Rebuild, copy or destroy – how should we deal with our cities’ history? – politicalbetting.com
Rebuild, copy or destroy – how should we deal with our cities’ history? – politicalbetting.com
Let me start this article with a question. What is this building in the picture above’s age?
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Good morning, everyone.
This is unlikely, but in case the Online Sod Off You Can't Say That Act leads to woe for PB, I have a plan. And, unlike the Cylons, it makes some degree of sense.
Let me know your Twitter username (mine's MorrisF1) and I'll put together a list of PB users. That way, if the site needs to be reconstituted in some way there'll be a list of many of regulars to help get it going immediately. Probably easiest if you just send me a message.
Hopefully this will be completely unnecessary but I think it's worth doing as both a safety net and to have a decent resource for kickstarting something new if that turns out to be required.
On-topic: an interesting discussion. I prefer the European old city skylines to the soulless skyscrapers of American identi-kit cities.
US action against Panama is not going to have support from any of these additional countries. There is no jus ad bellum. It’s not comparable with the second Gulf war, the invasion of Afghanistan, the invasion of Grenada or any other US action since WWII I can think of.
And for another counter-example, how about Ypres?
Many years ago when the Talyllyn were doing their extension to Nant Gwernol there was a big argument about whether to keep the unique winding house. It was eventually demolished. Now, it would be a major tourist attraction in its own right.
Too many of our urban planners seemed to be similarly short-sighted about how beautiful things had merit in themselves in the long term.
Nationwide say use of coins and paper money is ‘thriving’ with budgeting trends such as ‘cash stuffing’ on the rise
https://www.theguardian.com/money/2025/jan/07/cash-makes-surprise-comeback-amid-46-annual-rise-in-atm-withdrawals
I also like The Walkie Talkie.
On advice from a local Canadian source (Mrs PtP) I have had £40 on Freeland at 5/4. Two good candidates, she says, but Chrystia is 'more political'.
When did we last have two good candidates stand in for a major political Party in this country?
Mikel Arteta blames Carabao Cup ball for Arsenal’s bad finishing in Newcastle defeat
Arsenal trained with the ball – which has been used throughout the League Cup campaign – on the eve of semi-final first leg defeat
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/football/2025/01/07/mikel-arteta-blames-league-cup-ball-for-arsenal-defeat/
David Cameron and Ken Clarke both stood.
Started when worried about Brown's deranged ID card nonsense. Found various political blogs etc (Iain Dale and Dizzy Thinks spring to mind) but PB's the one I actually joined and posted on. Was two years later I started betting (I remember one of the Peters kindly and patiently explaining what laying a bet was).
Whilst the bleak concrete blocks of the 50s, 60s and 70s have nothing to commend them either I think it is for our current architects, planners and investors to find something genuinely interesting and new to replace them and going back to medieval structures seems to me, in the most part, to show a lack of imagination.
I spend a lot of time in St Malo which was bombed badly in the war but the old city, intra muros, was rebuilt from photos, drawings and records. Most people don’t know or care, they just see a beautiful walled city with beautiful old buildings, quirky street layouts and squares and it draws in tourists and the locals are proud to live there.
Outside the old city there are areas which, whilst they could be made a lot nicer, provide practical apartments, warehouses, industrial/retail.
So with Bristol anything that adds to the sense of a centre and personality is a good thing in my humble opinion.
I'd like to make a few points though: "many of the brutalist buildings that were put up post war are already tired and being pulled down after only 70 years."
Yes, and many buildings built over the centuries lasted far shorter periods. What we have now is survivor bias: buildings that were generally built well enough to stay up, and still have a use - even if that use has evolved over the years.
I'd also say that we can rebuild old buildings, and perhaps should in some cases. But they need to have a genuine use, and many of the older buildings with small room sizes are unsuitable for modern office or shop use. And if you alter them too much, you end up with a pastiche.
And finally, we have hundreds of structures on the Heritage at Risk register. I'd argue that perhaps excess money spent rebuilding copies of buildings might better be spent preserving the genuine heritage we have. That does not mean we cannot build better new buildings though.
https://www.buildingsatrisk.org.uk/ (2,200 at risk in Scotland alone)
Edit: and the much less user-friendly English version: https://historicengland.org.uk/advice/heritage-at-risk/search-register/
https://abcnews.go.com/US/former-virginia-nurse-charged-felony-child-abuse-amid/story?id=117425169
Elizabeth Ann Strotman, a nurse, is accused of breaking the bones of babies in neonatal intensive care. The Daily Mail says she specifically targeted black babies.
An increase in the use of cash means an increase in criminality.
FACT.
I suspect, in this country though, it would cost a fortune and take ages and cut across all sorts of building standards, environmental efficiency and accessibility policies that'd hugely complicate planning.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thames_Town
If I had my way (and I accept it's an unpopular view with many), I'd abolish standard Grade II listings completely.
We're now up to 2% of the entire housing stock being listed, almost all of it standard Grade II.
Are one in fifty dwellings in the UK really "of special interest"?
Of the 380,000 or so listed buildings (in England alone), only 2.5% are Grade I and 5.8% Grade II* (Grade 2-special).
Sure, retain these. In Oxfordshire, we'd have 381 Grade I and 694 Grade II*
And we'd no longer have something like 12,000 Grade II listed buildings.
In addition, Conservation Officers can just arbitrarily slap a Grade II listing on a property and make redevelopment or improvement of it that much harder. In my ward, they did that to a ramshackle old shack (uninhabitable) that a resident inherited and proposed demolishing to build two new houses (actually habitable ones). Partway through the application, it got listed.
It took years and multiple reiterations of the plans until it was acceptable (reduced to merely rebuilding the one house) and that itself was abandoned when the heir ran out of money and settled up.
We don't need to live in a museum, as you put it.
If you want a city that's been totally changed in the last hundred years, look at Derby. Many of the street layouts in the very centre of the city have changed.
I totally support Grade II listings which include many beautiful buildings, one of which- in the past - I was fortunate to own.
They are fundamental to the historic fabric of so many of our cities, towns and villages - and what gives us value and identity as a country.
The 1980s and 1990s allowed tonnes of such poorly constructed pastiche to proliferate. Housing estates with randomly added faux-timber frames or too-small Georgian windows, docklands blocks of flats in awful yellow and pink engineering bricks and pretend dock winches. Tesco outlets in Essex barn cladding with decorative clock towers.
My fear is that a British attempt to recreate the likes of the Dutch house would end up going the postmodernist pastiche route and looking very obviously modern. They would cut corners on materials and dimensions. Our 1980s town centres are arguably even uglier than our 1960s ones.
https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Winding_House,_Nant_Gwernol,_Gwynedd_-_geograph.org.uk_-_3016223.jpg
The latest gilt rates from the auction yesterday show us that the days when governments could borrow at what were negative interest rates are behind us. This is not just a UK phenomena, we are seeing similar trends in both the Euro zone and the US. It is going to make finding the resources for additional capital spending even more difficult. I think Reeves will be forced into a range of cuts in her Spring budget, further depressing growth, to stay within her fiscal rules. She must be bitterly regretting the largesse on spending in her last effort.
It would be very Trumpian for Panama to be invaded - for an asset whose time has been and gone. Just the threa will likely spur attempts to build alternatives, such as through Nicaragua
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B5vX4TWNRAo
or (perhaps less likely to be intimidated by threat of invasion), through Mexico's Interoceanic Corridor of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec (CIIT). This is a much cheaper option (US $7.5 billion), by rather than building a canal that dries up, instead building rail links to transport cargo containers across this narrow point of Mexico.
https://medium.com/@adriyanto/mexicos-interoceanic-corridor-a-new-route-to-compete-with-the-panama-canal-4cc98571b1b3
And you know what, London is an amazing beautiful city. And the reason it's amazing is because, unlike so many other cities, it is essentially unplanned. It's a hodgepodge of the new and the old, the terrible and the amazing, the historic, the cheap, the brutalist, and the beautiful. It has Regency terraces and the Barbican.
It's not a museum, it's an organic thing. No designer sat down - like Paris and New York - and said "this is how the streets should be".
And that's why it's great.
Yes, we will put up ugly buildings from time to time. But you know what, they'll get demolished in time, and replaced by better ones.
It's not a museum. It's not full of replica buildings (the Globe excepted). It's a real place built by millions of people's individual decisions.
Let's celebrate that, and - if anything - allow more freedom for people to build what they want.
Not borrowing for investment when we had a once-in-fifty years historuc opportunity, and then choosing to decouple from Europe at exactly the moment when a once-in-a-hundred years expansionist American orange lunatic wants to occupy Canada and Greenland.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/
File:Site_of_Village_Incline_and_winding_house,_Abergynolwyn_(Talyllyn_Railway)_-_geograph.org.uk_-_2511189.jpg
https://www.pressreader.com/uk/the-railway-magazine/20230103/282952454260601?srsltid=AfmBOoprqI3V9sajkTy4Qp4C6EwuDnas7OxnyTwBIIIbiZDPTt-DixO5
His dad says he's more likely to buy Man Utd
When you have $400bn and time on your hands you do pretty much what you fancy
Had to pay it when sorting out repairs to the stonework of my father's house (in a Conservation Area, not that that mattered as no way was I going to use any old comedian with Portland Cement as opposed to a stonework specialist using lime mortar).
His only really liquid assets are his Tesla shares, which he's been gently selling to fund Twitter losses.
I'm sure he could sell some more shares to purchase Liverpool or Manchester United if he wanted to. But - candidly - I don't see it. It doesn't fit his personality at all. He wants to be the star, making the decisions, and making things work, he doesn't want to be overshadowed by Mo Salah.
So, my money is against him buying a sports team.
Brutalist trivia: the loved/hated Trellisk Tower that soars/looms over west London was designed by the wonderfully-named Erno Goldfinger. Ian Fleming appropriated his surname for the Bond villain, much to the architect’s chagrin.
The highest priority in towns and cities should be the residents. Part of that is having them look nice though, and part of that is a link to history. So it’s all about balance.
Panama = Suez
Greenland = the Falklands
Both spelled disaster for the invading government.
Revisit Grade II buildings and if they're genuinely special and specially worth preserving unchanged, upgrade them on a case by case basis to Grade II*
The building in question wasn't listed until 2019; it wasn't seen as that special. Using up my allowance for the day, it's this one:
That's a photo from Google Maps, and I can attest that it's unchanged today - more than five years on.
Still uninhabited. Still not habitable. And I don't really think it's that beautiful or special (I've been inside; it's a wreck in there). I'd say that giving this the same special status as the house you obviously cherished could actually cheapen the specialness of that Grade II listing.
But I fully understand if you still disagree; it'd be a boring place if we all agreed (even if I'm always right, of course...
https://www.welcometoportsmouth.co.uk/The-Tricorn-Centre-Portsmouth.html
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c07g40x1v53o
I've just read a section that went: "The road-house was the phoniest place with awful black beams and lampshades made out of old wills and tankards with glass bottoms..."
Faux heritage and pastiche has existed for a long time.
Good morning, everybody.
We have to accept and get used to that, and at least try and control it so pure national interest and conquest doesn’t come back into fashion. Though if it does I want the Faroes, Calais, Malta, Cyprus, and to expand Gibraltar.
Not only was Trump already in view in 2015 when the Referendum was called, but its campaign.was conducted in tandem with Trumpites. Now not only does Trump want to remove the last vestiges of British and French influence in North America and occupy an EU nation, but his sidekick also wants to take.more immediate control over Britain itself. It was the biggest British strategic blunder in 75 years.
So we were both wrong - you had the wrong building and I was wrong in thinking it was unique.
Always nice to start with a point of commonality!
I bought a Victorian house. Now that I know it a bit better, I can say that the original builder was a shoddy cheapskate. I quite resent the fact that this guy who made cheap decisions 160 years ago is given priority in planning law over myself, who has to live in it. For example, to save money he built the roof at a very shallow 15 degree pitch. While other houses nearby have done roof conversions, I would need to apply for planning permission to raise the roofline, and quite probably be denied, on the same grounds as if I were putting in a 6 story monstrosity.
My point is that what we now see as pretty old buildings were often not made with the desire to build beautiful buildings, but out of the same commercial considerations as today. There should not be a presumption that old is better. Decisions should be made on our best understanding of *why* it's the best choice.
On a smaller scale, there are a couple of houses near me which have been rebuilt in the style of Edwardian/Victorian. They are quetly attractive and make me happy every time we pass them and are far nicer than anything contemporary. Why can't we continue to use styles which work and which people value? Because architects refuse, crying pastiche. Which doesn't strike me as a valid argument.
And the following decades may now offer a choice between a quite reasonable degree of social and economic autonomy within the E.U., and literal incorporation into the U.S, as a distant province whose only significance would be, London.
OTOH once upon a time there were 120 in the square mile. The city would be quite a place if they had all survived.
What could possibly go right, with such a strategy?
The one they demolished was the one that fed the incline which dropped down into Abergynolwyn village. You can still see the drum in the undergrowth by the lineside.
I wouldn't say incline winding houses are particularly rare in North Wales - this was my favorite local one growing up (gold nerd star if you know which one it is, without following the image link back!). As a teenager, I used to regularly walk up the incline to it, carrying a mountain bike to continue exploring beyond the top. If you know which one it is, you realise this was somewhat foolhardy, looking back!
I'd say this will be 15-25 years before it becomes widespread as a routine therapy. For one thing, we need long term studies to see if it is a treatment with long-term viability. And it's surgical, so expensive to do.
One of the obvious problems is that this is a transplant, so has availability issues - where do the Islets of Langerhans for transplant come from, given that we have 300k-400k or so Type I Diabetics and about 10k new ones each year?
Removing the need for immunosuppression is one element, but there are others. They could potentially be grown through something like appropriately genetically engineered pigs with turbo-pancreases (I don't know enough to comment if it could be done specifically for individual compatibility and when), but really it will want artificially grown cells.
We also really want some sort of easy delivery mechanism - eg direct injection into your pancreas with a big needle, like the ones used for a bone marrow biopsy (these are about 3mm in diameter - they are bloody sharp and it bloody hurts). I do not know if that is possible even in theory.
It took insulin pumps around 30 years to go from "you can have one if you take part in a clinical study and are within reach of a specialist centre - there were about 6 in the country, but you will have to fund some consumables yourself" to "rolling out semi-closed loop pumps to everyone who wants one over a couple of years."
It's a long and winding road,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Si7gu9yGz64
It should be annoying but it’s strangely enjoyable.
I definitely wouldn't pull it down.
Like for them, and so many others, the risk is you piss off the existing base, your "deplorables" attitude alienates a still wider group, and the new market never materialises.
However, I believe mansard extensions are being promoted iirc as a form of permitted development, before long. So you may have an out.
The key dimension will I think be "no higher than the peak of the existing roof for permitted development o apply".
An interesting exercise - go and look at some ugly brick boxes (modern). Then go and look at the houses on a lovely street of Edwardian houses. Look at what is actually different.
It actually isn't vast. You could take the brick boxes, and put most of the features in. Render the horrid brick, and paint.
And that tells you what people value. It isn't the lack of foundations, outside privies or roof slopes.
Will post some pastiche later. To hurt the feelings of any architects reading PB. Viscously.
The results started out as hideous. The later ones are getting quite good.
I think "15-25 years" is probably an overestimate, but I agree it's not going to be quick, and success is a very long way from guaranteed.
But compared to where things stood yesterday, it's a significant advance.
(The PI trial was intramuscular injection, for proof of principle. What the planned delivery mechanism might be for an approved treatment, I don't know.)
What I don't understand with Jaguar, regardless of the silliness of the adverts, is why they think anyone would want to pay a seven figure sum for the bastard love child of a VW Beetle and a Ford Capri, which offers about the same range as a high spec MG.
It reminds me of the time Homer Simpson tried to design a car, and not in a good way.
Two or three years ago I nearly bought a late 17th century farmstead, listed in the 80s. Now derelict, inside utterly trashed. As the rules stand, I would have had to sought listed building consent to remove the broken 1970s tile fireplaces from the living rooms, or demolish and rebuild the 1960s brick kitchen that had been badly built on the back.
Given it's state, it should have had a listing which stated "External frontage and yard only" and let the owners do what they liked with the rest of it.
It's still derelict now, I suspect because the eventual new owner has found obtaining listing building consent to fix it remarkably difficult.
I have friends with a listed Victorian house in Wales who had listed building consent declined when they attempted to remove 1970s everest aluminum framed single glazed windows, and to replace them with double glazed units in an original style, on the basis that the listing status applies to the house as it was when it was listed, aluminum windows and all...!