’t want to drive
Also relax the insanely cautious height restrictions in London, allow towers up to 1500 feet
I could sort this all out over a brief lunch
Point of order, most flats are leasehold, therefore you don't own them. You just have a very long lease, coupled with unlimited service charges and unlimited liability when things go wrong (as people caught up in the cladding scandal have found out).
There's a reason why the housing market is booming but leasehold flats aren't selling.
Get rid of leasehold. Fuck the landlords
Make everything freehold from now on, make it insanely easy to change from leasehold to freehold if that’s where you are now
Yep.
That would be the system that literally THE ENTIRE WORLD has apart from England (and yes, Scotland doesn't have it either).
This is the best thread I have ever read on leasehold that pretty much sums up what a grift it is.
Again, England is the ONLY place in the entire world that still has this stupid grift. The fact that we don't change it tells you everything you need to know about who donates to what political party and why.
We have, on this thread, proposed more interesting policies than Keir Starmer has managed in his entire tenure in Shadow Cabinet, whether as LOTO or shadow minister for Fuck Democracy Let’s Have a “2nd” Vote
Why aren’t labour coming up with eye-catching idea like this? I might even vote for them if they showed a bit of imagination and energy. They are inert
Commonhold is no panacea. It's been available since 2002, but few people opt for it.
The twitter thread is simplistic, and inaccurate in places. And, honestly, if you choose to buy a flat in a building that's 75% commercial, you own that mistake.
The best course of action is for tenants to buy out the freeholder, by way of a private limited company, in which they have shares. It's not very difficult, these days.
the housing crisis is insoluble. Cheaper prices traps millions in negative equity. Its what happens when you run an economy for over a decade on printed money
We don’t necessarily need high rise, but we do need 6-8 storey medium density housing to maximise the use of space while keeping the scale human.
As an aside, tower blocks may not be very liveable for everyone. In my first year at uni, I lived on the ninth floor of a student tower block in South Woodford. I was on crutches for the last term, and when the lift broke down (frequently, for prolonged periods), I would have to go up and down the stairs on crutches.
Not too bad for an otherwise fit 19-year old, but if you are elderly or infirm you are somewhat reliant on 100% working lifts.
So fix the lift, don’t use this as a reason to build two bed semis across the entire country.
I am surrounded by elderly, infirm Jewish people. It is likely the densest concentration of such outside of Tel Aviv.
They all live in apartments.
The special pleading on here is laughable.
It is ridiculous. “The British won’t live in flats, and what if you break an ankle”
Young families ideally need gardens, for everyone else they are nice-to-have, that is all
And given a choice between a flat on floor 28 with a spectacular view of Shoreditch - a flat that you OWN - compared to perpetually renting a bedsit in south Croydon in a low rise ex council block, then 99% of young people will say LET ME OWN
I doubt Jeremiah Jessop has ever been to London.
Fuck off. And when you fucked off there, fuck off some more. The go and fuck off some more.
Let’s face it, you’re no MalcolmG.
Fuck off, you twat.
Is that better?
Not really. @malcolmg at his best is almost lyrical in his swearblogging. Been off form recently, though.
Labour knows this by the way hence they dont say much. In favours of cheaper prices screws over millions of recent buyers In favour of higher prices screws over the young renters
We don’t necessarily need high rise, but we do need 6-8 storey medium density housing to maximise the use of space while keeping the scale human.
As an aside, tower blocks may not be very liveable for everyone. In my first year at uni, I lived on the ninth floor of a student tower block in South Woodford. I was on crutches for the last term, and when the lift broke down (frequently, for prolonged periods), I would have to go up and down the stairs on crutches.
Not too bad for an otherwise fit 19-year old, but if you are elderly or infirm you are somewhat reliant on 100% working lifts.
So fix the lift, don’t use this as a reason to build two bed semis across the entire country.
I am surrounded by elderly, infirm Jewish people. It is likely the densest concentration of such outside of Tel Aviv.
They all live in apartments.
The special pleading on here is laughable.
It is ridiculous. “The British won’t live in flats, and what if you break an ankle”
Young families ideally need gardens, for everyone else they are nice-to-have, that is all
And given a choice between a flat on floor 28 with a spectacular view of Shoreditch - a flat that you OWN - compared to perpetually renting a bedsit in south Croydon in a low rise ex council block, then 99% of young people will say LET ME OWN
I doubt Jeremiah Jessop has ever been to London.
Fuck off. And when you fucked off there, fuck off some more. The go and fuck off some more.
Is FuckOffSomeMore a stop on the new Elizabeth line?
It's where you change for Slough - although that might be a bit too much punishment.
This from the mail today Of course Russia is no nuclear threat
Russia will soon have 50 '14-storey high' Satan-2 nukes capable of reducing Western enemies into 'radioactive craters', Putin's space agency chief says in new threat
By Will Stewart for MailOnline07:55, 23 May 2022 , updated 09:08, 23 May 2022
You do realise that we are all laughing at you. You are about as convincing as your military
Let's suppose he's posting from Moscow. Isn't this a great opportunity to discuss with a Russian about all this. Why the insecurity of having to dismiss him. I mean in this case he is simply quoting the MailOnline. Or did he make that up?
Bots don't really do discussion, they don't answer peoples' questions. Their sole purpose is to spread Russian disinformation. No offence intended but I think your response is politically naive
Your ignorance must be bliss for you OllyT
My "ignorance" is nothing compared to the ignorance in which the Russian public are kept. I can at least express my views without the fear of a knock on the door at midnight.
Home ownership is a real issue. But we are a crowded island and countryside is precious. The answer is surely towers in the SE esp London. Build UP, build lots and lots of towers until flats in them are affordable for 20-somethings
Young people really don’t mind living in towers if the location is decent. Towers can be glamorous. Manhattan is glamorous, so is Hong Kong. They just want to own not rent
Then when they move into their 30s and 40s the youngsters will already be on the property ladder and they can shift to something suburban with a garden for the kids
Some older people - childless or empty-nesters - would be quite happy with towers as well. IF the location is right
There. Sorted
Not sorted until you can persuade the banks to offer mortgages on high rise flats.
Set up a national mortgage lender if the private ones won’t do it. This is a massive national issue and a generational problem for the Tories. We need to get home ownership rising again. We need it heading to 80% not sliding to 50%
Let the young buy flats in sexy towers. Problem solved. Now I’m off for a haircut
How do you stop buy to let in your new towers?
Change the law. This isn’t hard. The builders only get planning permission if the flats are sold to owner occupiers. SORTED
Yes this will piss off the class of rentier landlords, but, you know, World’s Tiniest Violin etc
There is at least one nice development in central Manchester which is only available to owner occupiers. I don't know how they police it but it is not without precedent.
Most young Londoners would jump at the chance of owning rather than renting. They wouldn’t give a damn if it’s a flat on floor 23. Just make it a reasonably cool location. East London is the obvious place, especially with the Liz Line
Build a million flats in 10,000 towers. Build so many the price of an E London 2 bed falls to £150,000 and anyone on an average salary can buy one, certainly any young couple
Build them in proper elegant clusters, with one or two super tall central towers, and shorter towers surrounding. Build the infrastructure to go with them, from pubs to shops to gyms. Forget about providing car parking. These are for young urbanites who don’t want to drive
Also relax the insanely cautious height restrictions in London, allow towers up to 1500 feet
I could sort this all out over a brief lunch
Point of order, most flats are leasehold, therefore you don't own them. You just have a very long lease, coupled with unlimited service charges and unlimited liability when things go wrong (as people caught up in the cladding scandal have found out).
There's a reason why the housing market is booming but leasehold flats aren't selling.
Get rid of leasehold. Fuck the landlords
Make everything freehold from now on, make it insanely easy to change from leasehold to freehold if that’s where you are now
Yep.
That would be the system that literally THE ENTIRE WORLD has apart from England (and yes, Scotland doesn't have it either).
This is the best thread I have ever read on leasehold that pretty much sums up what a grift it is.
Again, England is the ONLY place in the entire world that still has this stupid grift. The fact that we don't change it tells you everything you need to know about who donates to what political party and why.
We have, on this thread, proposed more interesting policies than Keir Starmer has managed in his entire tenure in Shadow Cabinet, whether as LOTO or shadow minister for Fuck Democracy Let’s Have a “2nd” Vote
Why aren’t labour coming up with eye-catching idea like this? I might even vote for them if they showed a bit of imagination and energy. They are inert
Commonhold is no panacea. It's been available since 2002, but few people opt for it.
The twitter thread is simplistic, and inaccurate in places. And, honestly, if you choose to buy a flat in a building that's 75% commercial, you own that mistake.
The best course of action is for tenants to buy out the freeholder, by way of a private limited company, in which they have shares. It's not very difficult, these days.
It's actually incredibly difficult when half the leaseholders are foreign buyers renting out the properties. You've no way of getting in touch with them and, even if you can, most of them aren't interested in the differences between freehold/leasehold/commonhold. They're just using the properties as places to park cash and earn a yield - they don't notice the bills, or how badly the properties are being managed.
We don’t necessarily need high rise, but we do need 6-8 storey medium density housing to maximise the use of space while keeping the scale human.
As an aside, tower blocks may not be very liveable for everyone. In my first year at uni, I lived on the ninth floor of a student tower block in South Woodford. I was on crutches for the last term, and when the lift broke down (frequently, for prolonged periods), I would have to go up and down the stairs on crutches.
Not too bad for an otherwise fit 19-year old, but if you are elderly or infirm you are somewhat reliant on 100% working lifts.
So fix the lift, don’t use this as a reason to build two bed semis across the entire country.
I am surrounded by elderly, infirm Jewish people. It is likely the densest concentration of such outside of Tel Aviv.
They all live in apartments.
The special pleading on here is laughable.
It is ridiculous. “The British won’t live in flats, and what if you break an ankle”
Young families ideally need gardens, for everyone else they are nice-to-have, that is all
And given a choice between a flat on floor 28 with a spectacular view of Shoreditch - a flat that you OWN - compared to perpetually renting a bedsit in south Croydon in a low rise ex council block, then 99% of young people will say LET ME OWN
I doubt Jeremiah Jessop has ever been to London.
Fuck off. And when you fucked off there, fuck off some more. The go and fuck off some more.
Let’s face it, you’re no MalcolmG.
Fuck off, you twat.
Is that better?
No, there’s no humour to it. It’s the bungalow in you; essentially suburban and dull.
This from the mail today Of course Russia is no nuclear threat
Russia will soon have 50 '14-storey high' Satan-2 nukes capable of reducing Western enemies into 'radioactive craters', Putin's space agency chief says in new threat
By Will Stewart for MailOnline07:55, 23 May 2022 , updated 09:08, 23 May 2022
You do realise that we are all laughing at you. You are about as convincing as your military
Let's suppose he's posting from Moscow. Isn't this a great opportunity to discuss with a Russian about all this. Why the insecurity of having to dismiss him. I mean in this case he is simply quoting the MailOnline. Or did he make that up?
Bots don't really do discussion, they don't answer peoples' questions. Their sole purpose is to spread Russian disinformation. No offence intended but I think your response is politically naive
Your ignorance must be bliss for you OllyT
My "ignorance" is nothing compared to the ignorance in which the Russian public are kept. I can at least express my views without the fear of a knock on the door at midnight.
do we not have our own propaganda in the uk. The surrendur at the steelworks in mariupol was presented as an evacuation. Propaganda on all sides my friend as there is in all wars
We don’t necessarily need high rise, but we do need 6-8 storey medium density housing to maximise the use of space while keeping the scale human.
As an aside, tower blocks may not be very liveable for everyone. In my first year at uni, I lived on the ninth floor of a student tower block in South Woodford. I was on crutches for the last term, and when the lift broke down (frequently, for prolonged periods), I would have to go up and down the stairs on crutches.
Not too bad for an otherwise fit 19-year old, but if you are elderly or infirm you are somewhat reliant on 100% working lifts.
So fix the lift, don’t use this as a reason to build two bed semis across the entire country.
I am surrounded by elderly, infirm Jewish people. It is likely the densest concentration of such outside of Tel Aviv.
They all live in apartments.
The special pleading on here is laughable.
It is ridiculous. “The British won’t live in flats, and what if you break an ankle”
Young families ideally need gardens, for everyone else they are nice-to-have, that is all
And given a choice between a flat on floor 28 with a spectacular view of Shoreditch - a flat that you OWN - compared to perpetually renting a bedsit in south Croydon in a low rise ex council block, then 99% of young people will say LET ME OWN
I doubt Jeremiah Jessop has ever been to London.
To give you an answer you don't deserve:
I spent four and a half/five years living in London.
A year in South Woodford. A year in Stepney Green. A year at the northern end of the Isle of Dogs. A few months in a flat on the Old Kent Road. About a year in a room in Chelsea.
So yeah, I've never been to London. Evidently.
I don’t doubt it. I am deliberately being scabrous because I think your arguments against higher density development is petty.
There are certainly things that need to be sorted out (my 16 floor block has a normal lift and a service lift) but if other countries can sort it out, I’m sure Britain can.
It isn't petty, and as I say below, your arguments are exactly the ones that led to the disastrous developments of the fifties, sixties and seventies - the developments that led to the reputation of tower block developments getting trashed for decades.
I was talking to Mrs J about this, and in Turkey the blocks (not high rise; usually four or five storey) often have a 'manager' in them; a family who look after the block. They organise repairs and do minor ones, get to know the residents, get shopping for people who are ill, etc, etc. The good ones become part of the families who live in the block; the poor ones are... poor.
I think the same is true of France and some other countries. But that's not the way we generally operate, and the 'managers' of blocks AIUI can be rather (ahem) distant individuals.
Home ownership is a real issue. But we are a crowded island and countryside is precious. The answer is surely towers in the SE esp London. Build UP, build lots and lots of towers until flats in them are affordable for 20-somethings
Young people really don’t mind living in towers if the location is decent. Towers can be glamorous. Manhattan is glamorous, so is Hong Kong. They just want to own not rent
Then when they move into their 30s and 40s the youngsters will already be on the property ladder and they can shift to something suburban with a garden for the kids
Some older people - childless or empty-nesters - would be quite happy with towers as well. IF the location is right
There. Sorted
Not sorted until you can persuade the banks to offer mortgages on high rise flats.
Set up a national mortgage lender if the private ones won’t do it. This is a massive national issue and a generational problem for the Tories. We need to get home ownership rising again. We need it heading to 80% not sliding to 50%
Let the young buy flats in sexy towers. Problem solved. Now I’m off for a haircut
How do you stop buy to let in your new towers?
Change the law. This isn’t hard. The builders only get planning permission if the flats are sold to owner occupiers. SORTED
Yes this will piss off the class of rentier landlords, but, you know, World’s Tiniest Violin etc
There is at least one nice development in central Manchester which is only available to owner occupiers. I don't know how they police it but it is not without precedent.
Most young Londoners would jump at the chance of owning rather than renting. They wouldn’t give a damn if it’s a flat on floor 23. Just make it a reasonably cool location. East London is the obvious place, especially with the Liz Line
Build a million flats in 10,000 towers. Build so many the price of an E London 2 bed falls to £150,000 and anyone on an average salary can buy one, certainly any young couple
Build them in proper elegant clusters, with one or two super tall central towers, and shorter towers surrounding. Build the infrastructure to go with them, from pubs to shops to gyms. Forget about providing car parking. These are for young urbanites who don’t want to drive
Also relax the insanely cautious height restrictions in London, allow towers up to 1500 feet
I could sort this all out over a brief lunch
Point of order, most flats are leasehold, therefore you don't own them. You just have a very long lease, coupled with unlimited service charges and unlimited liability when things go wrong (as people caught up in the cladding scandal have found out).
There's a reason why the housing market is booming but leasehold flats aren't selling.
Get rid of leasehold. Fuck the landlords
Make everything freehold from now on, make it insanely easy to change from leasehold to freehold if that’s where you are now
Yep.
That would be the system that literally THE ENTIRE WORLD has apart from England (and yes, Scotland doesn't have it either).
This is the best thread I have ever read on leasehold that pretty much sums up what a grift it is.
Again, England is the ONLY place in the entire world that still has this stupid grift. The fact that we don't change it tells you everything you need to know about who donates to what political party and why.
We have, on this thread, proposed more interesting policies than Keir Starmer has managed in his entire tenure in Shadow Cabinet, whether as LOTO or shadow minister for Fuck Democracy Let’s Have a “2nd” Vote
Why aren’t labour coming up with eye-catching idea like this? I might even vote for them if they showed a bit of imagination and energy. They are inert
Commonhold is no panacea. It's been available since 2002, but few people opt for it.
The twitter thread is simplistic, and inaccurate in places. And, honestly, if you choose to buy a flat in a building that's 75% commercial, you own that mistake.
The best course of action is for tenants to buy out the freeholder, by way of a private limited company, in which they have shares. It's not very difficult, these days.
It's actually incredibly difficult when half the leaseholders are foreign buyers renting out the properties. You've no way of getting in touch with them and, even if you can, most of them aren't interested in the differences between freehold/leasehold/commonhold. They're just using the properties as places to park cash and earn a yield - they don't notice the bills, or how badly the properties are being managed.
Changes to the law won't solve the problem of absentee flat owners.
Isn’t SeanF a solicitor who makes his money from leasehold palaver?
The grift is deep.
I do work on both sides.
A robust system of collective enfranchisement is the answer, and increasingly is the case, as are longer than 99 year leases and low or nil ground rents.
Home ownership is a real issue. But we are a crowded island and countryside is precious. The answer is surely towers in the SE esp London. Build UP, build lots and lots of towers until flats in them are affordable for 20-somethings
Young people really don’t mind living in towers if the location is decent. Towers can be glamorous. Manhattan is glamorous, so is Hong Kong. They just want to own not rent
Then when they move into their 30s and 40s the youngsters will already be on the property ladder and they can shift to something suburban with a garden for the kids
Some older people - childless or empty-nesters - would be quite happy with towers as well. IF the location is right
There. Sorted
Not sorted until you can persuade the banks to offer mortgages on high rise flats.
Set up a national mortgage lender if the private ones won’t do it. This is a massive national issue and a generational problem for the Tories. We need to get home ownership rising again. We need it heading to 80% not sliding to 50%
Let the young buy flats in sexy towers. Problem solved. Now I’m off for a haircut
How do you stop buy to let in your new towers?
Change the law. This isn’t hard. The builders only get planning permission if the flats are sold to owner occupiers. SORTED
Yes this will piss off the class of rentier landlords, but, you know, World’s Tiniest Violin etc
There is at least one nice development in central Manchester which is only available to owner occupiers. I don't know how they police it but it is not without precedent.
Most young Londoners would jump at the chance of owning rather than renting. They wouldn’t give a damn if it’s a flat on floor 23. Just make it a reasonably cool location. East London is the obvious place, especially with the Liz Line
Build a million flats in 10,000 towers. Build so many the price of an E London 2 bed falls to £150,000 and anyone on an average salary can buy one, certainly any young couple
Build them in proper elegant clusters, with one or two super tall central towers, and shorter towers surrounding. Build the infrastructure to go with them, from pubs to shops to gyms. Forget about providing car parking. These are for young urbanites who don’t want to drive
Also relax the insanely cautious height restrictions in London, allow towers up to 1500 feet
I could sort this all out over a brief lunch
Point of order, most flats are leasehold, therefore you don't own them. You just have a very long lease, coupled with unlimited service charges and unlimited liability when things go wrong (as people caught up in the cladding scandal have found out).
There's a reason why the housing market is booming but leasehold flats aren't selling.
Yep. 20+ years ago I balked at the opportunity to buy a flat. "I will only own the front door key" was my thought. And now that we have had Grenfell followed by the outrage of so many buildings being clad in "BurnKwik" cladding which the government is happy to leave in place (having taken bungs from property companies) its hardly a surprise that leasehold isn't selling.
I think we do need to build more higher-density housing and that means more blocks. But surely leased is the way to go.
I bought a leasehold flat in London as, at the time, it was all I could afford. It's been a non-stop nightmare of bills, charges and assorted grifters posing as managing agents ever since. If I could do it all over again, I'd simply rent until I could afford to buy a house. Never again.
Leasehold, and all that shit, needs proper regulation.
It’s the sort of micro-economic improvement that make everyone’s life easier and indeed help inflation, and in which the government is profoundly uninterested.
There ought to be a place for you in the PB cabinet.
Home ownership is a real issue. But we are a crowded island and countryside is precious. The answer is surely towers in the SE esp London. Build UP, build lots and lots of towers until flats in them are affordable for 20-somethings
Young people really don’t mind living in towers if the location is decent. Towers can be glamorous. Manhattan is glamorous, so is Hong Kong. They just want to own not rent
Then when they move into their 30s and 40s the youngsters will already be on the property ladder and they can shift to something suburban with a garden for the kids
Some older people - childless or empty-nesters - would be quite happy with towers as well. IF the location is right
There. Sorted
Not sorted until you can persuade the banks to offer mortgages on high rise flats.
Set up a national mortgage lender if the private ones won’t do it. This is a massive national issue and a generational problem for the Tories. We need to get home ownership rising again. We need it heading to 80% not sliding to 50%
Let the young buy flats in sexy towers. Problem solved. Now I’m off for a haircut
How do you stop buy to let in your new towers?
Change the law. This isn’t hard. The builders only get planning permission if the flats are sold to owner occupiers. SORTED
Yes this will piss off the class of rentier landlords, but, you know, World’s Tiniest Violin etc
There is at least one nice development in central Manchester which is only available to owner occupiers. I don't know how they police it but it is not without precedent.
Most young Londoners would jump at the chance of owning rather than renting. They wouldn’t give a damn if it’s a flat on floor 23. Just make it a reasonably cool location. East London is the obvious place, especially with the Liz Line
Build a million flats in 10,000 towers. Build so many the price of an E London 2 bed falls to £150,000 and anyone on an average salary can buy one, certainly any young couple
Build them in proper elegant clusters, with one or two super tall central towers, and shorter towers surrounding. Build the infrastructure to go with them, from pubs to shops to gyms. Forget about providing car parking. These are for young urbanites who don’t want to drive
Also relax the insanely cautious height restrictions in London, allow towers up to 1500 feet
I could sort this all out over a brief lunch
Point of order, most flats are leasehold, therefore you don't own them. You just have a very long lease, coupled with unlimited service charges and unlimited liability when things go wrong (as people caught up in the cladding scandal have found out).
There's a reason why the housing market is booming but leasehold flats aren't selling.
Home ownership is a real issue. But we are a crowded island and countryside is precious. The answer is surely towers in the SE esp London. Build UP, build lots and lots of towers until flats in them are affordable for 20-somethings
Young people really don’t mind living in towers if the location is decent. Towers can be glamorous. Manhattan is glamorous, so is Hong Kong. They just want to own not rent
Then when they move into their 30s and 40s the youngsters will already be on the property ladder and they can shift to something suburban with a garden for the kids
Some older people - childless or empty-nesters - would be quite happy with towers as well. IF the location is right
There. Sorted
I’ve been saying something similar for years. London is exceptionally low-rise.
Paris says hello!
It does. Paris has less green space than I’d like, but nobody is saying Paris (inside the periphique) is some kind of dystopian hellhole.
There are loads of tower blocks (office and residential) in London.
Not by global standards.
It depends what standards you choose to compare to. If you only want to compare against Manhattan that's going to be very different of course.
If you compare to Sydney, Auckland, Melbourne, Calgary or Toronto you might get a very different answer in the opposite direction.
Europe and the North East seaboard of the United States are fair comparators for London.
I know you want to concrete over the entire countryside, but basically nobody agrees with you.
I don't want to concrete over the entire countryside.
At present 4% of the UK is urban housing and 70% is farming. Even if the stock of housing increased by 25% so that those figures became 5% and 69% respectively, that's pissing in the ocean as far as concreting over the countryside is concerned.
Even if you eliminated all planning tomorrow, the overwhelming majority of the countryside wouldn't be concreted over as there's frankly next to nobody who wants to live there for the overwhelming majority of it.
You seem to have a fundamental misconception about what planning laws actually do.
Practically none of them are either designed to or actually do stop development. What they do is ensure that the development meets certain basic standards and that if they will damage something - for example a natural resource or archaeology - then the developer pays the costs of mitigation. When developers moan about planning what they are actually moaning about is having to spend money doing stuff that puts right the damage they do and making sure the houses they build are fit to live in. Sadly even with the current planning laws many new builds barely reach those basic standards.
Hm, a quibble with the above: planning laws, more widely, are mildly effective at preventing development on greenfield sites, and very effective at preventing development on Green Belt sites. You could realise massive amounts of development if you relaxed the latter. I disagree with Bart on the wisdom of doing so (to some extent), but agree with him that these rules have an effect. There is a massive demand to build on the Green Belt, but it is very very hard to do so. Note greenfield <> Green Belt.
This is the crux.
Planning legislation is not equivalent to Green Belt.
Green Belt is not equivalent to Areas of Natural Beauty. Or even, in many cases, particularly green.
Suggest revisiting the Green Belt legislation, though, and you trigger howls of fury. However, the highest house prices and the greatest constraints of supply are usually coincident with a Green Belt.
Suggestions of "trading" land into and out of Green Belts have so far come to nothing. The Green Belt was intended to prevent urban sprawl, particularly ribbon development. There should be alternative ways of doing that rather than the crude club of the Green Belt.
We don’t necessarily need high rise, but we do need 6-8 storey medium density housing to maximise the use of space while keeping the scale human.
As an aside, tower blocks may not be very liveable for everyone. In my first year at uni, I lived on the ninth floor of a student tower block in South Woodford. I was on crutches for the last term, and when the lift broke down (frequently, for prolonged periods), I would have to go up and down the stairs on crutches.
Not too bad for an otherwise fit 19-year old, but if you are elderly or infirm you are somewhat reliant on 100% working lifts.
So fix the lift, don’t use this as a reason to build two bed semis across the entire country.
I am surrounded by elderly, infirm Jewish people. It is likely the densest concentration of such outside of Tel Aviv.
They all live in apartments.
The special pleading on here is laughable.
It is ridiculous. “The British won’t live in flats, and what if you break an ankle”
Young families ideally need gardens, for everyone else they are nice-to-have, that is all
And given a choice between a flat on floor 28 with a spectacular view of Shoreditch - a flat that you OWN - compared to perpetually renting a bedsit in south Croydon in a low rise ex council block, then 99% of young people will say LET ME OWN
I doubt Jeremiah Jessop has ever been to London.
To give you an answer you don't deserve:
I spent four and a half/five years living in London.
A year in South Woodford. A year in Stepney Green. A year at the northern end of the Isle of Dogs. A few months in a flat on the Old Kent Road. About a year in a room in Chelsea.
So yeah, I've never been to London. Evidently.
I don’t doubt it. I am deliberately being scabrous because I think your arguments against higher density development is petty.
There are certainly things that need to be sorted out (my 16 floor block has a normal lift and a service lift) but if other countries can sort it out, I’m sure Britain can.
It isn't petty, and as I say below, your arguments are exactly the ones that led to the disastrous developments of the fifties, sixties and seventies - the developments that led to the reputation of tower block developments getting trashed for decades.
I was talking to Mrs J about this, and in Turkey the blocks (not high rise; usually four or five storey) often have a 'manager' in them; a family who look after the block. They organise repairs and do minor ones, get to know the residents, get shopping for people who are ill, etc, etc. The good ones become part of the families who live in the block; the poor ones are... poor.
I think the same is true of France and some other countries. But that's not the way we generally operate, and the 'managers' of blocks AIUI can be rather (ahem) distant individuals.
And the higher you build, the worse the problems.
No, my argument is not the same one that led to disastrous developments. Please show me that argument.
I merely note that
1. UK has v high house prices 2. Demand is in London / SE 3. Building in the countryside is unpopular 4. London is low-rise compared to international norms.
I prefer to go “up” than “out”, especially in a densely populated region like the South East, which is - besides - internationally renowned in terms of its amenity value.
You then chip in and say but what about the lifts! Now, apparently, I’m responsible for Ronan Point.
This is trifling stuff, compared with the macro question of how to provide decent housing for people while avoiding urban sprawl.
Home ownership is a real issue. But we are a crowded island and countryside is precious. The answer is surely towers in the SE esp London. Build UP, build lots and lots of towers until flats in them are affordable for 20-somethings
Young people really don’t mind living in towers if the location is decent. Towers can be glamorous. Manhattan is glamorous, so is Hong Kong. They just want to own not rent
Then when they move into their 30s and 40s the youngsters will already be on the property ladder and they can shift to something suburban with a garden for the kids
Some older people - childless or empty-nesters - would be quite happy with towers as well. IF the location is right
There. Sorted
Not sorted until you can persuade the banks to offer mortgages on high rise flats.
Set up a national mortgage lender if the private ones won’t do it. This is a massive national issue and a generational problem for the Tories. We need to get home ownership rising again. We need it heading to 80% not sliding to 50%
Let the young buy flats in sexy towers. Problem solved. Now I’m off for a haircut
How do you stop buy to let in your new towers?
Change the law. This isn’t hard. The builders only get planning permission if the flats are sold to owner occupiers. SORTED
Yes this will piss off the class of rentier landlords, but, you know, World’s Tiniest Violin etc
There is at least one nice development in central Manchester which is only available to owner occupiers. I don't know how they police it but it is not without precedent.
Most young Londoners would jump at the chance of owning rather than renting. They wouldn’t give a damn if it’s a flat on floor 23. Just make it a reasonably cool location. East London is the obvious place, especially with the Liz Line
Build a million flats in 10,000 towers. Build so many the price of an E London 2 bed falls to £150,000 and anyone on an average salary can buy one, certainly any young couple
Build them in proper elegant clusters, with one or two super tall central towers, and shorter towers surrounding. Build the infrastructure to go with them, from pubs to shops to gyms. Forget about providing car parking. These are for young urbanites who don’t want to drive
Also relax the insanely cautious height restrictions in London, allow towers up to 1500 feet
I could sort this all out over a brief lunch
Point of order, most flats are leasehold, therefore you don't own them. You just have a very long lease, coupled with unlimited service charges and unlimited liability when things go wrong (as people caught up in the cladding scandal have found out).
There's a reason why the housing market is booming but leasehold flats aren't selling.
Get rid of leasehold. Fuck the landlords
Make everything freehold from now on, make it insanely easy to change from leasehold to freehold if that’s where you are now
Yep.
That would be the system that literally THE ENTIRE WORLD has apart from England (and yes, Scotland doesn't have it either).
This is the best thread I have ever read on leasehold that pretty much sums up what a grift it is.
Again, England is the ONLY place in the entire world that still has this stupid grift. The fact that we don't change it tells you everything you need to know about who donates to what political party and why.
We have, on this thread, proposed more interesting policies than Keir Starmer has managed in his entire tenure in Shadow Cabinet, whether as LOTO or shadow minister for Fuck Democracy Let’s Have a “2nd” Vote
Why aren’t labour coming up with eye-catching idea like this? I might even vote for them if they showed a bit of imagination and energy. They are inert
Commonhold is no panacea. It's been available since 2002, but few people opt for it.
The twitter thread is simplistic, and inaccurate in places. And, honestly, if you choose to buy a flat in a building that's 75% commercial, you own that mistake.
The best course of action is for tenants to buy out the freeholder, by way of a private limited company, in which they have shares. It's not very difficult, these days.
It's actually incredibly difficult when half the leaseholders are foreign buyers renting out the properties. You've no way of getting in touch with them and, even if you can, most of them aren't interested in the differences between freehold/leasehold/commonhold. They're just using the properties as places to park cash and earn a yield - they don't notice the bills, or how badly the properties are being managed.
Changes to the law won't solve the problem of absentee flat owners.
Changes to the law might stop managing agents charging unlimited amounts, using dodgy "long term qualifying agreements" to avoid putting work out to competitive tender, taking kickbacks from insurers for choosing over expensive insurance policies, etc.
At the moment leaseholders have absolutely no way to challenge any of this save tribunals that are expensive, time consuming and practically impossible for lay people to navigate without forking out even more money on costly lawyers. Oh, and the freeholder can tack their lawyers bill onto your service charges, too.
As I say, it is a grift, plain and simple. There is a reason why leasehold flats aren't shifting, even in an overheated housing market. People have cottoned onto the fact that it's a con.
This from the mail today Of course Russia is no nuclear threat
Russia will soon have 50 '14-storey high' Satan-2 nukes capable of reducing Western enemies into 'radioactive craters', Putin's space agency chief says in new threat
By Will Stewart for MailOnline07:55, 23 May 2022 , updated 09:08, 23 May 2022
You do realise that we are all laughing at you. You are about as convincing as your military
Let's suppose he's posting from Moscow. Isn't this a great opportunity to discuss with a Russian about all this. Why the insecurity of having to dismiss him. I mean in this case he is simply quoting the MailOnline. Or did he make that up?
Bots don't really do discussion, they don't answer peoples' questions. Their sole purpose is to spread Russian disinformation. No offence intended but I think your response is politically naive
The only people you are offending are those you think will in some way be influenced by a post from @GaryL .
I mean you are smart enough to see through it all so why shouldn't everyone else.
Fair enough but if that is the case why does the site ban them pretty quickly? Spreading disinformation is a serious issue for western democracies. If it were so harmless I doubt that regimes like Russia would invest so much time and effort doing it.
Well he quoted the Mail. That would be a tenuous banning offence (I have a list of media outlets that I would likewise like people banned for quoting, for example).
I think if he is abiding by the site rules then let him take his chances like everyone else.
And actually all he did earlier today and yesterday AFAICS was make some commentary on the war which didn't include the categorical assertion that Ukraine was winning, Russia was losing and losing heavily, and it would only be a matter of time before the Ukrainian forces occupied Moscow. Oh and didn't he also say that the war would end via negotiation, much like every war ever.
The original meaning/version of a troll would be for some random poster to come into a happy, peaceful chatroom and sow discord and set the members against each other.
Are you really saying that PB needs the slightest excuse to be at each other like rats in a sack?
Comments
Is what you meant, right?
Thoughts and prayers for Crispin Blunt.
Most of the country is just too small. I live in a conurbation of ~400k, and even a tram route has AFAIK never been seriously discussed. You need millions.
That would be the system that literally THE ENTIRE WORLD has apart from England (and yes, Scotland doesn't have it either).
This is the best thread I have ever read on leasehold that pretty much sums up what a grift it is.
https://twitter.com/doctorow/status/1286700538994683909
Again, England is the ONLY place in the entire world that still has this stupid grift. The fact that we don't change it tells you everything you need to know about who donates to what political party and why.
Practically none of them are either designed to or actually do stop development. What they do is ensure that the development meets certain basic standards and that if they will damage something - for example a natural resource or archaeology - then the developer pays the costs of mitigation. When developers moan about planning what they are actually moaning about is having to spend money doing stuff that puts right the damage they do and making sure the houses they build are fit to live in. Sadly even with the current planning laws many new builds barely reach those basic standards.
There are technical reasons of land law why long leases are the best means to operate blocks of flats. The wisest course of action is for the leaseholders to club together to buy the freehold (since 1993,freholders can be compelled to sell),
A tad optimistic perhaps. But still!
I find the arrangement quite useful. I pay a few hundred quid a year but they have to sort out any problems in the common areas, deal with nuisance tenant elsewhere, do the common decorating, check the insurance, and if I get a problem from another flat in my house (like a leak), they have to get it fixed (and they do, quite promptly)
For me, it is well worth it
However for many it is a grind and a scam, and I would do away with it for anyone that prefers freehold
There is also a sub-question of who decides the balance to be struck. For the UK it is parliament. In the US the SC has a decisive role. SFAICS they can, if they wish, effectively ban women's rights or compel women's rights in the matter. This encourages militancy. I prefer our tradition. It should be for parliament.
BTW, in the USA it is impossible in practice in the long run to ignore the voters. It is a democracy. Unless people are prepared to defend their liberal positions by turning up and voting they will lose out to extremes. It is not the job of courts, even the SC, to do the voters' job for them.
Why aren’t labour coming up with eye-catching idea like this? I might even vote for them if they showed a bit of imagination and energy. They are inert
A developer will argue that they can only make a profit with a single lift, so that they have more floorspace to sell. I believe a variant of this argument has recently happened so that tall tower blocks are now being built with only one staircase - one of the contributory factors to the Grenfell disaster.
The government would have to enforce provision of redundant lifts so that lift availability would survive anticipated maintenance. Recent governments have a poor record of maintaining high building standards in the face of industry special pleading.
I have lost track of the number of over-inflated bills I have been charged for over the years via the managing agent and their grifting sub-contractors.
Different building, but even so-called brand new luxury developments are not immune to the grift.
https://www.irishtimes.com/business/construction/we-are-trapped-residents-hit-with-soaring-charges-at-luxury-london-homes-1.4509830
As I say, I will never, ever, ever buy a leasehold flat again. Nor vote Conservative until they do something about it and start looking after property "owners" instead of property developers.
https://www.bbc.com/news/live/world-europe-61546571?ns_fee=0&pinned_post_locator=urn:asset:49c1df8f-7807-4d1f-9d29-71609ae4b655
For sone reason which I can't possibly imagine it was not sorted out till after devolution - the 5th act of the reconvened Parliament at Holyrood was to abolish it.
https://spice-spotlight.scot/2019/12/20/land-reform-at-20-what-does-a-post-feudal-era-look-like/
Hope mother and baby are both doing well.
We all have an interest in the quality of the built environment because it uses up a non-renewable resource (ie land), and will be there for generations. People grow up, and live out their lives in far too many wretched dehumanising developments. But, unfortunately, politicians of all parties are far too receptive to special pleading from the builders. Do we really want everywhere to look like a suburb of Milton Keynes?
I spent four and a half/five years living in London.
A year in South Woodford.
A year in Stepney Green.
A year at the northern end of the Isle of Dogs.
A few months in a flat on the Old Kent Road.
About a year in a room in Chelsea.
So yeah, I've never been to London. Evidently.
Supposedly Great British Railways was supposed to do a big fares bonfire to fix all this. Instead its on an indefinite delay with only a long list of Tory MPs trying to secure its HQ to their constituency to show it even exists.
I mean you are smart enough to see through it all so why shouldn't everyone else.
That apart, they continue to provide a deterrent with more credibility than our own.
Its not having an owner / leaseholder that is the issue. Its the laws regulating what they can do to their "clients" who own a yale door key in their building.
There is a massive demand to build on the Green Belt, but it is very very hard to do so.
Note greenfield <> Green Belt.
They got 12 months, early in the year. So literally out by Christmas.
Your attitude is exactly the one that leads to unliveable spaces. Architects and planners seeing the way they want people to live, rather than how people live.
The worst thing about you attitude is you *can* design out these issues. But they cost - and are therefore sadly often dropped. But you want to ignore it because the way people are (or can be) does not fit in with your ideology.
Gary's posts may lack conviction but a lot of the responses to him are in "your mum smells of wee" country.
They are building towers just about every bit of land in central London, incidentally.
:: tries not to scream ::
But when I go in rush hour, I realise one reason that I wanted to get out.
As a matter of fact he rented by the hour
You also have the ‘Shout Out Your Abortion’ crowd and those who boast about how many abortions they have had. It’s a clear attempt to wind up the pro-Life side by celebrating abortion. If a bunch of BNP nutjobs stood outside a mosque with a bunch of sausages and talked about celebrating pork, you’d claim they were being deliberately offensive. The only difference is that in the first case, it’s not your side so you view it as acceptable and, no doubt, moderate, whilst you hate the other side, so it’s deemed offensive. In fact, both cases are offensive.
Hillary Clinton used to say abortion should be ‘safe, legal and rare’. That’s an entirely sensible viewpoint. But it’s not where today’s Democrats are.
There are certainly things that need to be sorted out (my 16 floor block has a normal lift and a service lift) but if other countries can sort it out, I’m sure Britain can.
Is that better?
As a matter of interest, the UK has 58 Trident missiles - not all are on submarines. But it kinda shows the scale of things.
The twitter thread is simplistic, and inaccurate in places. And, honestly, if you choose to buy a flat in a building that's 75% commercial, you own that mistake.
The best course of action is for tenants to buy out the freeholder, by way of a private limited company, in which they have shares. It's not very difficult, these days.
My other half used to live in Bedford, we could stay there with her friends for nothing and catch the train in, just never quite got round to it.
https://www.itv.com/news/2022-05-23/exclusive-pm-pictured-drinking-at-downing-street-party-during-lockdown
The more recent sentences are because the problem has hit the headlines - charging everyone involved with murder has suddenly become fashionable.
It’s the bungalow in you; essentially suburban and dull.
In favour of higher prices screws over the young renters
The photos cast fresh doubt on the PM's repeated claims he was unaware of rule-breaking in No10 during the pandemic.
See all images here:
https://www.itv.com/news/2022-05-23/exclusive-pm-pictured-drinking-at-downing-street-party-during-lockdown https://twitter.com/PaulBrandITV/status/1528754003416387589/photo/1
Yikes. This is Johnson responding to a specific question about this event in December.
"I am sure that whatever happened, the guidance was followed and the rules were followed at all times.” https://twitter.com/PaulBrandITV/status/1528754003416387589 https://twitter.com/Tony_Diver/status/1528755501755940865/video/1
My "ignorance" is nothing compared to the ignorance in which the Russian public are kept. I can at least express my views without the fear of a knock on the door at midnight.
The grift is deep.
I thought you decided alcohol wasn't against the rules, or is that just for Starmer, are Tories drinking alcohol verboten?
I was talking to Mrs J about this, and in Turkey the blocks (not high rise; usually four or five storey) often have a 'manager' in them; a family who look after the block. They organise repairs and do minor ones, get to know the residents, get shopping for people who are ill, etc, etc. The good ones become part of the families who live in the block; the poor ones are... poor.
I think the same is true of France and some other countries. But that's not the way we generally operate, and the 'managers' of blocks AIUI can be rather (ahem) distant individuals.
And the higher you build, the worse the problems.
Nearly killed me.
A robust system of collective enfranchisement is the answer, and increasingly is the case, as are longer than 99 year leases and low or nil ground rents.
We don't need commonhold.
Planning legislation is not equivalent to Green Belt.
Green Belt is not equivalent to Areas of Natural Beauty. Or even, in many cases, particularly green.
Suggest revisiting the Green Belt legislation, though, and you trigger howls of fury. However, the highest house prices and the greatest constraints of supply are usually coincident with a Green Belt.
Suggestions of "trading" land into and out of Green Belts have so far come to nothing. The Green Belt was intended to prevent urban sprawl, particularly ribbon development. There should be alternative ways of doing that rather than the crude club of the Green Belt.
I merely note that
1. UK has v high house prices
2. Demand is in London / SE
3. Building in the countryside is unpopular
4. London is low-rise compared to international norms.
I prefer to go “up” than “out”, especially in a densely populated region like the South East, which is - besides - internationally renowned in terms of its amenity value.
You then chip in and say but what about the lifts! Now, apparently, I’m responsible for Ronan Point.
This is trifling stuff, compared with the macro question of how to provide decent housing for people while avoiding urban sprawl.
At the moment leaseholders have absolutely no way to challenge any of this save tribunals that are expensive, time consuming and practically impossible for lay people to navigate without forking out even more money on costly lawyers. Oh, and the freeholder can tack their lawyers bill onto your service charges, too.
As I say, it is a grift, plain and simple. There is a reason why leasehold flats aren't shifting, even in an overheated housing market. People have cottoned onto the fact that it's a con.
Both Labour and Conservative governments have in fact, done quite a bit to regulate long leases.
I think if he is abiding by the site rules then let him take his chances like everyone else.
And actually all he did earlier today and yesterday AFAICS was make some commentary on the war which didn't include the categorical assertion that Ukraine was winning, Russia was losing and losing heavily, and it would only be a matter of time before the Ukrainian forces occupied Moscow. Oh and didn't he also say that the war would end via negotiation, much like every war ever.
The original meaning/version of a troll would be for some random poster to come into a happy, peaceful chatroom and sow discord and set the members against each other.
Are you really saying that PB needs the slightest excuse to be at each other like rats in a sack?