Asking people queuing for lottery tickets is going to understate the Greens, I'd have thought.
In village culture here, and maybe most places, the unofficial admission price to anything 'free' in village hall type venues is to buy a raffle ticket for £1 (minimum). In consequence you sometimes have to bring home some unwanted piece of well intentioned stuff. This week it was an unidentifiable plant of some sort. Intuition or guesswork suggests to me that polling this group of gamblers would reach a large number unreached by any other sort of lottery.
I love those kind of raffles. Used to attend Cancer Research events as a friend was on the committee. The raffle prizes were mostly terrible and plentiful. Towards the end the cry would go out "Put it back in..." as no-one wanted the 'prize'. I swear some things went round for years.
I turn up, buy raffle tickets, don't ask my name to be recorded and leave before the draw. My wife is slower than me so sometimes, like this week, has to come home encumbered.
Stephen Fry told a story about carrying 'fake' tickets in your pocket to avoid having to buy some. It probably originated elsewhere.
I heard Gyles Brandreth tell that story about John Major doing that.
One suspects its an old chestnut
Can't see how it would work... you'd have top have every colour available just in case for the standard lottery using cloakroom tickets. Easier to just say 'I've already got some', it's not as if anyone is going to ask to check them.
Allegedly you have a few different colours (and raffle strips are very generic).
But yes I suspect its not something anyone actually does.
BTW - how is the house - can you send your link to build hub again? I've run out of grand designs/George Clarke programs and need my property porn!
The guys lugging the marble top reminds me when we had the top delivered for our kitchen island. Two parts, each required 8 guys busting a gut to shift them.
The island is so large that if Trump hears about it, he'll want to put the American flag on it...
Is that @Benpointer’s new house?! I rather like it. Certainly a hundred times nicer than the average, windowless, Barratt home red brick rabbit hutch
We should build more wooden houses. Red brick, unless used with great skill, is intrinsically ugly and bleak, especially in the British climate
Really? I've always thought of red brick as a very warm and sympathetic kind of material, human in scale and reassuringly earthy as well as a nod to Victorian industrial structures, Elizabethan Manor houses and the like. To my mind the red brick is the most British of construction materials, in fact. It opens up the possibility of some nice patterns too, although perhaps less so nowadays when you have a single row of bricks and a breeze block inner skin. We replicated the Flemish bond of the existing house when we built our kitchen extension and used second hand London stock bricks and it looks beautiful. Our brickie was exceptionally skilled though. And London bricks are more yellow than red I suppose.
I've been trying to think of some exceptions to this - some of the mills of Greater Manchester, for example, or the new flats on the old Boddingtons Brewery site in Strangeways - but these all come under 'with great skill'. Certainly looking out the window of my suburban house, I can see four different types of red brick houses, none of which, under a leaden January sky, fill the heart with song. The three white-rendered houses I can see on the other hand are quite cheery.
There are a few very handsome streets of red brick houses I can think of within 400 yards of here. But all of them are Victorian or Edwardian. Actually, I can think of a couple of very handsome red brick houses on the street opposite - but both have been consciously built to look Victorian (one of which replacing a Victorian house which fell down after an unsuccessful cellar conversion), using more-expensive-than-necessary bricks. So it can be done. But it requires some commitment to quality and in these cases an architect not ruthlessly committed to modernism.
Wouldn't Burnham be wiser to STFU until the by-election is over?
The best thing he can do is campaign like hell for the Labour candidate. He’s a popular figure in the city, and is a significant asset to the party even after last week’s shenanigans.
I see Carole Codswallop has got a new bogeyman. I hope the backers of her new venture have deep pockets for the inevitable crazy amount of lawyers being required to be on retainer.
What is it?
Peter Thiel / Palantir is new obsession. She has got funded along for some online journalism site that wheeled out loads of famous names to say they would be involved and instead it has just a 20 articles in 6 months.
Peter Thiel. The man who screwed Gawker funding the hulksters lawsuit. Good luck with that
I would say it omits the most concerning, and quite possible, outcome - that the regime absorbs the attacks, continues to repress its people, and survives.
As far as the "danger" of falling into chaos, chaos would be marked improvement upon the Islamic Republic status quo.
'Nationalist'? Is that now the Right's accepted euphemism for 'racist'?
Dunno. The article is by my stalker so on principle I don’t read beyond the headline
I don't subscribe so can't see the article either; therefore its contents will forever remain a mystery. But presumably this is a British equivalent of the 'Pepe the Frog' phenomenon, a decade on.
I don't subscribe and it was there for me? Perhaps it is one of those occasions where you can see a certain number of free articles a month?
Perhaps there's a way to break the paywall. But I wouldn't advocate that: the doddery old chap who penned the article looks like he could do with the money.
He'd probably waste it.
Whether on drugs'n'hookers, or on soft furnishings is the only question.
Asking people queuing for lottery tickets is going to understate the Greens, I'd have thought.
In village culture here, and maybe most places, the unofficial admission price to anything 'free' in village hall type venues is to buy a raffle ticket for £1 (minimum). In consequence you sometimes have to bring home some unwanted piece of well intentioned stuff. This week it was an unidentifiable plant of some sort. Intuition or guesswork suggests to me that polling this group of gamblers would reach a large number unreached by any other sort of lottery.
I love those kind of raffles. Used to attend Cancer Research events as a friend was on the committee. The raffle prizes were mostly terrible and plentiful. Towards the end the cry would go out "Put it back in..." as no-one wanted the 'prize'. I swear some things went round for years.
I turn up, buy raffle tickets, don't ask my name to be recorded and leave before the draw. My wife is slower than me so sometimes, like this week, has to come home encumbered.
Stephen Fry told a story about carrying 'fake' tickets in your pocket to avoid having to buy some. It probably originated elsewhere.
I heard Gyles Brandreth tell that story about John Major doing that.
One suspects its an old chestnut
Can't see how it would work... you'd have top have every colour available just in case for the standard lottery using cloakroom tickets. Easier to just say 'I've already got some', it's not as if anyone is going to ask to check them.
Allegedly you have a few different colours (and raffle strips are very generic).
But yes I suspect its not something anyone actually does.
BTW - how is the house - can you send your link to build hub again? I've run out of grand designs/George Clarke programs and need my property porn!
The guys lugging the marble top reminds me when we had the top delivered for our kitchen island. Two parts, each required 8 guys busting a gut to shift them.
The island is so large that if Trump hears about it, he'll want to put the American flag on it...
Is that @Benpointer’s new house?! I rather like it. Certainly a hundred times nicer than the average, windowless, Barratt home red brick rabbit hutch
We should build more wooden houses. Red brick, unless used with great skill, is intrinsically ugly and bleak, especially in the British climate
I'm a fan of patterned brick, and use of glazed or blue engineered types. I quite like garden walls made out of blue brick, with red detailing. The last one I did I was thinking about a dog or space invader outline made in the contrasting colour, but the brickie was not keen.
The share of timber frame has increased substantially to around 25% in England, which is great, and is 75-80% in Scotland and in the self-build sector.
Asking people queuing for lottery tickets is going to understate the Greens, I'd have thought.
In village culture here, and maybe most places, the unofficial admission price to anything 'free' in village hall type venues is to buy a raffle ticket for £1 (minimum). In consequence you sometimes have to bring home some unwanted piece of well intentioned stuff. This week it was an unidentifiable plant of some sort. Intuition or guesswork suggests to me that polling this group of gamblers would reach a large number unreached by any other sort of lottery.
I love those kind of raffles. Used to attend Cancer Research events as a friend was on the committee. The raffle prizes were mostly terrible and plentiful. Towards the end the cry would go out "Put it back in..." as no-one wanted the 'prize'. I swear some things went round for years.
I turn up, buy raffle tickets, don't ask my name to be recorded and leave before the draw. My wife is slower than me so sometimes, like this week, has to come home encumbered.
Stephen Fry told a story about carrying 'fake' tickets in your pocket to avoid having to buy some. It probably originated elsewhere.
I heard Gyles Brandreth tell that story about John Major doing that.
One suspects its an old chestnut
Can't see how it would work... you'd have top have every colour available just in case for the standard lottery using cloakroom tickets. Easier to just say 'I've already got some', it's not as if anyone is going to ask to check them.
Allegedly you have a few different colours (and raffle strips are very generic).
But yes I suspect its not something anyone actually does.
BTW - how is the house - can you send your link to build hub again? I've run out of grand designs/George Clarke programs and need my property porn!
The guys lugging the marble top reminds me when we had the top delivered for our kitchen island. Two parts, each required 8 guys busting a gut to shift them.
The island is so large that if Trump hears about it, he'll want to put the American flag on it...
Is that @Benpointer’s new house?! I rather like it. Certainly a hundred times nicer than the average, windowless, Barratt home red brick rabbit hutch
We should build more wooden houses. Red brick, unless used with great skill, is intrinsically ugly and bleak, especially in the British climate
Really? I've always thought of red brick as a very warm and sympathetic kind of material, human in scale and reassuringly earthy as well as a nod to Victorian industrial structures, Elizabethan Manor houses and the like. To my mind the red brick is the most British of construction materials, in fact. It opens up the possibility of some nice patterns too, although perhaps less so nowadays when you have a single row of bricks and a breeze block inner skin. We replicated the Flemish bond of the existing house when we built our kitchen extension and used second hand London stock bricks and it looks beautiful. Our brickie was exceptionally skilled though. And London bricks are more yellow than red I suppose.
'To my mind the red brick is the most British of construction materials'
English (with a soupçon of Welsh and Northern Irish) really. Sandstone is the essence of Scottish construction, with a bit of granite thrown in for us teuchters. I remember in the febrile run up to 2014 some idiot rightwing hack was claiming Scotch expertise by reminiscing about being brought up in red brick Glasgow tenements. After a bit of guffawing she was quickly put right.
Asking people queuing for lottery tickets is going to understate the Greens, I'd have thought.
In village culture here, and maybe most places, the unofficial admission price to anything 'free' in village hall type venues is to buy a raffle ticket for £1 (minimum). In consequence you sometimes have to bring home some unwanted piece of well intentioned stuff. This week it was an unidentifiable plant of some sort. Intuition or guesswork suggests to me that polling this group of gamblers would reach a large number unreached by any other sort of lottery.
I love those kind of raffles. Used to attend Cancer Research events as a friend was on the committee. The raffle prizes were mostly terrible and plentiful. Towards the end the cry would go out "Put it back in..." as no-one wanted the 'prize'. I swear some things went round for years.
I turn up, buy raffle tickets, don't ask my name to be recorded and leave before the draw. My wife is slower than me so sometimes, like this week, has to come home encumbered.
Stephen Fry told a story about carrying 'fake' tickets in your pocket to avoid having to buy some. It probably originated elsewhere.
I heard Gyles Brandreth tell that story about John Major doing that.
One suspects its an old chestnut
Can't see how it would work... you'd have top have every colour available just in case for the standard lottery using cloakroom tickets. Easier to just say 'I've already got some', it's not as if anyone is going to ask to check them.
Allegedly you have a few different colours (and raffle strips are very generic).
But yes I suspect its not something anyone actually does.
BTW - how is the house - can you send your link to build hub again? I've run out of grand designs/George Clarke programs and need my property porn!
The guys lugging the marble top reminds me when we had the top delivered for our kitchen island. Two parts, each required 8 guys busting a gut to shift them.
The island is so large that if Trump hears about it, he'll want to put the American flag on it...
Is that @Benpointer’s new house?! I rather like it. Certainly a hundred times nicer than the average, windowless, Barratt home red brick rabbit hutch
We should build more wooden houses. Red brick, unless used with great skill, is intrinsically ugly and bleak, especially in the British climate
Really? I've always thought of red brick as a very warm and sympathetic kind of material, human in scale and reassuringly earthy as well as a nod to Victorian industrial structures, Elizabethan Manor houses and the like. To my mind the red brick is the most British of construction materials, in fact. It opens up the possibility of some nice patterns too, although perhaps less so nowadays when you have a single row of bricks and a breeze block inner skin. We replicated the Flemish bond of the existing house when we built our kitchen extension and used second hand London stock bricks and it looks beautiful. Our brickie was exceptionally skilled though. And London bricks are more yellow than red I suppose.
I've been trying to think of some exceptions to this - some of the mills of Greater Manchester, for example, or the new flats on the old Boddingtons Brewery site in Strangeways - but these all come under 'with great skill'. Certainly looking out the window of my suburban house, I can see four different types of red brick houses, none of which, under a leaden January sky, fill the heart with song. The three white-rendered houses I can see on the other hand are quite cheery.
There are a few very handsome streets of red brick houses I can think of within 400 yards of here. But all of them are Victorian or Edwardian. Actually, I can think of a couple of very handsome red brick houses on the street opposite - but both have been consciously built to look Victorian (one of which replacing a Victorian house which fell down after an unsuccessful cellar conversion), using more-expensive-than-necessary bricks. So it can be done. But it requires some commitment to quality and in these cases an architect not ruthlessly committed to modernism.
An afterthought/clarification: I am certainly not saying all Victorian streets of redbrick housing are attractive. There were thousands of streets of slum housing which were utterly cheerless, and I can think of some pretty drab Victorian red brick near here. What I'm saying is that the majority of attractive red brick is Victorian/Edwardian.
Also, I agree with OLB: lighter bricks (like London or Hull) is rather cheerful.
Asking people queuing for lottery tickets is going to understate the Greens, I'd have thought.
In village culture here, and maybe most places, the unofficial admission price to anything 'free' in village hall type venues is to buy a raffle ticket for £1 (minimum). In consequence you sometimes have to bring home some unwanted piece of well intentioned stuff. This week it was an unidentifiable plant of some sort. Intuition or guesswork suggests to me that polling this group of gamblers would reach a large number unreached by any other sort of lottery.
I love those kind of raffles. Used to attend Cancer Research events as a friend was on the committee. The raffle prizes were mostly terrible and plentiful. Towards the end the cry would go out "Put it back in..." as no-one wanted the 'prize'. I swear some things went round for years.
I turn up, buy raffle tickets, don't ask my name to be recorded and leave before the draw. My wife is slower than me so sometimes, like this week, has to come home encumbered.
Stephen Fry told a story about carrying 'fake' tickets in your pocket to avoid having to buy some. It probably originated elsewhere.
I heard Gyles Brandreth tell that story about John Major doing that.
One suspects its an old chestnut
Can't see how it would work... you'd have top have every colour available just in case for the standard lottery using cloakroom tickets. Easier to just say 'I've already got some', it's not as if anyone is going to ask to check them.
Allegedly you have a few different colours (and raffle strips are very generic).
But yes I suspect its not something anyone actually does.
BTW - how is the house - can you send your link to build hub again? I've run out of grand designs/George Clarke programs and need my property porn!
The guys lugging the marble top reminds me when we had the top delivered for our kitchen island. Two parts, each required 8 guys busting a gut to shift them.
The island is so large that if Trump hears about it, he'll want to put the American flag on it...
Is that @Benpointer’s new house?! I rather like it. Certainly a hundred times nicer than the average, windowless, Barratt home red brick rabbit hutch
We should build more wooden houses. Red brick, unless used with great skill, is intrinsically ugly and bleak, especially in the British climate
I'm a fan of patterned brick, and use of glazed or blue engineered types. I quite like garden walls made out of blue brick, with red detailing. The last one I did I was thinking about a dog or space invader outline made in the contrasting colour, but the brickie was not keen.
The share of timber frame has increased substantially to around 25% in England, which is great, and is 75-80% in Scotland and in the self-build sector.
Wouldn't Burnham be wiser to STFU until the by-election is over?
Why?
He's got plenty of support and sympathy about being blocked across the labour movement but carping on and on and on about it when they are trying to scrape a win somehow in Denton is not exactly team player of the month.
Asking people queuing for lottery tickets is going to understate the Greens, I'd have thought.
In village culture here, and maybe most places, the unofficial admission price to anything 'free' in village hall type venues is to buy a raffle ticket for £1 (minimum). In consequence you sometimes have to bring home some unwanted piece of well intentioned stuff. This week it was an unidentifiable plant of some sort. Intuition or guesswork suggests to me that polling this group of gamblers would reach a large number unreached by any other sort of lottery.
I love those kind of raffles. Used to attend Cancer Research events as a friend was on the committee. The raffle prizes were mostly terrible and plentiful. Towards the end the cry would go out "Put it back in..." as no-one wanted the 'prize'. I swear some things went round for years.
I turn up, buy raffle tickets, don't ask my name to be recorded and leave before the draw. My wife is slower than me so sometimes, like this week, has to come home encumbered.
Stephen Fry told a story about carrying 'fake' tickets in your pocket to avoid having to buy some. It probably originated elsewhere.
I heard Gyles Brandreth tell that story about John Major doing that.
One suspects its an old chestnut
Can't see how it would work... you'd have top have every colour available just in case for the standard lottery using cloakroom tickets. Easier to just say 'I've already got some', it's not as if anyone is going to ask to check them.
Allegedly you have a few different colours (and raffle strips are very generic).
But yes I suspect its not something anyone actually does.
BTW - how is the house - can you send your link to build hub again? I've run out of grand designs/George Clarke programs and need my property porn!
The guys lugging the marble top reminds me when we had the top delivered for our kitchen island. Two parts, each required 8 guys busting a gut to shift them.
The island is so large that if Trump hears about it, he'll want to put the American flag on it...
Is that @Benpointer’s new house?! I rather like it. Certainly a hundred times nicer than the average, windowless, Barratt home red brick rabbit hutch
We should build more wooden houses. Red brick, unless used with great skill, is intrinsically ugly and bleak, especially in the British climate
I'm a fan of patterned brick, and use of glazed or blue engineered types. I quite like garden walls made out of blue brick, with red detailing. The last one I did I was thinking about a dog or space invader outline made in the contrasting colour, but the brickie was not keen.
The share of timber frame has increased substantially to around 25% in England, which is great, and is 75-80% in Scotland and in the self-build sector.
Brick is a great building material; it just needs to be employed with a bit of imagination.
A Barrat box would look little better in stone.
I disagree. Where newbuilds are built in stone they look 100% better. Render, too. There is a good looking new estate you can see from the M6 near Lancaster which springs to mind.
Asking people queuing for lottery tickets is going to understate the Greens, I'd have thought.
In village culture here, and maybe most places, the unofficial admission price to anything 'free' in village hall type venues is to buy a raffle ticket for £1 (minimum). In consequence you sometimes have to bring home some unwanted piece of well intentioned stuff. This week it was an unidentifiable plant of some sort. Intuition or guesswork suggests to me that polling this group of gamblers would reach a large number unreached by any other sort of lottery.
I love those kind of raffles. Used to attend Cancer Research events as a friend was on the committee. The raffle prizes were mostly terrible and plentiful. Towards the end the cry would go out "Put it back in..." as no-one wanted the 'prize'. I swear some things went round for years.
I turn up, buy raffle tickets, don't ask my name to be recorded and leave before the draw. My wife is slower than me so sometimes, like this week, has to come home encumbered.
Stephen Fry told a story about carrying 'fake' tickets in your pocket to avoid having to buy some. It probably originated elsewhere.
I heard Gyles Brandreth tell that story about John Major doing that.
One suspects its an old chestnut
Can't see how it would work... you'd have top have every colour available just in case for the standard lottery using cloakroom tickets. Easier to just say 'I've already got some', it's not as if anyone is going to ask to check them.
Allegedly you have a few different colours (and raffle strips are very generic).
But yes I suspect its not something anyone actually does.
BTW - how is the house - can you send your link to build hub again? I've run out of grand designs/George Clarke programs and need my property porn!
The guys lugging the marble top reminds me when we had the top delivered for our kitchen island. Two parts, each required 8 guys busting a gut to shift them.
The island is so large that if Trump hears about it, he'll want to put the American flag on it...
Is that @Benpointer’s new house?! I rather like it. Certainly a hundred times nicer than the average, windowless, Barratt home red brick rabbit hutch
We should build more wooden houses. Red brick, unless used with great skill, is intrinsically ugly and bleak, especially in the British climate
Really? I've always thought of red brick as a very warm and sympathetic kind of material, human in scale and reassuringly earthy as well as a nod to Victorian industrial structures, Elizabethan Manor houses and the like. To my mind the red brick is the most British of construction materials, in fact. It opens up the possibility of some nice patterns too, although perhaps less so nowadays when you have a single row of bricks and a breeze block inner skin. We replicated the Flemish bond of the existing house when we built our kitchen extension and used second hand London stock bricks and it looks beautiful. Our brickie was exceptionally skilled though. And London bricks are more yellow than red I suppose.
I've been trying to think of some exceptions to this - some of the mills of Greater Manchester, for example, or the new flats on the old Boddingtons Brewery site in Strangeways - but these all come under 'with great skill'. Certainly looking out the window of my suburban house, I can see four different types of red brick houses, none of which, under a leaden January sky, fill the heart with song. The three white-rendered houses I can see on the other hand are quite cheery.
There are a few very handsome streets of red brick houses I can think of within 400 yards of here. But all of them are Victorian or Edwardian. Actually, I can think of a couple of very handsome red brick houses on the street opposite - but both have been consciously built to look Victorian (one of which replacing a Victorian house which fell down after an unsuccessful cellar conversion), using more-expensive-than-necessary bricks. So it can be done. But it requires some commitment to quality and in these cases an architect not ruthlessly committed to modernism.
An afterthought/clarification: I am certainly not saying all Victorian streets of redbrick housing are attractive. There were thousands of streets of slum housing which were utterly cheerless, and I can think of some pretty drab Victorian red brick near here. What I'm saying is that the majority of attractive red brick is Victorian/Edwardian.
Also, I agree with OLB: lighter bricks (like London or Hull) is rather cheerful.
Wouldn't Burnham be wiser to STFU until the by-election is over?
Why?
He's got plenty of support and sympathy about being blocked across the labour movement but carping on and on and on about it when they are trying to scrape a win somehow in Denton is not exactly team player of the month.
There is no doubt he could have a huge influence on the vote
Key will be how much he gets involved and also which big beasts, if any, canvass the seat
Russia's energy terror killed a Holocaust survivor in Kyiv.
On 13 January, plumbers found Yevgenia Besfamilnaya—"Baba Zhenya" to her neighbors—frozen solid in her apartment. Russian missiles had knocked out power and heat across the capital.
Outside: -18°C.
As an infant, Baba Zhenya somehow escaped Babi Yar, where Nazis murdered 34,000 Kyivan Jews in two days. An orphanage took her in and gave her a surname—Besfamilnaya, meaning "nameless.".. https://x.com/EuromaidanPress/status/2016551351136768387
Asking people queuing for lottery tickets is going to understate the Greens, I'd have thought.
In village culture here, and maybe most places, the unofficial admission price to anything 'free' in village hall type venues is to buy a raffle ticket for £1 (minimum). In consequence you sometimes have to bring home some unwanted piece of well intentioned stuff. This week it was an unidentifiable plant of some sort. Intuition or guesswork suggests to me that polling this group of gamblers would reach a large number unreached by any other sort of lottery.
I love those kind of raffles. Used to attend Cancer Research events as a friend was on the committee. The raffle prizes were mostly terrible and plentiful. Towards the end the cry would go out "Put it back in..." as no-one wanted the 'prize'. I swear some things went round for years.
I turn up, buy raffle tickets, don't ask my name to be recorded and leave before the draw. My wife is slower than me so sometimes, like this week, has to come home encumbered.
Stephen Fry told a story about carrying 'fake' tickets in your pocket to avoid having to buy some. It probably originated elsewhere.
I heard Gyles Brandreth tell that story about John Major doing that.
One suspects its an old chestnut
Can't see how it would work... you'd have top have every colour available just in case for the standard lottery using cloakroom tickets. Easier to just say 'I've already got some', it's not as if anyone is going to ask to check them.
Allegedly you have a few different colours (and raffle strips are very generic).
But yes I suspect its not something anyone actually does.
BTW - how is the house - can you send your link to build hub again? I've run out of grand designs/George Clarke programs and need my property porn!
The guys lugging the marble top reminds me when we had the top delivered for our kitchen island. Two parts, each required 8 guys busting a gut to shift them.
The island is so large that if Trump hears about it, he'll want to put the American flag on it...
Is that @Benpointer’s new house?! I rather like it. Certainly a hundred times nicer than the average, windowless, Barratt home red brick rabbit hutch
We should build more wooden houses. Red brick, unless used with great skill, is intrinsically ugly and bleak, especially in the British climate
Really? I've always thought of red brick as a very warm and sympathetic kind of material, human in scale and reassuringly earthy as well as a nod to Victorian industrial structures, Elizabethan Manor houses and the like. To my mind the red brick is the most British of construction materials, in fact. It opens up the possibility of some nice patterns too, although perhaps less so nowadays when you have a single row of bricks and a breeze block inner skin. We replicated the Flemish bond of the existing house when we built our kitchen extension and used second hand London stock bricks and it looks beautiful. Our brickie was exceptionally skilled though. And London bricks are more yellow than red I suppose.
'To my mind the red brick is the most British of construction materials'
English (with a soupçon of Welsh and Northern Irish) really. Sandstone is the essence of Scottish construction, with a bit of granite thrown in for us teuchters. I remember in the febrile run up to 2014 some idiot rightwing hack was claiming Scotch expertise by reminiscing about being brought up in red brick Glasgow tenements. After a bit of guffawing she was quickly put right.
True and I should have known better having grown up in a sandstone Scottish house, although the stone was facing IIRC, with a layer of red brick behind it. Part of our garden wall was red brick too, and there were certainly brick houses in the area although often painted or rendered or rough cast. I spent part of my childhood in a red brick Victorian terraced house in NE England, went to an aggressively red brick college, lived in a red brick apartment in the US and currently live in a London brick house so I am attached to it as a building material! And I wouldn't say that rain-soaked dark sandstone under a grey Fife sky was a sight to gladden the heart.
Asking people queuing for lottery tickets is going to understate the Greens, I'd have thought.
In village culture here, and maybe most places, the unofficial admission price to anything 'free' in village hall type venues is to buy a raffle ticket for £1 (minimum). In consequence you sometimes have to bring home some unwanted piece of well intentioned stuff. This week it was an unidentifiable plant of some sort. Intuition or guesswork suggests to me that polling this group of gamblers would reach a large number unreached by any other sort of lottery.
I love those kind of raffles. Used to attend Cancer Research events as a friend was on the committee. The raffle prizes were mostly terrible and plentiful. Towards the end the cry would go out "Put it back in..." as no-one wanted the 'prize'. I swear some things went round for years.
I turn up, buy raffle tickets, don't ask my name to be recorded and leave before the draw. My wife is slower than me so sometimes, like this week, has to come home encumbered.
Stephen Fry told a story about carrying 'fake' tickets in your pocket to avoid having to buy some. It probably originated elsewhere.
I heard Gyles Brandreth tell that story about John Major doing that.
One suspects its an old chestnut
Can't see how it would work... you'd have top have every colour available just in case for the standard lottery using cloakroom tickets. Easier to just say 'I've already got some', it's not as if anyone is going to ask to check them.
Allegedly you have a few different colours (and raffle strips are very generic).
But yes I suspect its not something anyone actually does.
BTW - how is the house - can you send your link to build hub again? I've run out of grand designs/George Clarke programs and need my property porn!
The guys lugging the marble top reminds me when we had the top delivered for our kitchen island. Two parts, each required 8 guys busting a gut to shift them.
The island is so large that if Trump hears about it, he'll want to put the American flag on it...
Is that @Benpointer’s new house?! I rather like it. Certainly a hundred times nicer than the average, windowless, Barratt home red brick rabbit hutch
We should build more wooden houses. Red brick, unless used with great skill, is intrinsically ugly and bleak, especially in the British climate
I'm a fan of patterned brick, and use of glazed or blue engineered types. I quite like garden walls made out of blue brick, with red detailing. The last one I did I was thinking about a dog or space invader outline made in the contrasting colour, but the brickie was not keen.
The share of timber frame has increased substantially to around 25% in England, which is great, and is 75-80% in Scotland and in the self-build sector.
Brick is a great building material; it just needs to be employed with a bit of imagination.
A Barrat box would look little better in stone.
I think brick suffers a little if it is missing what a University friend used to call "niggely bits" ie detail. Being in an architectural family, I grew up browsing the "Brick Bulletin" and the "Concrete Quarterly", from meterials-based research associations. Bradford and Nottingham, and northern cities, are locations for brick.
So you want things like a contrasting plinth and string course somewhere, or a course of bricks set at 45 degrees below the gutter. I think it suffers in modern estate houses where everything is simple shapes with no overlaps at corners.
Often it is just skill and attention to detail, as the marginal cost for the look is very cheap in materials and labour, but requires more thinking time up front.
But that's a problem that plagues nearly everything these days, in these days of no money available and therefore undertrained workforces whether professional or blue collar. There are so many things which can be designed and built optimally for the same cost, but cost a fortune to retrofit fixes.
So the faulty version stays in place. My favourite example is still probably the Gadarene rush to roll out thousands of electric, before updating the "reference wheelchair" from the size of a wheelchair in 199x, to reflect the size of a wheelchair found by research in 2021. Obviously it will be built to the utter legal minimum, so perhaps 1/4 of wheelchairs will not fit the allocated spaces on the brand new buses.
So we are stuck with inadequate buses for another 25 years.
Asking people queuing for lottery tickets is going to understate the Greens, I'd have thought.
In village culture here, and maybe most places, the unofficial admission price to anything 'free' in village hall type venues is to buy a raffle ticket for £1 (minimum). In consequence you sometimes have to bring home some unwanted piece of well intentioned stuff. This week it was an unidentifiable plant of some sort. Intuition or guesswork suggests to me that polling this group of gamblers would reach a large number unreached by any other sort of lottery.
I love those kind of raffles. Used to attend Cancer Research events as a friend was on the committee. The raffle prizes were mostly terrible and plentiful. Towards the end the cry would go out "Put it back in..." as no-one wanted the 'prize'. I swear some things went round for years.
I turn up, buy raffle tickets, don't ask my name to be recorded and leave before the draw. My wife is slower than me so sometimes, like this week, has to come home encumbered.
Stephen Fry told a story about carrying 'fake' tickets in your pocket to avoid having to buy some. It probably originated elsewhere.
I heard Gyles Brandreth tell that story about John Major doing that.
One suspects its an old chestnut
Can't see how it would work... you'd have top have every colour available just in case for the standard lottery using cloakroom tickets. Easier to just say 'I've already got some', it's not as if anyone is going to ask to check them.
Allegedly you have a few different colours (and raffle strips are very generic).
But yes I suspect its not something anyone actually does.
BTW - how is the house - can you send your link to build hub again? I've run out of grand designs/George Clarke programs and need my property porn!
The guys lugging the marble top reminds me when we had the top delivered for our kitchen island. Two parts, each required 8 guys busting a gut to shift them.
The island is so large that if Trump hears about it, he'll want to put the American flag on it...
Is that @Benpointer’s new house?! I rather like it. Certainly a hundred times nicer than the average, windowless, Barratt home red brick rabbit hutch
We should build more wooden houses. Red brick, unless used with great skill, is intrinsically ugly and bleak, especially in the British climate
I'm a fan of patterned brick, and use of glazed or blue engineered types. I quite like garden walls made out of blue brick, with red detailing. The last one I did I was thinking about a dog or space invader outline made in the contrasting colour, but the brickie was not keen.
The share of timber frame has increased substantially to around 25% in England, which is great, and is 75-80% in Scotland and in the self-build sector.
Asking people queuing for lottery tickets is going to understate the Greens, I'd have thought.
In village culture here, and maybe most places, the unofficial admission price to anything 'free' in village hall type venues is to buy a raffle ticket for £1 (minimum). In consequence you sometimes have to bring home some unwanted piece of well intentioned stuff. This week it was an unidentifiable plant of some sort. Intuition or guesswork suggests to me that polling this group of gamblers would reach a large number unreached by any other sort of lottery.
I love those kind of raffles. Used to attend Cancer Research events as a friend was on the committee. The raffle prizes were mostly terrible and plentiful. Towards the end the cry would go out "Put it back in..." as no-one wanted the 'prize'. I swear some things went round for years.
I turn up, buy raffle tickets, don't ask my name to be recorded and leave before the draw. My wife is slower than me so sometimes, like this week, has to come home encumbered.
Stephen Fry told a story about carrying 'fake' tickets in your pocket to avoid having to buy some. It probably originated elsewhere.
I heard Gyles Brandreth tell that story about John Major doing that.
One suspects its an old chestnut
Can't see how it would work... you'd have top have every colour available just in case for the standard lottery using cloakroom tickets. Easier to just say 'I've already got some', it's not as if anyone is going to ask to check them.
Allegedly you have a few different colours (and raffle strips are very generic).
But yes I suspect its not something anyone actually does.
BTW - how is the house - can you send your link to build hub again? I've run out of grand designs/George Clarke programs and need my property porn!
The guys lugging the marble top reminds me when we had the top delivered for our kitchen island. Two parts, each required 8 guys busting a gut to shift them.
The island is so large that if Trump hears about it, he'll want to put the American flag on it...
Is that @Benpointer’s new house?! I rather like it. Certainly a hundred times nicer than the average, windowless, Barratt home red brick rabbit hutch
We should build more wooden houses. Red brick, unless used with great skill, is intrinsically ugly and bleak, especially in the British climate
Really? I've always thought of red brick as a very warm and sympathetic kind of material, human in scale and reassuringly earthy as well as a nod to Victorian industrial structures, Elizabethan Manor houses and the like. To my mind the red brick is the most British of construction materials, in fact. It opens up the possibility of some nice patterns too, although perhaps less so nowadays when you have a single row of bricks and a breeze block inner skin. We replicated the Flemish bond of the existing house when we built our kitchen extension and used second hand London stock bricks and it looks beautiful. Our brickie was exceptionally skilled though. And London bricks are more yellow than red I suppose.
'To my mind the red brick is the most British of construction materials'
English (with a soupçon of Welsh and Northern Irish) really. Sandstone is the essence of Scottish construction, with a bit of granite thrown in for us teuchters. I remember in the febrile run up to 2014 some idiot rightwing hack was claiming Scotch expertise by reminiscing about being brought up in red brick Glasgow tenements. After a bit of guffawing she was quickly put right.
True and I should have known better having grown up in a sandstone Scottish house, although the stone was facing IIRC, with a layer of red brick behind it. Part of our garden wall was red brick too, and there were certainly brick houses in the area although often painted or rendered or rough cast. I spent part of my childhood in a red brick Victorian terraced house in NE England, went to an aggressively red brick college, lived in a red brick apartment in the US and currently live in a London brick house so I am attached to it as a building material! And I wouldn't say that rain-soaked dark sandstone under a grey Fife sky was a sight to gladden the heart.
Try granite under a grey Aberdeenshire sky! The warmth of sandstone and glitter of granite in sunshine sort of makes up for it.
Russia's energy terror killed a Holocaust survivor in Kyiv.
On 13 January, plumbers found Yevgenia Besfamilnaya—"Baba Zhenya" to her neighbors—frozen solid in her apartment. Russian missiles had knocked out power and heat across the capital.
Outside: -18°C.
As an infant, Baba Zhenya somehow escaped Babi Yar, where Nazis murdered 34,000 Kyivan Jews in two days. An orphanage took her in and gave her a surname—Besfamilnaya, meaning "nameless.".. https://x.com/EuromaidanPress/status/2016551351136768387
“Like” is the wrong reaction to that.
One side is bombing military targets, the other is bombing civilian targets.
Asking people queuing for lottery tickets is going to understate the Greens, I'd have thought.
In village culture here, and maybe most places, the unofficial admission price to anything 'free' in village hall type venues is to buy a raffle ticket for £1 (minimum). In consequence you sometimes have to bring home some unwanted piece of well intentioned stuff. This week it was an unidentifiable plant of some sort. Intuition or guesswork suggests to me that polling this group of gamblers would reach a large number unreached by any other sort of lottery.
I love those kind of raffles. Used to attend Cancer Research events as a friend was on the committee. The raffle prizes were mostly terrible and plentiful. Towards the end the cry would go out "Put it back in..." as no-one wanted the 'prize'. I swear some things went round for years.
I turn up, buy raffle tickets, don't ask my name to be recorded and leave before the draw. My wife is slower than me so sometimes, like this week, has to come home encumbered.
Stephen Fry told a story about carrying 'fake' tickets in your pocket to avoid having to buy some. It probably originated elsewhere.
I heard Gyles Brandreth tell that story about John Major doing that.
One suspects its an old chestnut
Can't see how it would work... you'd have top have every colour available just in case for the standard lottery using cloakroom tickets. Easier to just say 'I've already got some', it's not as if anyone is going to ask to check them.
Allegedly you have a few different colours (and raffle strips are very generic).
But yes I suspect its not something anyone actually does.
BTW - how is the house - can you send your link to build hub again? I've run out of grand designs/George Clarke programs and need my property porn!
The guys lugging the marble top reminds me when we had the top delivered for our kitchen island. Two parts, each required 8 guys busting a gut to shift them.
The island is so large that if Trump hears about it, he'll want to put the American flag on it...
Is that @Benpointer’s new house?! I rather like it. Certainly a hundred times nicer than the average, windowless, Barratt home red brick rabbit hutch
We should build more wooden houses. Red brick, unless used with great skill, is intrinsically ugly and bleak, especially in the British climate
Really? I've always thought of red brick as a very warm and sympathetic kind of material, human in scale and reassuringly earthy as well as a nod to Victorian industrial structures, Elizabethan Manor houses and the like. To my mind the red brick is the most British of construction materials, in fact. It opens up the possibility of some nice patterns too, although perhaps less so nowadays when you have a single row of bricks and a breeze block inner skin. We replicated the Flemish bond of the existing house when we built our kitchen extension and used second hand London stock bricks and it looks beautiful. Our brickie was exceptionally skilled though. And London bricks are more yellow than red I suppose.
'To my mind the red brick is the most British of construction materials'
English (with a soupçon of Welsh and Northern Irish) really. Sandstone is the essence of Scottish construction, with a bit of granite thrown in for us teuchters. I remember in the febrile run up to 2014 some idiot rightwing hack was claiming Scotch expertise by reminiscing about being brought up in red brick Glasgow tenements. After a bit of guffawing she was quickly put right.
True and I should have known better having grown up in a sandstone Scottish house, although the stone was facing IIRC, with a layer of red brick behind it. Part of our garden wall was red brick too, and there were certainly brick houses in the area although often painted or rendered or rough cast. I spent part of my childhood in a red brick Victorian terraced house in NE England, went to an aggressively red brick college, lived in a red brick apartment in the US and currently live in a London brick house so I am attached to it as a building material! And I wouldn't say that rain-soaked dark sandstone under a grey Fife sky was a sight to gladden the heart.
Which raises the question: what architecture does look good in the wet? Personally, I always admire architectural renders which show the building on a rainy day. Anything can look good in the sun; it takes skill to look good in the rain. For me it is about how reflective the surface is: the new glass skyscrapers at the bottom of Deansgate look fantastic in the rain because they reflect the sky and the light, rather than absorb it. But glass isn't really practical in suburban housing. The point is, though: shiny.
As a city, York looks fantastic in the rain because of the way the stone of the pavements reflects the light.
Asking people queuing for lottery tickets is going to understate the Greens, I'd have thought.
In village culture here, and maybe most places, the unofficial admission price to anything 'free' in village hall type venues is to buy a raffle ticket for £1 (minimum). In consequence you sometimes have to bring home some unwanted piece of well intentioned stuff. This week it was an unidentifiable plant of some sort. Intuition or guesswork suggests to me that polling this group of gamblers would reach a large number unreached by any other sort of lottery.
I love those kind of raffles. Used to attend Cancer Research events as a friend was on the committee. The raffle prizes were mostly terrible and plentiful. Towards the end the cry would go out "Put it back in..." as no-one wanted the 'prize'. I swear some things went round for years.
I turn up, buy raffle tickets, don't ask my name to be recorded and leave before the draw. My wife is slower than me so sometimes, like this week, has to come home encumbered.
Stephen Fry told a story about carrying 'fake' tickets in your pocket to avoid having to buy some. It probably originated elsewhere.
I heard Gyles Brandreth tell that story about John Major doing that.
One suspects its an old chestnut
Can't see how it would work... you'd have top have every colour available just in case for the standard lottery using cloakroom tickets. Easier to just say 'I've already got some', it's not as if anyone is going to ask to check them.
Allegedly you have a few different colours (and raffle strips are very generic).
But yes I suspect its not something anyone actually does.
BTW - how is the house - can you send your link to build hub again? I've run out of grand designs/George Clarke programs and need my property porn!
The guys lugging the marble top reminds me when we had the top delivered for our kitchen island. Two parts, each required 8 guys busting a gut to shift them.
The island is so large that if Trump hears about it, he'll want to put the American flag on it...
Is that @Benpointer’s new house?! I rather like it. Certainly a hundred times nicer than the average, windowless, Barratt home red brick rabbit hutch
We should build more wooden houses. Red brick, unless used with great skill, is intrinsically ugly and bleak, especially in the British climate
I'm a fan of patterned brick, and use of glazed or blue engineered types. I quite like garden walls made out of blue brick, with red detailing. The last one I did I was thinking about a dog or space invader outline made in the contrasting colour, but the brickie was not keen.
The share of timber frame has increased substantially to around 25% in England, which is great, and is 75-80% in Scotland and in the self-build sector.
Brick is a great building material; it just needs to be employed with a bit of imagination.
A Barrat box would look little better in stone.
I think brick suffers a little if it is missing what a University friend used to call "niggely bits" ie detail. Being in an architectural family, I grew up browsing the "Brick Bulletin" and the "Concrete Quarterly", from meterials-based research associations. Bradford and Nottingham, and northern cities, are locations for brick.
So you want things like a contrasting plinth and string course somewhere, or a course of bricks set at 45 degrees below the gutter. I think it suffers in modern estate houses where everything is simple shapes with no overlaps at corners.
Often it is just skill and attention to detail, as the marginal cost for the look is very cheap in materials and labour, but requires more thinking time up front.
But that's a problem that plagues nearly everything these days, in these days of no money available and therefore undertrained workforces whether professional or blue collar. There are so many things which can be designed and built optimally for the same cost, but cost a fortune to retrofit fixes.
So the faulty version stays in place. My favourite example is still probably the Gadarene rush to roll out thousands of electric, before updating the "reference wheelchair" from the size of a wheelchair in 199x, to reflect the size of a wheelchair found by research in 2021. Obviously it will be built to the utter legal minimum, so perhaps 1/4 of wheelchairs will not fit the allocated spaces on the brand new buses.
So we are stuck with inadequate buses for another 25 years.
One sad thing is that decorative window structure etc are even easier/cheaper these days than in Victorian/Edwardian times.
We still have molds from those days - used to make replacements for the cast concrete stuff.
Asking people queuing for lottery tickets is going to understate the Greens, I'd have thought.
In village culture here, and maybe most places, the unofficial admission price to anything 'free' in village hall type venues is to buy a raffle ticket for £1 (minimum). In consequence you sometimes have to bring home some unwanted piece of well intentioned stuff. This week it was an unidentifiable plant of some sort. Intuition or guesswork suggests to me that polling this group of gamblers would reach a large number unreached by any other sort of lottery.
I love those kind of raffles. Used to attend Cancer Research events as a friend was on the committee. The raffle prizes were mostly terrible and plentiful. Towards the end the cry would go out "Put it back in..." as no-one wanted the 'prize'. I swear some things went round for years.
I turn up, buy raffle tickets, don't ask my name to be recorded and leave before the draw. My wife is slower than me so sometimes, like this week, has to come home encumbered.
Stephen Fry told a story about carrying 'fake' tickets in your pocket to avoid having to buy some. It probably originated elsewhere.
I heard Gyles Brandreth tell that story about John Major doing that.
One suspects its an old chestnut
Can't see how it would work... you'd have top have every colour available just in case for the standard lottery using cloakroom tickets. Easier to just say 'I've already got some', it's not as if anyone is going to ask to check them.
Allegedly you have a few different colours (and raffle strips are very generic).
But yes I suspect its not something anyone actually does.
BTW - how is the house - can you send your link to build hub again? I've run out of grand designs/George Clarke programs and need my property porn!
The guys lugging the marble top reminds me when we had the top delivered for our kitchen island. Two parts, each required 8 guys busting a gut to shift them.
The island is so large that if Trump hears about it, he'll want to put the American flag on it...
Is that @Benpointer’s new house?! I rather like it. Certainly a hundred times nicer than the average, windowless, Barratt home red brick rabbit hutch
We should build more wooden houses. Red brick, unless used with great skill, is intrinsically ugly and bleak, especially in the British climate
I'm a fan of patterned brick, and use of glazed or blue engineered types. I quite like garden walls made out of blue brick, with red detailing. The last one I did I was thinking about a dog or space invader outline made in the contrasting colour, but the brickie was not keen.
The share of timber frame has increased substantially to around 25% in England, which is great, and is 75-80% in Scotland and in the self-build sector.
Brick is a great building material; it just needs to be employed with a bit of imagination.
A Barrat box would look little better in stone.
I disagree. Where newbuilds are built in stone they look 100% better. Render, too. There is a good looking new estate you can see from the M6 near Lancaster which springs to mind.
Theres a long sad story about these (they're currently boarded up, and unlikely to ever be occupied, I think related to issue of contaminated land), but from an appearance point of view I think they are better than 90% of new builds.
The biggest problem is simply that we restrict land supply then build far too densely, which means it all looks "wrong" even when built in the local style. There's an estate gone up recently near me - the houses themselves are quite pretty, but of a style that you'd expect to find sat in half an acre - they look ridiculous piled up together on a postage stamp each.
Asking people queuing for lottery tickets is going to understate the Greens, I'd have thought.
In village culture here, and maybe most places, the unofficial admission price to anything 'free' in village hall type venues is to buy a raffle ticket for £1 (minimum). In consequence you sometimes have to bring home some unwanted piece of well intentioned stuff. This week it was an unidentifiable plant of some sort. Intuition or guesswork suggests to me that polling this group of gamblers would reach a large number unreached by any other sort of lottery.
I love those kind of raffles. Used to attend Cancer Research events as a friend was on the committee. The raffle prizes were mostly terrible and plentiful. Towards the end the cry would go out "Put it back in..." as no-one wanted the 'prize'. I swear some things went round for years.
I turn up, buy raffle tickets, don't ask my name to be recorded and leave before the draw. My wife is slower than me so sometimes, like this week, has to come home encumbered.
Stephen Fry told a story about carrying 'fake' tickets in your pocket to avoid having to buy some. It probably originated elsewhere.
I heard Gyles Brandreth tell that story about John Major doing that.
One suspects its an old chestnut
Can't see how it would work... you'd have top have every colour available just in case for the standard lottery using cloakroom tickets. Easier to just say 'I've already got some', it's not as if anyone is going to ask to check them.
Allegedly you have a few different colours (and raffle strips are very generic).
But yes I suspect its not something anyone actually does.
BTW - how is the house - can you send your link to build hub again? I've run out of grand designs/George Clarke programs and need my property porn!
The guys lugging the marble top reminds me when we had the top delivered for our kitchen island. Two parts, each required 8 guys busting a gut to shift them.
The island is so large that if Trump hears about it, he'll want to put the American flag on it...
Is that @Benpointer’s new house?! I rather like it. Certainly a hundred times nicer than the average, windowless, Barratt home red brick rabbit hutch
We should build more wooden houses. Red brick, unless used with great skill, is intrinsically ugly and bleak, especially in the British climate
Really? I've always thought of red brick as a very warm and sympathetic kind of material, human in scale and reassuringly earthy as well as a nod to Victorian industrial structures, Elizabethan Manor houses and the like. To my mind the red brick is the most British of construction materials, in fact. It opens up the possibility of some nice patterns too, although perhaps less so nowadays when you have a single row of bricks and a breeze block inner skin. We replicated the Flemish bond of the existing house when we built our kitchen extension and used second hand London stock bricks and it looks beautiful. Our brickie was exceptionally skilled though. And London bricks are more yellow than red I suppose.
'To my mind the red brick is the most British of construction materials'
English (with a soupçon of Welsh and Northern Irish) really. Sandstone is the essence of Scottish construction, with a bit of granite thrown in for us teuchters. I remember in the febrile run up to 2014 some idiot rightwing hack was claiming Scotch expertise by reminiscing about being brought up in red brick Glasgow tenements. After a bit of guffawing she was quickly put right.
True and I should have known better having grown up in a sandstone Scottish house, although the stone was facing IIRC, with a layer of red brick behind it. Part of our garden wall was red brick too, and there were certainly brick houses in the area although often painted or rendered or rough cast. I spent part of my childhood in a red brick Victorian terraced house in NE England, went to an aggressively red brick college, lived in a red brick apartment in the US and currently live in a London brick house so I am attached to it as a building material! And I wouldn't say that rain-soaked dark sandstone under a grey Fife sky was a sight to gladden the heart.
Which raises the question: what architecture does look good in the wet? Personally, I always admire architectural renders which show the building on a rainy day. Anything can look good in the sun; it takes skill to look good in the rain. For me it is about how reflective the surface is: the new glass skyscrapers at the bottom of Deansgate look fantastic in the rain because they reflect the sky and the light, rather than absorb it. But glass isn't really practical in suburban housing. The point is, though: shiny.
As a city, York looks fantastic in the rain because of the way the stone of the pavements reflects the light.
Crushed shell harling in the Hebrides glistens beautifully. If you trip and catch yourself on it you'll cut your hand up. IYKYK.
Russia's energy terror killed a Holocaust survivor in Kyiv.
On 13 January, plumbers found Yevgenia Besfamilnaya—"Baba Zhenya" to her neighbors—frozen solid in her apartment. Russian missiles had knocked out power and heat across the capital.
Outside: -18°C.
As an infant, Baba Zhenya somehow escaped Babi Yar, where Nazis murdered 34,000 Kyivan Jews in two days. An orphanage took her in and gave her a surname—Besfamilnaya, meaning "nameless.".. https://x.com/EuromaidanPress/status/2016551351136768387
“Like” is the wrong reaction to that.
One side is bombing military targets, the other is bombing civilian targets.
Puck Futin, arm Ukraine.
Horrible though it is, bombing civilian targets shows Russian incompetence.
If they were focusing on bombing military targets, they would be doing more harm.
Asking people queuing for lottery tickets is going to understate the Greens, I'd have thought.
In village culture here, and maybe most places, the unofficial admission price to anything 'free' in village hall type venues is to buy a raffle ticket for £1 (minimum). In consequence you sometimes have to bring home some unwanted piece of well intentioned stuff. This week it was an unidentifiable plant of some sort. Intuition or guesswork suggests to me that polling this group of gamblers would reach a large number unreached by any other sort of lottery.
I love those kind of raffles. Used to attend Cancer Research events as a friend was on the committee. The raffle prizes were mostly terrible and plentiful. Towards the end the cry would go out "Put it back in..." as no-one wanted the 'prize'. I swear some things went round for years.
I turn up, buy raffle tickets, don't ask my name to be recorded and leave before the draw. My wife is slower than me so sometimes, like this week, has to come home encumbered.
Stephen Fry told a story about carrying 'fake' tickets in your pocket to avoid having to buy some. It probably originated elsewhere.
I heard Gyles Brandreth tell that story about John Major doing that.
One suspects its an old chestnut
Can't see how it would work... you'd have top have every colour available just in case for the standard lottery using cloakroom tickets. Easier to just say 'I've already got some', it's not as if anyone is going to ask to check them.
Allegedly you have a few different colours (and raffle strips are very generic).
But yes I suspect its not something anyone actually does.
BTW - how is the house - can you send your link to build hub again? I've run out of grand designs/George Clarke programs and need my property porn!
The guys lugging the marble top reminds me when we had the top delivered for our kitchen island. Two parts, each required 8 guys busting a gut to shift them.
The island is so large that if Trump hears about it, he'll want to put the American flag on it...
Is that @Benpointer’s new house?! I rather like it. Certainly a hundred times nicer than the average, windowless, Barratt home red brick rabbit hutch
We should build more wooden houses. Red brick, unless used with great skill, is intrinsically ugly and bleak, especially in the British climate
Really? I've always thought of red brick as a very warm and sympathetic kind of material, human in scale and reassuringly earthy as well as a nod to Victorian industrial structures, Elizabethan Manor houses and the like. To my mind the red brick is the most British of construction materials, in fact. It opens up the possibility of some nice patterns too, although perhaps less so nowadays when you have a single row of bricks and a breeze block inner skin. We replicated the Flemish bond of the existing house when we built our kitchen extension and used second hand London stock bricks and it looks beautiful. Our brickie was exceptionally skilled though. And London bricks are more yellow than red I suppose.
'To my mind the red brick is the most British of construction materials'
English (with a soupçon of Welsh and Northern Irish) really. Sandstone is the essence of Scottish construction, with a bit of granite thrown in for us teuchters. I remember in the febrile run up to 2014 some idiot rightwing hack was claiming Scotch expertise by reminiscing about being brought up in red brick Glasgow tenements. After a bit of guffawing she was quickly put right.
True and I should have known better having grown up in a sandstone Scottish house, although the stone was facing IIRC, with a layer of red brick behind it. Part of our garden wall was red brick too, and there were certainly brick houses in the area although often painted or rendered or rough cast. I spent part of my childhood in a red brick Victorian terraced house in NE England, went to an aggressively red brick college, lived in a red brick apartment in the US and currently live in a London brick house so I am attached to it as a building material! And I wouldn't say that rain-soaked dark sandstone under a grey Fife sky was a sight to gladden the heart.
Which raises the question: what architecture does look good in the wet? Personally, I always admire architectural renders which show the building on a rainy day. Anything can look good in the sun; it takes skill to look good in the rain. For me it is about how reflective the surface is: the new glass skyscrapers at the bottom of Deansgate look fantastic in the rain because they reflect the sky and the light, rather than absorb it. But glass isn't really practical in suburban housing. The point is, though: shiny.
As a city, York looks fantastic in the rain because of the way the stone of the pavements reflects the light.
I’ve probably become more reactionary in my artistic taste over the years, but I’ve found a recent appreciation; of the Victorian painter John Atkinson Grimshaw who was a master of cobbles & pavements reflecting light in twilight. Below is Leeds though he painted all over the place, including Glasgow.
FON’s numbers are not implausible, but 30% is close to Reform’s ceiling in a strongly left wing constituency, in which only the Denton wards can be considered good territory for them.
Russia's energy terror killed a Holocaust survivor in Kyiv.
On 13 January, plumbers found Yevgenia Besfamilnaya—"Baba Zhenya" to her neighbors—frozen solid in her apartment. Russian missiles had knocked out power and heat across the capital.
Outside: -18°C.
As an infant, Baba Zhenya somehow escaped Babi Yar, where Nazis murdered 34,000 Kyivan Jews in two days. An orphanage took her in and gave her a surname—Besfamilnaya, meaning "nameless.".. https://x.com/EuromaidanPress/status/2016551351136768387
“Like” is the wrong reaction to that.
One side is bombing military targets, the other is bombing civilian targets.
Puck Futin, arm Ukraine.
Horrible though it is, bombing civilian targets shows Russian incompetence.
If they were focusing on bombing military targets, they would be doing more harm.
Indeed, but there are rules of war, and bombing substations in residential areas in Kiev is a war crime.
War sucks, but if you sign up to defend your country you know what’s happening.
Freezing old ladies to death in their homes is not the same.
Asking people queuing for lottery tickets is going to understate the Greens, I'd have thought.
In village culture here, and maybe most places, the unofficial admission price to anything 'free' in village hall type venues is to buy a raffle ticket for £1 (minimum). In consequence you sometimes have to bring home some unwanted piece of well intentioned stuff. This week it was an unidentifiable plant of some sort. Intuition or guesswork suggests to me that polling this group of gamblers would reach a large number unreached by any other sort of lottery.
I love those kind of raffles. Used to attend Cancer Research events as a friend was on the committee. The raffle prizes were mostly terrible and plentiful. Towards the end the cry would go out "Put it back in..." as no-one wanted the 'prize'. I swear some things went round for years.
I turn up, buy raffle tickets, don't ask my name to be recorded and leave before the draw. My wife is slower than me so sometimes, like this week, has to come home encumbered.
Stephen Fry told a story about carrying 'fake' tickets in your pocket to avoid having to buy some. It probably originated elsewhere.
I heard Gyles Brandreth tell that story about John Major doing that.
One suspects its an old chestnut
Can't see how it would work... you'd have top have every colour available just in case for the standard lottery using cloakroom tickets. Easier to just say 'I've already got some', it's not as if anyone is going to ask to check them.
Allegedly you have a few different colours (and raffle strips are very generic).
But yes I suspect its not something anyone actually does.
BTW - how is the house - can you send your link to build hub again? I've run out of grand designs/George Clarke programs and need my property porn!
The guys lugging the marble top reminds me when we had the top delivered for our kitchen island. Two parts, each required 8 guys busting a gut to shift them.
The island is so large that if Trump hears about it, he'll want to put the American flag on it...
Is that @Benpointer’s new house?! I rather like it. Certainly a hundred times nicer than the average, windowless, Barratt home red brick rabbit hutch
We should build more wooden houses. Red brick, unless used with great skill, is intrinsically ugly and bleak, especially in the British climate
Really? I've always thought of red brick as a very warm and sympathetic kind of material, human in scale and reassuringly earthy as well as a nod to Victorian industrial structures, Elizabethan Manor houses and the like. To my mind the red brick is the most British of construction materials, in fact. It opens up the possibility of some nice patterns too, although perhaps less so nowadays when you have a single row of bricks and a breeze block inner skin. We replicated the Flemish bond of the existing house when we built our kitchen extension and used second hand London stock bricks and it looks beautiful. Our brickie was exceptionally skilled though. And London bricks are more yellow than red I suppose.
'To my mind the red brick is the most British of construction materials'
English (with a soupçon of Welsh and Northern Irish) really. Sandstone is the essence of Scottish construction, with a bit of granite thrown in for us teuchters. I remember in the febrile run up to 2014 some idiot rightwing hack was claiming Scotch expertise by reminiscing about being brought up in red brick Glasgow tenements. After a bit of guffawing she was quickly put right.
True and I should have known better having grown up in a sandstone Scottish house, although the stone was facing IIRC, with a layer of red brick behind it. Part of our garden wall was red brick too, and there were certainly brick houses in the area although often painted or rendered or rough cast. I spent part of my childhood in a red brick Victorian terraced house in NE England, went to an aggressively red brick college, lived in a red brick apartment in the US and currently live in a London brick house so I am attached to it as a building material! And I wouldn't say that rain-soaked dark sandstone under a grey Fife sky was a sight to gladden the heart.
Which raises the question: what architecture does look good in the wet? Personally, I always admire architectural renders which show the building on a rainy day. Anything can look good in the sun; it takes skill to look good in the rain. For me it is about how reflective the surface is: the new glass skyscrapers at the bottom of Deansgate look fantastic in the rain because they reflect the sky and the light, rather than absorb it. But glass isn't really practical in suburban housing. The point is, though: shiny.
As a city, York looks fantastic in the rain because of the way the stone of the pavements reflects the light.
I’ve probably become more reactionary in my artistic taste over the years, but I’ve found a recent appreciation; of the Victorian painter John Atkinson Grimshaw who was a master of cobbles & pavements reflecting light in twilight. Below is Leeds though he painted all over the place, including Glasgow.
Does it come to this? We can’t afford a future, we are completely consumed with what we can have right now. We’re entitled. Somehow.
This infuriates me. It is immensely short sighted. We are selling out our children's future.
This is exactly what you would expect when an incoming Chancellor rules out using the main fiscal levers, in order to raise tax from a broad base. Instead you get lots of stupid inefficient rises as well as sector by sector cuts that have a disproportionate effect on those hit.
Listenting to Starmer this morning talking-up deals with China that almost amount to nothing, I am now more certain than ever that we would be better off if Sunak and Hunt were still in office.
Asking people queuing for lottery tickets is going to understate the Greens, I'd have thought.
In village culture here, and maybe most places, the unofficial admission price to anything 'free' in village hall type venues is to buy a raffle ticket for £1 (minimum). In consequence you sometimes have to bring home some unwanted piece of well intentioned stuff. This week it was an unidentifiable plant of some sort. Intuition or guesswork suggests to me that polling this group of gamblers would reach a large number unreached by any other sort of lottery.
I love those kind of raffles. Used to attend Cancer Research events as a friend was on the committee. The raffle prizes were mostly terrible and plentiful. Towards the end the cry would go out "Put it back in..." as no-one wanted the 'prize'. I swear some things went round for years.
I turn up, buy raffle tickets, don't ask my name to be recorded and leave before the draw. My wife is slower than me so sometimes, like this week, has to come home encumbered.
Stephen Fry told a story about carrying 'fake' tickets in your pocket to avoid having to buy some. It probably originated elsewhere.
I heard Gyles Brandreth tell that story about John Major doing that.
One suspects its an old chestnut
Can't see how it would work... you'd have top have every colour available just in case for the standard lottery using cloakroom tickets. Easier to just say 'I've already got some', it's not as if anyone is going to ask to check them.
Allegedly you have a few different colours (and raffle strips are very generic).
But yes I suspect its not something anyone actually does.
BTW - how is the house - can you send your link to build hub again? I've run out of grand designs/George Clarke programs and need my property porn!
The guys lugging the marble top reminds me when we had the top delivered for our kitchen island. Two parts, each required 8 guys busting a gut to shift them.
The island is so large that if Trump hears about it, he'll want to put the American flag on it...
Is that @Benpointer’s new house?! I rather like it. Certainly a hundred times nicer than the average, windowless, Barratt home red brick rabbit hutch
We should build more wooden houses. Red brick, unless used with great skill, is intrinsically ugly and bleak, especially in the British climate
Really? I've always thought of red brick as a very warm and sympathetic kind of material, human in scale and reassuringly earthy as well as a nod to Victorian industrial structures, Elizabethan Manor houses and the like. To my mind the red brick is the most British of construction materials, in fact. It opens up the possibility of some nice patterns too, although perhaps less so nowadays when you have a single row of bricks and a breeze block inner skin. We replicated the Flemish bond of the existing house when we built our kitchen extension and used second hand London stock bricks and it looks beautiful. Our brickie was exceptionally skilled though. And London bricks are more yellow than red I suppose.
'To my mind the red brick is the most British of construction materials'
English (with a soupçon of Welsh and Northern Irish) really. Sandstone is the essence of Scottish construction, with a bit of granite thrown in for us teuchters. I remember in the febrile run up to 2014 some idiot rightwing hack was claiming Scotch expertise by reminiscing about being brought up in red brick Glasgow tenements. After a bit of guffawing she was quickly put right.
True and I should have known better having grown up in a sandstone Scottish house, although the stone was facing IIRC, with a layer of red brick behind it. Part of our garden wall was red brick too, and there were certainly brick houses in the area although often painted or rendered or rough cast. I spent part of my childhood in a red brick Victorian terraced house in NE England, went to an aggressively red brick college, lived in a red brick apartment in the US and currently live in a London brick house so I am attached to it as a building material! And I wouldn't say that rain-soaked dark sandstone under a grey Fife sky was a sight to gladden the heart.
Which raises the question: what architecture does look good in the wet? Personally, I always admire architectural renders which show the building on a rainy day. Anything can look good in the sun; it takes skill to look good in the rain. For me it is about how reflective the surface is: the new glass skyscrapers at the bottom of Deansgate look fantastic in the rain because they reflect the sky and the light, rather than absorb it. But glass isn't really practical in suburban housing. The point is, though: shiny.
As a city, York looks fantastic in the rain because of the way the stone of the pavements reflects the light.
I’ve probably become more reactionary in my artistic taste over the years, but I’ve found a recent appreciation; of the Victorian painter John Atkinson Grimshaw who was a master of cobbles & pavements reflecting light in twilight. Below is Leeds though he painted all over the place, including Glasgow.
Nigel Farage opens investigation into Reform candidate over 'racist' and 'sickening' social media posts Mike Manning is Reform UK's candidate in an upcoming by-election on Redcar and Cleveland Borough Council
Asking people queuing for lottery tickets is going to understate the Greens, I'd have thought.
In village culture here, and maybe most places, the unofficial admission price to anything 'free' in village hall type venues is to buy a raffle ticket for £1 (minimum). In consequence you sometimes have to bring home some unwanted piece of well intentioned stuff. This week it was an unidentifiable plant of some sort. Intuition or guesswork suggests to me that polling this group of gamblers would reach a large number unreached by any other sort of lottery.
I love those kind of raffles. Used to attend Cancer Research events as a friend was on the committee. The raffle prizes were mostly terrible and plentiful. Towards the end the cry would go out "Put it back in..." as no-one wanted the 'prize'. I swear some things went round for years.
I turn up, buy raffle tickets, don't ask my name to be recorded and leave before the draw. My wife is slower than me so sometimes, like this week, has to come home encumbered.
Stephen Fry told a story about carrying 'fake' tickets in your pocket to avoid having to buy some. It probably originated elsewhere.
I heard Gyles Brandreth tell that story about John Major doing that.
One suspects its an old chestnut
Can't see how it would work... you'd have top have every colour available just in case for the standard lottery using cloakroom tickets. Easier to just say 'I've already got some', it's not as if anyone is going to ask to check them.
Allegedly you have a few different colours (and raffle strips are very generic).
But yes I suspect its not something anyone actually does.
BTW - how is the house - can you send your link to build hub again? I've run out of grand designs/George Clarke programs and need my property porn!
The guys lugging the marble top reminds me when we had the top delivered for our kitchen island. Two parts, each required 8 guys busting a gut to shift them.
The island is so large that if Trump hears about it, he'll want to put the American flag on it...
Is that @Benpointer’s new house?! I rather like it. Certainly a hundred times nicer than the average, windowless, Barratt home red brick rabbit hutch
We should build more wooden houses. Red brick, unless used with great skill, is intrinsically ugly and bleak, especially in the British climate
Really? I've always thought of red brick as a very warm and sympathetic kind of material, human in scale and reassuringly earthy as well as a nod to Victorian industrial structures, Elizabethan Manor houses and the like. To my mind the red brick is the most British of construction materials, in fact. It opens up the possibility of some nice patterns too, although perhaps less so nowadays when you have a single row of bricks and a breeze block inner skin. We replicated the Flemish bond of the existing house when we built our kitchen extension and used second hand London stock bricks and it looks beautiful. Our brickie was exceptionally skilled though. And London bricks are more yellow than red I suppose.
I've been trying to think of some exceptions to this - some of the mills of Greater Manchester, for example, or the new flats on the old Boddingtons Brewery site in Strangeways - but these all come under 'with great skill'. Certainly looking out the window of my suburban house, I can see four different types of red brick houses, none of which, under a leaden January sky, fill the heart with song. The three white-rendered houses I can see on the other hand are quite cheery.
There are a few very handsome streets of red brick houses I can think of within 400 yards of here. But all of them are Victorian or Edwardian. Actually, I can think of a couple of very handsome red brick houses on the street opposite - but both have been consciously built to look Victorian (one of which replacing a Victorian house which fell down after an unsuccessful cellar conversion), using more-expensive-than-necessary bricks. So it can be done. But it requires some commitment to quality and in these cases an architect not ruthlessly committed to modernism.
Exactly. In our climate the best solution is: paint them white, or maybe white, pale pink, green, blue in variation, like the most cheerful towns in Ireland or nicer bits of Scotland. Even on a winter’s day those houses will slightly lift the spirit
Dull rows of redbrick simply look cheap and bleak. Unless there is that “great skill”
"There is no date for when the visa agreement will be in force but the government is hoping this will happen as soon as possible"
How does Starmer always end up with an agreement about coming to an agreement. Given all this stuff is agreed prior to the visit and the very little they have to announce, the least you would be able to say is from today all UK passport holders can come to China visa free for 30 days.
Asking people queuing for lottery tickets is going to understate the Greens, I'd have thought.
In village culture here, and maybe most places, the unofficial admission price to anything 'free' in village hall type venues is to buy a raffle ticket for £1 (minimum). In consequence you sometimes have to bring home some unwanted piece of well intentioned stuff. This week it was an unidentifiable plant of some sort. Intuition or guesswork suggests to me that polling this group of gamblers would reach a large number unreached by any other sort of lottery.
I love those kind of raffles. Used to attend Cancer Research events as a friend was on the committee. The raffle prizes were mostly terrible and plentiful. Towards the end the cry would go out "Put it back in..." as no-one wanted the 'prize'. I swear some things went round for years.
I turn up, buy raffle tickets, don't ask my name to be recorded and leave before the draw. My wife is slower than me so sometimes, like this week, has to come home encumbered.
Stephen Fry told a story about carrying 'fake' tickets in your pocket to avoid having to buy some. It probably originated elsewhere.
I heard Gyles Brandreth tell that story about John Major doing that.
One suspects its an old chestnut
Can't see how it would work... you'd have top have every colour available just in case for the standard lottery using cloakroom tickets. Easier to just say 'I've already got some', it's not as if anyone is going to ask to check them.
Allegedly you have a few different colours (and raffle strips are very generic).
But yes I suspect its not something anyone actually does.
BTW - how is the house - can you send your link to build hub again? I've run out of grand designs/George Clarke programs and need my property porn!
The guys lugging the marble top reminds me when we had the top delivered for our kitchen island. Two parts, each required 8 guys busting a gut to shift them.
The island is so large that if Trump hears about it, he'll want to put the American flag on it...
Is that @Benpointer’s new house?! I rather like it. Certainly a hundred times nicer than the average, windowless, Barratt home red brick rabbit hutch
We should build more wooden houses. Red brick, unless used with great skill, is intrinsically ugly and bleak, especially in the British climate
Really? I've always thought of red brick as a very warm and sympathetic kind of material, human in scale and reassuringly earthy as well as a nod to Victorian industrial structures, Elizabethan Manor houses and the like. To my mind the red brick is the most British of construction materials, in fact. It opens up the possibility of some nice patterns too, although perhaps less so nowadays when you have a single row of bricks and a breeze block inner skin. We replicated the Flemish bond of the existing house when we built our kitchen extension and used second hand London stock bricks and it looks beautiful. Our brickie was exceptionally skilled though. And London bricks are more yellow than red I suppose.
I've been trying to think of some exceptions to this - some of the mills of Greater Manchester, for example, or the new flats on the old Boddingtons Brewery site in Strangeways - but these all come under 'with great skill'. Certainly looking out the window of my suburban house, I can see four different types of red brick houses, none of which, under a leaden January sky, fill the heart with song. The three white-rendered houses I can see on the other hand are quite cheery.
There are a few very handsome streets of red brick houses I can think of within 400 yards of here. But all of them are Victorian or Edwardian. Actually, I can think of a couple of very handsome red brick houses on the street opposite - but both have been consciously built to look Victorian (one of which replacing a Victorian house which fell down after an unsuccessful cellar conversion), using more-expensive-than-necessary bricks. So it can be done. But it requires some commitment to quality and in these cases an architect not ruthlessly committed to modernism.
An afterthought/clarification: I am certainly not saying all Victorian streets of redbrick housing are attractive. There were thousands of streets of slum housing which were utterly cheerless, and I can think of some pretty drab Victorian red brick near here. What I'm saying is that the majority of attractive red brick is Victorian/Edwardian.
Also, I agree with OLB: lighter bricks (like London or Hull) is rather cheerful.
Asking people queuing for lottery tickets is going to understate the Greens, I'd have thought.
In village culture here, and maybe most places, the unofficial admission price to anything 'free' in village hall type venues is to buy a raffle ticket for £1 (minimum). In consequence you sometimes have to bring home some unwanted piece of well intentioned stuff. This week it was an unidentifiable plant of some sort. Intuition or guesswork suggests to me that polling this group of gamblers would reach a large number unreached by any other sort of lottery.
I love those kind of raffles. Used to attend Cancer Research events as a friend was on the committee. The raffle prizes were mostly terrible and plentiful. Towards the end the cry would go out "Put it back in..." as no-one wanted the 'prize'. I swear some things went round for years.
I turn up, buy raffle tickets, don't ask my name to be recorded and leave before the draw. My wife is slower than me so sometimes, like this week, has to come home encumbered.
Stephen Fry told a story about carrying 'fake' tickets in your pocket to avoid having to buy some. It probably originated elsewhere.
I heard Gyles Brandreth tell that story about John Major doing that.
One suspects its an old chestnut
Can't see how it would work... you'd have top have every colour available just in case for the standard lottery using cloakroom tickets. Easier to just say 'I've already got some', it's not as if anyone is going to ask to check them.
Allegedly you have a few different colours (and raffle strips are very generic).
But yes I suspect its not something anyone actually does.
BTW - how is the house - can you send your link to build hub again? I've run out of grand designs/George Clarke programs and need my property porn!
The guys lugging the marble top reminds me when we had the top delivered for our kitchen island. Two parts, each required 8 guys busting a gut to shift them.
The island is so large that if Trump hears about it, he'll want to put the American flag on it...
Is that @Benpointer’s new house?! I rather like it. Certainly a hundred times nicer than the average, windowless, Barratt home red brick rabbit hutch
We should build more wooden houses. Red brick, unless used with great skill, is intrinsically ugly and bleak, especially in the British climate
Really? I've always thought of red brick as a very warm and sympathetic kind of material, human in scale and reassuringly earthy as well as a nod to Victorian industrial structures, Elizabethan Manor houses and the like. To my mind the red brick is the most British of construction materials, in fact. It opens up the possibility of some nice patterns too, although perhaps less so nowadays when you have a single row of bricks and a breeze block inner skin. We replicated the Flemish bond of the existing house when we built our kitchen extension and used second hand London stock bricks and it looks beautiful. Our brickie was exceptionally skilled though. And London bricks are more yellow than red I suppose.
'To my mind the red brick is the most British of construction materials'
English (with a soupçon of Welsh and Northern Irish) really. Sandstone is the essence of Scottish construction, with a bit of granite thrown in for us teuchters. I remember in the febrile run up to 2014 some idiot rightwing hack was claiming Scotch expertise by reminiscing about being brought up in red brick Glasgow tenements. After a bit of guffawing she was quickly put right.
True and I should have known better having grown up in a sandstone Scottish house, although the stone was facing IIRC, with a layer of red brick behind it. Part of our garden wall was red brick too, and there were certainly brick houses in the area although often painted or rendered or rough cast. I spent part of my childhood in a red brick Victorian terraced house in NE England, went to an aggressively red brick college, lived in a red brick apartment in the US and currently live in a London brick house so I am attached to it as a building material! And I wouldn't say that rain-soaked dark sandstone under a grey Fife sky was a sight to gladden the heart.
Which raises the question: what architecture does look good in the wet? Personally, I always admire architectural renders which show the building on a rainy day. Anything can look good in the sun; it takes skill to look good in the rain. For me it is about how reflective the surface is: the new glass skyscrapers at the bottom of Deansgate look fantastic in the rain because they reflect the sky and the light, rather than absorb it. But glass isn't really practical in suburban housing. The point is, though: shiny.
As a city, York looks fantastic in the rain because of the way the stone of the pavements reflects the light.
I’ve probably become more reactionary in my artistic taste over the years, but I’ve found a recent appreciation; of the Victorian painter John Atkinson Grimshaw who was a master of cobbles & pavements reflecting light in twilight. Below is Leeds though he painted all over the place, including Glasgow.
Me too. (And I started off pretty reactionary.) That's my kinda shit.
We went to the Kelvingrove museum back in October. A nice little art collection. My favourite was of a tenement in the west end, covered in snow. It had a similar warmth against the weather to it. Next to it was sub idiotic modernist daubing by some Miro wannabe. It felt like a subtle bit of criticism by the curator. "All right, I'll display this crassness because I'm contractually obliged to, but place it next to someone who can portray life with skill and flair and allow the viewer to draw his own conclusions."
"There is no date for when the visa agreement will be in force but the government is hoping this will happen as soon as possible"
How does Starmer always end up with an agreement about coming to an agreement. Given all this stuff is agreed prior to the visit and the very little they have to announce, the least you would be able to say is from today all UK passport holders can come to China visa free for 30 days.
Could be worse, he could have announced unlimited Chinese visas for which the UK would pay China £1,000 each.
Does it come to this? We can’t afford a future, we are completely consumed with what we can have right now. We’re entitled. Somehow.
This infuriates me. It is immensely short sighted. We are selling out our children's future.
This is exactly what you would expect when an incoming Chancellor rules out using the main fiscal levers, in order to raise tax from a broad base. Instead you get lots of stupid inefficient rises as well as sector by sector cuts that have a disproportionate effect on those hit.
Listenting to Starmer this morning talking-up deals with China that almost amount to nothing, I am now more certain than ever that we would be better off if Sunak and Hunt were still in office.
Sunak and Hunt cut the capital budget too. Indeed there's a good FT graph somewhere showing the UK is absolutely shocking at long term government investment (building stuff, public health), and has been under governments of all stripes. I think the Poles are at nearly double what we do as a percentage of GDP (a GDP that is rapidly approaching ours).
Asking people queuing for lottery tickets is going to understate the Greens, I'd have thought.
In village culture here, and maybe most places, the unofficial admission price to anything 'free' in village hall type venues is to buy a raffle ticket for £1 (minimum). In consequence you sometimes have to bring home some unwanted piece of well intentioned stuff. This week it was an unidentifiable plant of some sort. Intuition or guesswork suggests to me that polling this group of gamblers would reach a large number unreached by any other sort of lottery.
I love those kind of raffles. Used to attend Cancer Research events as a friend was on the committee. The raffle prizes were mostly terrible and plentiful. Towards the end the cry would go out "Put it back in..." as no-one wanted the 'prize'. I swear some things went round for years.
I turn up, buy raffle tickets, don't ask my name to be recorded and leave before the draw. My wife is slower than me so sometimes, like this week, has to come home encumbered.
Stephen Fry told a story about carrying 'fake' tickets in your pocket to avoid having to buy some. It probably originated elsewhere.
I heard Gyles Brandreth tell that story about John Major doing that.
One suspects its an old chestnut
Can't see how it would work... you'd have top have every colour available just in case for the standard lottery using cloakroom tickets. Easier to just say 'I've already got some', it's not as if anyone is going to ask to check them.
Allegedly you have a few different colours (and raffle strips are very generic).
But yes I suspect its not something anyone actually does.
BTW - how is the house - can you send your link to build hub again? I've run out of grand designs/George Clarke programs and need my property porn!
The guys lugging the marble top reminds me when we had the top delivered for our kitchen island. Two parts, each required 8 guys busting a gut to shift them.
The island is so large that if Trump hears about it, he'll want to put the American flag on it...
Is that @Benpointer’s new house?! I rather like it. Certainly a hundred times nicer than the average, windowless, Barratt home red brick rabbit hutch
We should build more wooden houses. Red brick, unless used with great skill, is intrinsically ugly and bleak, especially in the British climate
Really? I've always thought of red brick as a very warm and sympathetic kind of material, human in scale and reassuringly earthy as well as a nod to Victorian industrial structures, Elizabethan Manor houses and the like. To my mind the red brick is the most British of construction materials, in fact. It opens up the possibility of some nice patterns too, although perhaps less so nowadays when you have a single row of bricks and a breeze block inner skin. We replicated the Flemish bond of the existing house when we built our kitchen extension and used second hand London stock bricks and it looks beautiful. Our brickie was exceptionally skilled though. And London bricks are more yellow than red I suppose.
'To my mind the red brick is the most British of construction materials'
English (with a soupçon of Welsh and Northern Irish) really. Sandstone is the essence of Scottish construction, with a bit of granite thrown in for us teuchters. I remember in the febrile run up to 2014 some idiot rightwing hack was claiming Scotch expertise by reminiscing about being brought up in red brick Glasgow tenements. After a bit of guffawing she was quickly put right.
True and I should have known better having grown up in a sandstone Scottish house, although the stone was facing IIRC, with a layer of red brick behind it. Part of our garden wall was red brick too, and there were certainly brick houses in the area although often painted or rendered or rough cast. I spent part of my childhood in a red brick Victorian terraced house in NE England, went to an aggressively red brick college, lived in a red brick apartment in the US and currently live in a London brick house so I am attached to it as a building material! And I wouldn't say that rain-soaked dark sandstone under a grey Fife sky was a sight to gladden the heart.
Which raises the question: what architecture does look good in the wet? Personally, I always admire architectural renders which show the building on a rainy day. Anything can look good in the sun; it takes skill to look good in the rain. For me it is about how reflective the surface is: the new glass skyscrapers at the bottom of Deansgate look fantastic in the rain because they reflect the sky and the light, rather than absorb it. But glass isn't really practical in suburban housing. The point is, though: shiny.
As a city, York looks fantastic in the rain because of the way the stone of the pavements reflects the light.
I’ve probably become more reactionary in my artistic taste over the years, but I’ve found a recent appreciation; of the Victorian painter John Atkinson Grimshaw who was a master of cobbles & pavements reflecting light in twilight. Below is Leeds though he painted all over the place, including Glasgow.
You can feel the cold and wet from that painting.
Very similar to Thomas Kincade. He is also brilliant with lights and reflections.
Nigel Farage opens investigation into Reform candidate over 'racist' and 'sickening' social media posts Mike Manning is Reform UK's candidate in an upcoming by-election on Redcar and Cleveland Borough Council
I think Nigel needs to make a decision here. Overtly racist, bigoted and demeaning language is becoming increasingly acceptable amongst the British Right, to the extent that using it has practically become a badge of virility. How long before 'cracking down' on it will cause more problems for Nigel than not? I abhor such attitudes myself, but in relation to Reform and its fellow travellers this is becoming a moral objection rather than a practical one.
I said at the time the 'reconsidering the decision' was just the government covering it's arse so that the WASPI judicial review couldn't say they didn't consider all evidence.
Does it come to this? We can’t afford a future, we are completely consumed with what we can have right now. We’re entitled. Somehow.
This infuriates me. It is immensely short sighted. We are selling out our children's future.
This is exactly what you would expect when an incoming Chancellor rules out using the main fiscal levers, in order to raise tax from a broad base. Instead you get lots of stupid inefficient rises as well as sector by sector cuts that have a disproportionate effect on those hit.
Listenting to Starmer this morning talking-up deals with China that almost amount to nothing, I am now more certain than ever that we would be better off if Sunak and Hunt were still in office.
Sunak and Hunt cut the capital budget too. Indeed there's a good FT graph somewhere showing the UK is absolutely shocking at long term government investment (building stuff, public health), and has been under governments of all stripes. I think the Poles are at nearly double what we do as a percentage of GDP (a GDP that is rapidly approaching ours).
Public sector infrastructure projects should be a continual pipeline not something that is started and stopped at the whim of 2 civil servants in the treasury
Asking people queuing for lottery tickets is going to understate the Greens, I'd have thought.
In village culture here, and maybe most places, the unofficial admission price to anything 'free' in village hall type venues is to buy a raffle ticket for £1 (minimum). In consequence you sometimes have to bring home some unwanted piece of well intentioned stuff. This week it was an unidentifiable plant of some sort. Intuition or guesswork suggests to me that polling this group of gamblers would reach a large number unreached by any other sort of lottery.
I love those kind of raffles. Used to attend Cancer Research events as a friend was on the committee. The raffle prizes were mostly terrible and plentiful. Towards the end the cry would go out "Put it back in..." as no-one wanted the 'prize'. I swear some things went round for years.
I turn up, buy raffle tickets, don't ask my name to be recorded and leave before the draw. My wife is slower than me so sometimes, like this week, has to come home encumbered.
Stephen Fry told a story about carrying 'fake' tickets in your pocket to avoid having to buy some. It probably originated elsewhere.
I heard Gyles Brandreth tell that story about John Major doing that.
One suspects its an old chestnut
Can't see how it would work... you'd have top have every colour available just in case for the standard lottery using cloakroom tickets. Easier to just say 'I've already got some', it's not as if anyone is going to ask to check them.
Allegedly you have a few different colours (and raffle strips are very generic).
But yes I suspect its not something anyone actually does.
BTW - how is the house - can you send your link to build hub again? I've run out of grand designs/George Clarke programs and need my property porn!
The guys lugging the marble top reminds me when we had the top delivered for our kitchen island. Two parts, each required 8 guys busting a gut to shift them.
The island is so large that if Trump hears about it, he'll want to put the American flag on it...
Is that @Benpointer’s new house?! I rather like it. Certainly a hundred times nicer than the average, windowless, Barratt home red brick rabbit hutch
We should build more wooden houses. Red brick, unless used with great skill, is intrinsically ugly and bleak, especially in the British climate
Really? I've always thought of red brick as a very warm and sympathetic kind of material, human in scale and reassuringly earthy as well as a nod to Victorian industrial structures, Elizabethan Manor houses and the like. To my mind the red brick is the most British of construction materials, in fact. It opens up the possibility of some nice patterns too, although perhaps less so nowadays when you have a single row of bricks and a breeze block inner skin. We replicated the Flemish bond of the existing house when we built our kitchen extension and used second hand London stock bricks and it looks beautiful. Our brickie was exceptionally skilled though. And London bricks are more yellow than red I suppose.
'To my mind the red brick is the most British of construction materials'
English (with a soupçon of Welsh and Northern Irish) really. Sandstone is the essence of Scottish construction, with a bit of granite thrown in for us teuchters. I remember in the febrile run up to 2014 some idiot rightwing hack was claiming Scotch expertise by reminiscing about being brought up in red brick Glasgow tenements. After a bit of guffawing she was quickly put right.
True and I should have known better having grown up in a sandstone Scottish house, although the stone was facing IIRC, with a layer of red brick behind it. Part of our garden wall was red brick too, and there were certainly brick houses in the area although often painted or rendered or rough cast. I spent part of my childhood in a red brick Victorian terraced house in NE England, went to an aggressively red brick college, lived in a red brick apartment in the US and currently live in a London brick house so I am attached to it as a building material! And I wouldn't say that rain-soaked dark sandstone under a grey Fife sky was a sight to gladden the heart.
Which raises the question: what architecture does look good in the wet? Personally, I always admire architectural renders which show the building on a rainy day. Anything can look good in the sun; it takes skill to look good in the rain. For me it is about how reflective the surface is: the new glass skyscrapers at the bottom of Deansgate look fantastic in the rain because they reflect the sky and the light, rather than absorb it. But glass isn't really practical in suburban housing. The point is, though: shiny.
As a city, York looks fantastic in the rain because of the way the stone of the pavements reflects the light.
I’ve probably become more reactionary in my artistic taste over the years, but I’ve found a recent appreciation; of the Victorian painter John Atkinson Grimshaw who was a master of cobbles & pavements reflecting light in twilight. Below is Leeds though he painted all over the place, including Glasgow.
You can feel the cold and wet from that painting.
I’m on a bus out of the toon at the moment. That’s exactly what it’s like
"There is no date for when the visa agreement will be in force but the government is hoping this will happen as soon as possible"
How does Starmer always end up with an agreement about coming to an agreement. Given all this stuff is agreed prior to the visit and the very little they have to announce, the least you would be able to say is from today all UK passport holders can come to China visa free for 30 days.
It will turn out to be a one tourist in, one tourist out agreement.
Asking people queuing for lottery tickets is going to understate the Greens, I'd have thought.
In village culture here, and maybe most places, the unofficial admission price to anything 'free' in village hall type venues is to buy a raffle ticket for £1 (minimum). In consequence you sometimes have to bring home some unwanted piece of well intentioned stuff. This week it was an unidentifiable plant of some sort. Intuition or guesswork suggests to me that polling this group of gamblers would reach a large number unreached by any other sort of lottery.
I love those kind of raffles. Used to attend Cancer Research events as a friend was on the committee. The raffle prizes were mostly terrible and plentiful. Towards the end the cry would go out "Put it back in..." as no-one wanted the 'prize'. I swear some things went round for years.
I turn up, buy raffle tickets, don't ask my name to be recorded and leave before the draw. My wife is slower than me so sometimes, like this week, has to come home encumbered.
Stephen Fry told a story about carrying 'fake' tickets in your pocket to avoid having to buy some. It probably originated elsewhere.
I heard Gyles Brandreth tell that story about John Major doing that.
One suspects its an old chestnut
Can't see how it would work... you'd have top have every colour available just in case for the standard lottery using cloakroom tickets. Easier to just say 'I've already got some', it's not as if anyone is going to ask to check them.
Allegedly you have a few different colours (and raffle strips are very generic).
But yes I suspect its not something anyone actually does.
BTW - how is the house - can you send your link to build hub again? I've run out of grand designs/George Clarke programs and need my property porn!
The guys lugging the marble top reminds me when we had the top delivered for our kitchen island. Two parts, each required 8 guys busting a gut to shift them.
The island is so large that if Trump hears about it, he'll want to put the American flag on it...
Is that @Benpointer’s new house?! I rather like it. Certainly a hundred times nicer than the average, windowless, Barratt home red brick rabbit hutch
We should build more wooden houses. Red brick, unless used with great skill, is intrinsically ugly and bleak, especially in the British climate
Really? I've always thought of red brick as a very warm and sympathetic kind of material, human in scale and reassuringly earthy as well as a nod to Victorian industrial structures, Elizabethan Manor houses and the like. To my mind the red brick is the most British of construction materials, in fact. It opens up the possibility of some nice patterns too, although perhaps less so nowadays when you have a single row of bricks and a breeze block inner skin. We replicated the Flemish bond of the existing house when we built our kitchen extension and used second hand London stock bricks and it looks beautiful. Our brickie was exceptionally skilled though. And London bricks are more yellow than red I suppose.
'To my mind the red brick is the most British of construction materials'
English (with a soupçon of Welsh and Northern Irish) really. Sandstone is the essence of Scottish construction, with a bit of granite thrown in for us teuchters. I remember in the febrile run up to 2014 some idiot rightwing hack was claiming Scotch expertise by reminiscing about being brought up in red brick Glasgow tenements. After a bit of guffawing she was quickly put right.
True and I should have known better having grown up in a sandstone Scottish house, although the stone was facing IIRC, with a layer of red brick behind it. Part of our garden wall was red brick too, and there were certainly brick houses in the area although often painted or rendered or rough cast. I spent part of my childhood in a red brick Victorian terraced house in NE England, went to an aggressively red brick college, lived in a red brick apartment in the US and currently live in a London brick house so I am attached to it as a building material! And I wouldn't say that rain-soaked dark sandstone under a grey Fife sky was a sight to gladden the heart.
Which raises the question: what architecture does look good in the wet? Personally, I always admire architectural renders which show the building on a rainy day. Anything can look good in the sun; it takes skill to look good in the rain. For me it is about how reflective the surface is: the new glass skyscrapers at the bottom of Deansgate look fantastic in the rain because they reflect the sky and the light, rather than absorb it. But glass isn't really practical in suburban housing. The point is, though: shiny.
As a city, York looks fantastic in the rain because of the way the stone of the pavements reflects the light.
I’ve probably become more reactionary in my artistic taste over the years, but I’ve found a recent appreciation; of the Victorian painter John Atkinson Grimshaw who was a master of cobbles & pavements reflecting light in twilight. Below is Leeds though he painted all over the place, including Glasgow.
You can feel the cold and wet from that painting.
Very similar to Thomas Kincade. He is also brilliant with lights and reflections.
This is a top-tier shit-post. Unless you mean it, of course.
I said at the time the 'reconsidering the decision' was just the government covering it's arse so that the WASPI judicial review couldn't say they didn't consider all evidence.
Good to see that's how's it's played out.
To your credit you did say exactly that and have been proved right 👍
Does it come to this? We can’t afford a future, we are completely consumed with what we can have right now. We’re entitled. Somehow.
This infuriates me. It is immensely short sighted. We are selling out our children's future.
This is exactly what you would expect when an incoming Chancellor rules out using the main fiscal levers, in order to raise tax from a broad base. Instead you get lots of stupid inefficient rises as well as sector by sector cuts that have a disproportionate effect on those hit.
Listenting to Starmer this morning talking-up deals with China that almost amount to nothing, I am now more certain than ever that we would be better off if Sunak and Hunt were still in office.
Sunak and Hunt cut the capital budget too. Indeed there's a good FT graph somewhere showing the UK is absolutely shocking at long term government investment (building stuff, public health), and has been under governments of all stripes. I think the Poles are at nearly double what we do as a percentage of GDP (a GDP that is rapidly approaching ours).
Public sector infrastructure projects should be a continual pipeline not something that is started and stopped at the whim of 2 civil servants in the treasury
My first law would be cancelling projects must take at least as long as approving them. That might actually reduce the number approved, but those that are would experience much less uncertainty and stimulate actual investment.
Your regular reminder that HS2 was so expensive partly because contractors were so worried about it being cancelled and couldn't commit to a 20+ year programme of investment. And they were right to be so.
Does it come to this? We can’t afford a future, we are completely consumed with what we can have right now. We’re entitled. Somehow.
This infuriates me. It is immensely short sighted. We are selling out our children's future.
This is exactly what you would expect when an incoming Chancellor rules out using the main fiscal levers, in order to raise tax from a broad base. Instead you get lots of stupid inefficient rises as well as sector by sector cuts that have a disproportionate effect on those hit.
Listenting to Starmer this morning talking-up deals with China that almost amount to nothing, I am now more certain than ever that we would be better off if Sunak and Hunt were still in office.
Sunak and Hunt cut the capital budget too. Indeed there's a good FT graph somewhere showing the UK is absolutely shocking at long term government investment (building stuff, public health), and has been under governments of all stripes. I think the Poles are at nearly double what we do as a percentage of GDP (a GDP that is rapidly approaching ours).
Public sector infrastructure projects should be a continual pipeline not something that is started and stopped at the whim of 2 civil servants in the treasury
You’re right but how do we practically get to that’ ?
So Republican Alabama Rep.Barry Moore held a town hall in Baldwin County where he was asked why immigrants aren’t getting due process & he said they aren’t allowed it & his constituents let him know he was full of crap & it’s a violation of the Constitution & he fled out the back
Asking people queuing for lottery tickets is going to understate the Greens, I'd have thought.
In village culture here, and maybe most places, the unofficial admission price to anything 'free' in village hall type venues is to buy a raffle ticket for £1 (minimum). In consequence you sometimes have to bring home some unwanted piece of well intentioned stuff. This week it was an unidentifiable plant of some sort. Intuition or guesswork suggests to me that polling this group of gamblers would reach a large number unreached by any other sort of lottery.
I love those kind of raffles. Used to attend Cancer Research events as a friend was on the committee. The raffle prizes were mostly terrible and plentiful. Towards the end the cry would go out "Put it back in..." as no-one wanted the 'prize'. I swear some things went round for years.
I turn up, buy raffle tickets, don't ask my name to be recorded and leave before the draw. My wife is slower than me so sometimes, like this week, has to come home encumbered.
Stephen Fry told a story about carrying 'fake' tickets in your pocket to avoid having to buy some. It probably originated elsewhere.
I heard Gyles Brandreth tell that story about John Major doing that.
One suspects its an old chestnut
Can't see how it would work... you'd have top have every colour available just in case for the standard lottery using cloakroom tickets. Easier to just say 'I've already got some', it's not as if anyone is going to ask to check them.
Allegedly you have a few different colours (and raffle strips are very generic).
But yes I suspect its not something anyone actually does.
BTW - how is the house - can you send your link to build hub again? I've run out of grand designs/George Clarke programs and need my property porn!
The guys lugging the marble top reminds me when we had the top delivered for our kitchen island. Two parts, each required 8 guys busting a gut to shift them.
The island is so large that if Trump hears about it, he'll want to put the American flag on it...
Is that @Benpointer’s new house?! I rather like it. Certainly a hundred times nicer than the average, windowless, Barratt home red brick rabbit hutch
We should build more wooden houses. Red brick, unless used with great skill, is intrinsically ugly and bleak, especially in the British climate
Really? I've always thought of red brick as a very warm and sympathetic kind of material, human in scale and reassuringly earthy as well as a nod to Victorian industrial structures, Elizabethan Manor houses and the like. To my mind the red brick is the most British of construction materials, in fact. It opens up the possibility of some nice patterns too, although perhaps less so nowadays when you have a single row of bricks and a breeze block inner skin. We replicated the Flemish bond of the existing house when we built our kitchen extension and used second hand London stock bricks and it looks beautiful. Our brickie was exceptionally skilled though. And London bricks are more yellow than red I suppose.
'To my mind the red brick is the most British of construction materials'
English (with a soupçon of Welsh and Northern Irish) really. Sandstone is the essence of Scottish construction, with a bit of granite thrown in for us teuchters. I remember in the febrile run up to 2014 some idiot rightwing hack was claiming Scotch expertise by reminiscing about being brought up in red brick Glasgow tenements. After a bit of guffawing she was quickly put right.
True and I should have known better having grown up in a sandstone Scottish house, although the stone was facing IIRC, with a layer of red brick behind it. Part of our garden wall was red brick too, and there were certainly brick houses in the area although often painted or rendered or rough cast. I spent part of my childhood in a red brick Victorian terraced house in NE England, went to an aggressively red brick college, lived in a red brick apartment in the US and currently live in a London brick house so I am attached to it as a building material! And I wouldn't say that rain-soaked dark sandstone under a grey Fife sky was a sight to gladden the heart.
Which raises the question: what architecture does look good in the wet? Personally, I always admire architectural renders which show the building on a rainy day. Anything can look good in the sun; it takes skill to look good in the rain. For me it is about how reflective the surface is: the new glass skyscrapers at the bottom of Deansgate look fantastic in the rain because they reflect the sky and the light, rather than absorb it. But glass isn't really practical in suburban housing. The point is, though: shiny.
As a city, York looks fantastic in the rain because of the way the stone of the pavements reflects the light.
Aberdeen (granite) does not look good in the rain. Bath (sandstone) looks OK. It would be interesting to hear what others think about other towns.
But their campaign is to maintain state pension inequality, and against the equality of pension age.
I know. It was always the issue. Their essential case was that they deserved to be treated differently to men. Its classic having cake and eating it.
Plus, I, who was so far from retirement when it was announced that I barely even heard of pensions, recall the changes being announced. On the news on the TV, radio in the papers. Etc. There was never a case. They are just playing the victim card.
Oh know I wanted to retire at 60 and then it was all snatched away...
Asking people queuing for lottery tickets is going to understate the Greens, I'd have thought.
In village culture here, and maybe most places, the unofficial admission price to anything 'free' in village hall type venues is to buy a raffle ticket for £1 (minimum). In consequence you sometimes have to bring home some unwanted piece of well intentioned stuff. This week it was an unidentifiable plant of some sort. Intuition or guesswork suggests to me that polling this group of gamblers would reach a large number unreached by any other sort of lottery.
I love those kind of raffles. Used to attend Cancer Research events as a friend was on the committee. The raffle prizes were mostly terrible and plentiful. Towards the end the cry would go out "Put it back in..." as no-one wanted the 'prize'. I swear some things went round for years.
I turn up, buy raffle tickets, don't ask my name to be recorded and leave before the draw. My wife is slower than me so sometimes, like this week, has to come home encumbered.
Stephen Fry told a story about carrying 'fake' tickets in your pocket to avoid having to buy some. It probably originated elsewhere.
I heard Gyles Brandreth tell that story about John Major doing that.
One suspects its an old chestnut
Can't see how it would work... you'd have top have every colour available just in case for the standard lottery using cloakroom tickets. Easier to just say 'I've already got some', it's not as if anyone is going to ask to check them.
Allegedly you have a few different colours (and raffle strips are very generic).
But yes I suspect its not something anyone actually does.
BTW - how is the house - can you send your link to build hub again? I've run out of grand designs/George Clarke programs and need my property porn!
The guys lugging the marble top reminds me when we had the top delivered for our kitchen island. Two parts, each required 8 guys busting a gut to shift them.
The island is so large that if Trump hears about it, he'll want to put the American flag on it...
Is that @Benpointer’s new house?! I rather like it. Certainly a hundred times nicer than the average, windowless, Barratt home red brick rabbit hutch
We should build more wooden houses. Red brick, unless used with great skill, is intrinsically ugly and bleak, especially in the British climate
Really? I've always thought of red brick as a very warm and sympathetic kind of material, human in scale and reassuringly earthy as well as a nod to Victorian industrial structures, Elizabethan Manor houses and the like. To my mind the red brick is the most British of construction materials, in fact. It opens up the possibility of some nice patterns too, although perhaps less so nowadays when you have a single row of bricks and a breeze block inner skin. We replicated the Flemish bond of the existing house when we built our kitchen extension and used second hand London stock bricks and it looks beautiful. Our brickie was exceptionally skilled though. And London bricks are more yellow than red I suppose.
'To my mind the red brick is the most British of construction materials'
English (with a soupçon of Welsh and Northern Irish) really. Sandstone is the essence of Scottish construction, with a bit of granite thrown in for us teuchters. I remember in the febrile run up to 2014 some idiot rightwing hack was claiming Scotch expertise by reminiscing about being brought up in red brick Glasgow tenements. After a bit of guffawing she was quickly put right.
True and I should have known better having grown up in a sandstone Scottish house, although the stone was facing IIRC, with a layer of red brick behind it. Part of our garden wall was red brick too, and there were certainly brick houses in the area although often painted or rendered or rough cast. I spent part of my childhood in a red brick Victorian terraced house in NE England, went to an aggressively red brick college, lived in a red brick apartment in the US and currently live in a London brick house so I am attached to it as a building material! And I wouldn't say that rain-soaked dark sandstone under a grey Fife sky was a sight to gladden the heart.
Which raises the question: what architecture does look good in the wet? Personally, I always admire architectural renders which show the building on a rainy day. Anything can look good in the sun; it takes skill to look good in the rain. For me it is about how reflective the surface is: the new glass skyscrapers at the bottom of Deansgate look fantastic in the rain because they reflect the sky and the light, rather than absorb it. But glass isn't really practical in suburban housing. The point is, though: shiny.
As a city, York looks fantastic in the rain because of the way the stone of the pavements reflects the light.
Aberdeen (granite) does not look good in the rain. Bath (sandstone) looks OK. It would be interesting to hear what others think about other towns.
Whitewashed Devonshire cob and thatch looks fine. As does genuine Tudor half timbered black and white. Basically: white rendering of some kind, because grey wintry Britain needs light and white
Within the realms of the possible, why did we abandon stucco? Is it really that pricey? The Nash Terraces looks glorious in any weather, possibly at their best on a bright winter day
If we can’t do any of that, just dump red brick and use London stockbrick everywhere, with white trimmings for cornices, porches, pediments. Ie Poundbury
OT - Nice to see people are finally ready to state the bloody obvious about Find Out Now, I'd rather they did a poll with a reasonable sample so we can test their methods. Even for those purposes this farce was totally useless.
I'll be watching and comparing the Scottish and Welsh polls and results to see what that tells us. Especially on FON and YouGov. Norstat are usually best in Scotland - if that holds then its good news for the SNP.
Asking people queuing for lottery tickets is going to understate the Greens, I'd have thought.
In village culture here, and maybe most places, the unofficial admission price to anything 'free' in village hall type venues is to buy a raffle ticket for £1 (minimum). In consequence you sometimes have to bring home some unwanted piece of well intentioned stuff. This week it was an unidentifiable plant of some sort. Intuition or guesswork suggests to me that polling this group of gamblers would reach a large number unreached by any other sort of lottery.
I love those kind of raffles. Used to attend Cancer Research events as a friend was on the committee. The raffle prizes were mostly terrible and plentiful. Towards the end the cry would go out "Put it back in..." as no-one wanted the 'prize'. I swear some things went round for years.
I turn up, buy raffle tickets, don't ask my name to be recorded and leave before the draw. My wife is slower than me so sometimes, like this week, has to come home encumbered.
Stephen Fry told a story about carrying 'fake' tickets in your pocket to avoid having to buy some. It probably originated elsewhere.
I heard Gyles Brandreth tell that story about John Major doing that.
One suspects its an old chestnut
Can't see how it would work... you'd have top have every colour available just in case for the standard lottery using cloakroom tickets. Easier to just say 'I've already got some', it's not as if anyone is going to ask to check them.
Allegedly you have a few different colours (and raffle strips are very generic).
But yes I suspect its not something anyone actually does.
BTW - how is the house - can you send your link to build hub again? I've run out of grand designs/George Clarke programs and need my property porn!
The guys lugging the marble top reminds me when we had the top delivered for our kitchen island. Two parts, each required 8 guys busting a gut to shift them.
The island is so large that if Trump hears about it, he'll want to put the American flag on it...
Is that @Benpointer’s new house?! I rather like it. Certainly a hundred times nicer than the average, windowless, Barratt home red brick rabbit hutch
We should build more wooden houses. Red brick, unless used with great skill, is intrinsically ugly and bleak, especially in the British climate
Really? I've always thought of red brick as a very warm and sympathetic kind of material, human in scale and reassuringly earthy as well as a nod to Victorian industrial structures, Elizabethan Manor houses and the like. To my mind the red brick is the most British of construction materials, in fact. It opens up the possibility of some nice patterns too, although perhaps less so nowadays when you have a single row of bricks and a breeze block inner skin. We replicated the Flemish bond of the existing house when we built our kitchen extension and used second hand London stock bricks and it looks beautiful. Our brickie was exceptionally skilled though. And London bricks are more yellow than red I suppose.
'To my mind the red brick is the most British of construction materials'
English (with a soupçon of Welsh and Northern Irish) really. Sandstone is the essence of Scottish construction, with a bit of granite thrown in for us teuchters. I remember in the febrile run up to 2014 some idiot rightwing hack was claiming Scotch expertise by reminiscing about being brought up in red brick Glasgow tenements. After a bit of guffawing she was quickly put right.
True and I should have known better having grown up in a sandstone Scottish house, although the stone was facing IIRC, with a layer of red brick behind it. Part of our garden wall was red brick too, and there were certainly brick houses in the area although often painted or rendered or rough cast. I spent part of my childhood in a red brick Victorian terraced house in NE England, went to an aggressively red brick college, lived in a red brick apartment in the US and currently live in a London brick house so I am attached to it as a building material! And I wouldn't say that rain-soaked dark sandstone under a grey Fife sky was a sight to gladden the heart.
Which raises the question: what architecture does look good in the wet? Personally, I always admire architectural renders which show the building on a rainy day. Anything can look good in the sun; it takes skill to look good in the rain. For me it is about how reflective the surface is: the new glass skyscrapers at the bottom of Deansgate look fantastic in the rain because they reflect the sky and the light, rather than absorb it. But glass isn't really practical in suburban housing. The point is, though: shiny.
As a city, York looks fantastic in the rain because of the way the stone of the pavements reflects the light.
I’ve probably become more reactionary in my artistic taste over the years, but I’ve found a recent appreciation; of the Victorian painter John Atkinson Grimshaw who was a master of cobbles & pavements reflecting light in twilight. Below is Leeds though he painted all over the place, including Glasgow.
Me too. (And I started off pretty reactionary.) That's my kinda shit.
We went to the Kelvingrove museum back in October. A nice little art collection. My favourite was of a tenement in the west end, covered in snow. It had a similar warmth against the weather to it. Next to it was sub idiotic modernist daubing by some Miro wannabe. It felt like a subtle bit of criticism by the curator. "All right, I'll display this crassness because I'm contractually obliged to, but place it next to someone who can portray life with skill and flair and allow the viewer to draw his own conclusions."
I’m guessing it was “Windows in the West” by Avril Paton. We have a few of her paintings, unfortunately only prints.
OT - Nice to see people are finally ready to state the bloody obvious about Find Out Now, I'd rather they did a poll with a reasonable sample so we can test their methods. Even for those purposes this farce was totally useless.
I'll be watching and comparing the Scottish and Welsh polls and results to see what that tells us. Especially on FON and YouGov. Norstat are usually best in Scotland - if that holds then its good news for the SNP.
I wonder whether Find Out Now have had a Ratner moment by issuing the Gorton and Denton poll. Who is now going to trust their other polls, or use them to produce polls for their organisation?
Asking people queuing for lottery tickets is going to understate the Greens, I'd have thought.
In village culture here, and maybe most places, the unofficial admission price to anything 'free' in village hall type venues is to buy a raffle ticket for £1 (minimum). In consequence you sometimes have to bring home some unwanted piece of well intentioned stuff. This week it was an unidentifiable plant of some sort. Intuition or guesswork suggests to me that polling this group of gamblers would reach a large number unreached by any other sort of lottery.
I love those kind of raffles. Used to attend Cancer Research events as a friend was on the committee. The raffle prizes were mostly terrible and plentiful. Towards the end the cry would go out "Put it back in..." as no-one wanted the 'prize'. I swear some things went round for years.
I turn up, buy raffle tickets, don't ask my name to be recorded and leave before the draw. My wife is slower than me so sometimes, like this week, has to come home encumbered.
Stephen Fry told a story about carrying 'fake' tickets in your pocket to avoid having to buy some. It probably originated elsewhere.
I heard Gyles Brandreth tell that story about John Major doing that.
One suspects its an old chestnut
Can't see how it would work... you'd have top have every colour available just in case for the standard lottery using cloakroom tickets. Easier to just say 'I've already got some', it's not as if anyone is going to ask to check them.
Allegedly you have a few different colours (and raffle strips are very generic).
But yes I suspect its not something anyone actually does.
BTW - how is the house - can you send your link to build hub again? I've run out of grand designs/George Clarke programs and need my property porn!
The guys lugging the marble top reminds me when we had the top delivered for our kitchen island. Two parts, each required 8 guys busting a gut to shift them.
The island is so large that if Trump hears about it, he'll want to put the American flag on it...
Is that @Benpointer’s new house?! I rather like it. Certainly a hundred times nicer than the average, windowless, Barratt home red brick rabbit hutch
We should build more wooden houses. Red brick, unless used with great skill, is intrinsically ugly and bleak, especially in the British climate
Really? I've always thought of red brick as a very warm and sympathetic kind of material, human in scale and reassuringly earthy as well as a nod to Victorian industrial structures, Elizabethan Manor houses and the like. To my mind the red brick is the most British of construction materials, in fact. It opens up the possibility of some nice patterns too, although perhaps less so nowadays when you have a single row of bricks and a breeze block inner skin. We replicated the Flemish bond of the existing house when we built our kitchen extension and used second hand London stock bricks and it looks beautiful. Our brickie was exceptionally skilled though. And London bricks are more yellow than red I suppose.
'To my mind the red brick is the most British of construction materials'
English (with a soupçon of Welsh and Northern Irish) really. Sandstone is the essence of Scottish construction, with a bit of granite thrown in for us teuchters. I remember in the febrile run up to 2014 some idiot rightwing hack was claiming Scotch expertise by reminiscing about being brought up in red brick Glasgow tenements. After a bit of guffawing she was quickly put right.
True and I should have known better having grown up in a sandstone Scottish house, although the stone was facing IIRC, with a layer of red brick behind it. Part of our garden wall was red brick too, and there were certainly brick houses in the area although often painted or rendered or rough cast. I spent part of my childhood in a red brick Victorian terraced house in NE England, went to an aggressively red brick college, lived in a red brick apartment in the US and currently live in a London brick house so I am attached to it as a building material! And I wouldn't say that rain-soaked dark sandstone under a grey Fife sky was a sight to gladden the heart.
Which raises the question: what architecture does look good in the wet? Personally, I always admire architectural renders which show the building on a rainy day. Anything can look good in the sun; it takes skill to look good in the rain. For me it is about how reflective the surface is: the new glass skyscrapers at the bottom of Deansgate look fantastic in the rain because they reflect the sky and the light, rather than absorb it. But glass isn't really practical in suburban housing. The point is, though: shiny.
As a city, York looks fantastic in the rain because of the way the stone of the pavements reflects the light.
I’ve probably become more reactionary in my artistic taste over the years, but I’ve found a recent appreciation; of the Victorian painter John Atkinson Grimshaw who was a master of cobbles & pavements reflecting light in twilight. Below is Leeds though he painted all over the place, including Glasgow.
Me too. (And I started off pretty reactionary.) That's my kinda shit.
We went to the Kelvingrove museum back in October. A nice little art collection. My favourite was of a tenement in the west end, covered in snow. It had a similar warmth against the weather to it. Next to it was sub idiotic modernist daubing by some Miro wannabe. It felt like a subtle bit of criticism by the curator. "All right, I'll display this crassness because I'm contractually obliged to, but place it next to someone who can portray life with skill and flair and allow the viewer to draw his own conclusions."
I’m guessing it was “Windows in the West” by Avril Paton. We have a few of her paintings, unfortunately only prints.
If the margin of error in the poll is +/-8% it's still useful in a minor way at telling us roughly how popular the parties are. Better than nothing in other words. Hopefully we'll get a more accurate poll soon.
Xi smiling broadly as he shakes Starmer's hand ahead of their talks. The Chinese have always liked dull, serious and bureaucratic UK PMs. Ted Heath was always very popular with the Chinese, also like Starmer far more than he was with UK voters "UK and China must build 'more sophisticated relationship', Starmer tells Xi - live updates - BBC News" https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/cly9p5kr2q7t
Starmer making his visit to China all about the "cost of living" in the UK shows him to be deeply unserious about geopolitics
Notwithstanding his general incompetence, Starmer's so far uneventful trip to China has elicited invective from PB's finest for promoting trade and being smaller than a toy bear.
Starmer stands at a diminutive 5ft 9. The same height as the statuesque Johnson.
yes we cannot wait to get those dinghy engine parts on Ali Express, what a Titan.
Wealthy Chinese buyers can now buy Solihull built Range Rovers unfettered. And Solihull residents can buy cheap Range Rover copies from Shanghai. Everyone's happy.
Wouldn't Burnham be wiser to STFU until the by-election is over?
There's a 95% chance that if another by-election seat becomes available for Burnham it'll be in a less safe seat than Gorton & Denton. So you can sort of understand why he's annoyed.
Asking people queuing for lottery tickets is going to understate the Greens, I'd have thought.
In village culture here, and maybe most places, the unofficial admission price to anything 'free' in village hall type venues is to buy a raffle ticket for £1 (minimum). In consequence you sometimes have to bring home some unwanted piece of well intentioned stuff. This week it was an unidentifiable plant of some sort. Intuition or guesswork suggests to me that polling this group of gamblers would reach a large number unreached by any other sort of lottery.
I love those kind of raffles. Used to attend Cancer Research events as a friend was on the committee. The raffle prizes were mostly terrible and plentiful. Towards the end the cry would go out "Put it back in..." as no-one wanted the 'prize'. I swear some things went round for years.
I turn up, buy raffle tickets, don't ask my name to be recorded and leave before the draw. My wife is slower than me so sometimes, like this week, has to come home encumbered.
Stephen Fry told a story about carrying 'fake' tickets in your pocket to avoid having to buy some. It probably originated elsewhere.
I heard Gyles Brandreth tell that story about John Major doing that.
One suspects its an old chestnut
Can't see how it would work... you'd have top have every colour available just in case for the standard lottery using cloakroom tickets. Easier to just say 'I've already got some', it's not as if anyone is going to ask to check them.
Allegedly you have a few different colours (and raffle strips are very generic).
But yes I suspect its not something anyone actually does.
BTW - how is the house - can you send your link to build hub again? I've run out of grand designs/George Clarke programs and need my property porn!
The guys lugging the marble top reminds me when we had the top delivered for our kitchen island. Two parts, each required 8 guys busting a gut to shift them.
The island is so large that if Trump hears about it, he'll want to put the American flag on it...
Is that @Benpointer’s new house?! I rather like it. Certainly a hundred times nicer than the average, windowless, Barratt home red brick rabbit hutch
We should build more wooden houses. Red brick, unless used with great skill, is intrinsically ugly and bleak, especially in the British climate
Really? I've always thought of red brick as a very warm and sympathetic kind of material, human in scale and reassuringly earthy as well as a nod to Victorian industrial structures, Elizabethan Manor houses and the like. To my mind the red brick is the most British of construction materials, in fact. It opens up the possibility of some nice patterns too, although perhaps less so nowadays when you have a single row of bricks and a breeze block inner skin. We replicated the Flemish bond of the existing house when we built our kitchen extension and used second hand London stock bricks and it looks beautiful. Our brickie was exceptionally skilled though. And London bricks are more yellow than red I suppose.
'To my mind the red brick is the most British of construction materials'
English (with a soupçon of Welsh and Northern Irish) really. Sandstone is the essence of Scottish construction, with a bit of granite thrown in for us teuchters. I remember in the febrile run up to 2014 some idiot rightwing hack was claiming Scotch expertise by reminiscing about being brought up in red brick Glasgow tenements. After a bit of guffawing she was quickly put right.
True and I should have known better having grown up in a sandstone Scottish house, although the stone was facing IIRC, with a layer of red brick behind it. Part of our garden wall was red brick too, and there were certainly brick houses in the area although often painted or rendered or rough cast. I spent part of my childhood in a red brick Victorian terraced house in NE England, went to an aggressively red brick college, lived in a red brick apartment in the US and currently live in a London brick house so I am attached to it as a building material! And I wouldn't say that rain-soaked dark sandstone under a grey Fife sky was a sight to gladden the heart.
Which raises the question: what architecture does look good in the wet? Personally, I always admire architectural renders which show the building on a rainy day. Anything can look good in the sun; it takes skill to look good in the rain. For me it is about how reflective the surface is: the new glass skyscrapers at the bottom of Deansgate look fantastic in the rain because they reflect the sky and the light, rather than absorb it. But glass isn't really practical in suburban housing. The point is, though: shiny.
As a city, York looks fantastic in the rain because of the way the stone of the pavements reflects the light.
Aberdeen (granite) does not look good in the rain. Bath (sandstone) looks OK. It would be interesting to hear what others think about other towns.
I was thinking that Aberdeen looked good in the wet, but you've made me realise that it only looks good when the sun comes out after it has finished raining - the way the light reflects off wet grey granite is very attractive. Your post reminded me that when it is dull and overcast or actually raining, it looks very cold and bleak indeed.
I think anything stucco'd looks good even in the rain - so Brighton, for example.
Xi smiling broadly as he shakes Starmer's hand ahead of their talks. The Chinese have always liked dull, serious and bureaucratic UK PMs. Ted Heath was always very popular with the Chinese, also like Starmer far more than he was with UK voters "UK and China must build 'more sophisticated relationship', Starmer tells Xi - live updates - BBC News" https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/cly9p5kr2q7t
Starmer making his visit to China all about the "cost of living" in the UK shows him to be deeply unserious about geopolitics
Notwithstanding his general incompetence, Starmer's so far uneventful trip to China has elicited invective from PB's finest for promoting trade and being smaller than a toy bear.
Starmer stands at a diminutive 5ft 9. The same height as the statuesque Johnson.
yes we cannot wait to get those dinghy engine parts on Ali Express, what a Titan.
Wealthy Chinese buyers can now buy Solihull built Range Rovers unfettered. And Solihull residents can buy cheap Range Rover copies from Shanghai. Everyone's happy.
But their campaign is to maintain state pension inequality, and against the equality of pension age.
I know. It was always the issue. Their essential case was that they deserved to be treated differently to men. Its classic having cake and eating it.
Plus, I, who was so far from retirement when it was announced that I barely even heard of pensions, recall the changes being announced. On the news on the TV, radio in the papers. Etc. There was never a case. They are just playing the victim card.
Oh know I wanted to retire at 60 and then it was all snatched away...
Same for me too, remember it well, 20+ years ago? And I can't really work out how they're financially disadvantaged - surely having to work for a few more years means their pension pots are bigger?
But their campaign is to maintain state pension inequality, and against the equality of pension age.
I know. It was always the issue. Their essential case was that they deserved to be treated differently to men. Its classic having cake and eating it.
Plus, I, who was so far from retirement when it was announced that I barely even heard of pensions, recall the changes being announced. On the news on the TV, radio in the papers. Etc. There was never a case. They are just playing the victim card.
Oh know I wanted to retire at 60 and then it was all snatched away...
Same for me too, remember it well, 20+ years ago? And I can't really work out how they're financially disadvantaged - surely having to work for a few more years means their pension pots are bigger?
But their campaign is to maintain state pension inequality, and against the equality of pension age.
I know. It was always the issue. Their essential case was that they deserved to be treated differently to men. Its classic having cake and eating it.
Plus, I, who was so far from retirement when it was announced that I barely even heard of pensions, recall the changes being announced. On the news on the TV, radio in the papers. Etc. There was never a case. They are just playing the victim card.
Oh know I wanted to retire at 60 and then it was all snatched away...
Same for me too, remember it well, 20+ years ago? And I can't really work out how they're financially disadvantaged - surely having to work for a few more years means their pension pots are bigger?
If the margin of error in the poll is +/-8% it's still useful in a minor way at telling us roughly how popular the parties are. Better than nothing in other words. Hopefully we'll get a more accurate poll soon.
Indeed, it tells us the Tories and Lib Dems are out the running.
But their campaign is to maintain state pension inequality, and against the equality of pension age.
I know. It was always the issue. Their essential case was that they deserved to be treated differently to men. Its classic having cake and eating it.
Plus, I, who was so far from retirement when it was announced that I barely even heard of pensions, recall the changes being announced. On the news on the TV, radio in the papers. Etc. There was never a case. They are just playing the victim card.
Oh know I wanted to retire at 60 and then it was all snatched away...
Same for me too, remember it well, 20+ years ago? And I can't really work out how they're financially disadvantaged - surely having to work for a few more years means their pension pots are bigger?
They didn't want to work for a few more years.
I get that, nor do I, but working extra years brings me more money, not less.
If the margin of error in the poll is +/-8% it's still useful in a minor way at telling us roughly how popular the parties are. Better than nothing in other words. Hopefully we'll get a more accurate poll soon.
Indeed, it tells us the Tories and Lib Dems are out the running.
Asking people queuing for lottery tickets is going to understate the Greens, I'd have thought.
In village culture here, and maybe most places, the unofficial admission price to anything 'free' in village hall type venues is to buy a raffle ticket for £1 (minimum). In consequence you sometimes have to bring home some unwanted piece of well intentioned stuff. This week it was an unidentifiable plant of some sort. Intuition or guesswork suggests to me that polling this group of gamblers would reach a large number unreached by any other sort of lottery.
I love those kind of raffles. Used to attend Cancer Research events as a friend was on the committee. The raffle prizes were mostly terrible and plentiful. Towards the end the cry would go out "Put it back in..." as no-one wanted the 'prize'. I swear some things went round for years.
I turn up, buy raffle tickets, don't ask my name to be recorded and leave before the draw. My wife is slower than me so sometimes, like this week, has to come home encumbered.
Stephen Fry told a story about carrying 'fake' tickets in your pocket to avoid having to buy some. It probably originated elsewhere.
I heard Gyles Brandreth tell that story about John Major doing that.
One suspects its an old chestnut
Can't see how it would work... you'd have top have every colour available just in case for the standard lottery using cloakroom tickets. Easier to just say 'I've already got some', it's not as if anyone is going to ask to check them.
Allegedly you have a few different colours (and raffle strips are very generic).
But yes I suspect its not something anyone actually does.
BTW - how is the house - can you send your link to build hub again? I've run out of grand designs/George Clarke programs and need my property porn!
The guys lugging the marble top reminds me when we had the top delivered for our kitchen island. Two parts, each required 8 guys busting a gut to shift them.
The island is so large that if Trump hears about it, he'll want to put the American flag on it...
Is that @Benpointer’s new house?! I rather like it. Certainly a hundred times nicer than the average, windowless, Barratt home red brick rabbit hutch
We should build more wooden houses. Red brick, unless used with great skill, is intrinsically ugly and bleak, especially in the British climate
Really? I've always thought of red brick as a very warm and sympathetic kind of material, human in scale and reassuringly earthy as well as a nod to Victorian industrial structures, Elizabethan Manor houses and the like. To my mind the red brick is the most British of construction materials, in fact. It opens up the possibility of some nice patterns too, although perhaps less so nowadays when you have a single row of bricks and a breeze block inner skin. We replicated the Flemish bond of the existing house when we built our kitchen extension and used second hand London stock bricks and it looks beautiful. Our brickie was exceptionally skilled though. And London bricks are more yellow than red I suppose.
'To my mind the red brick is the most British of construction materials'
English (with a soupçon of Welsh and Northern Irish) really. Sandstone is the essence of Scottish construction, with a bit of granite thrown in for us teuchters. I remember in the febrile run up to 2014 some idiot rightwing hack was claiming Scotch expertise by reminiscing about being brought up in red brick Glasgow tenements. After a bit of guffawing she was quickly put right.
True and I should have known better having grown up in a sandstone Scottish house, although the stone was facing IIRC, with a layer of red brick behind it. Part of our garden wall was red brick too, and there were certainly brick houses in the area although often painted or rendered or rough cast. I spent part of my childhood in a red brick Victorian terraced house in NE England, went to an aggressively red brick college, lived in a red brick apartment in the US and currently live in a London brick house so I am attached to it as a building material! And I wouldn't say that rain-soaked dark sandstone under a grey Fife sky was a sight to gladden the heart.
Which raises the question: what architecture does look good in the wet? Personally, I always admire architectural renders which show the building on a rainy day. Anything can look good in the sun; it takes skill to look good in the rain. For me it is about how reflective the surface is: the new glass skyscrapers at the bottom of Deansgate look fantastic in the rain because they reflect the sky and the light, rather than absorb it. But glass isn't really practical in suburban housing. The point is, though: shiny.
As a city, York looks fantastic in the rain because of the way the stone of the pavements reflects the light.
Aberdeen (granite) does not look good in the rain. Bath (sandstone) looks OK. It would be interesting to hear what others think about other towns.
Whitewashed Devonshire cob and thatch looks fine. As does genuine Tudor half timbered black and white. Basically: white rendering of some kind, because grey wintry Britain needs light and white
Within the realms of the possible, why did we abandon stucco? Is it really that pricey? The Nash Terraces looks glorious in any weather, possibly at their best on a bright winter day
If we can’t do any of that, just dump red brick and use London stockbrick everywhere, with white trimmings for cornices, porches, pediments. Ie Poundbury
King Charles III was right all along
I'm fond of traditional bright coloured farmhouses in the landscape with bright coloured rendering eg pink or yellow. Think the Tobermory seafront.
Personally I would never buy something rendered unless I could get proof that it had been there for a very long time, because it is always put on there to hide something. My own first house is an 1850 cottage which was pebble-dashed because the bricks are cheap crap that get sodden, but the render is the original stuff from the mid-Victorian period.
Equally I'd never paint brickwork, because that only guarantees you will have to repaint it every 10 years, and (unless the colour is chosen carefully) it will look poor. I'd even probably say that of the dull grey Scottish render, which is there to protect against the howling gales.
Stucco is a problem because it is used to cover poor quality speculative Georgian builds. One of the possible problems from leasehold reform is that stucco London will really suffer. For its impact it depends on constant colour in whole areas, which is enforced by freeholders such as the Grosvenor Estate. That right could be lost.
That is amusing and very Tele. Fine to not jump on that bandwagon btw but you wouldn't want to miss it entirely so welcome aboard. No seats left now though - you'll have to stand.
But their campaign is to maintain state pension inequality, and against the equality of pension age.
I know. It was always the issue. Their essential case was that they deserved to be treated differently to men. Its classic having cake and eating it.
Plus, I, who was so far from retirement when it was announced that I barely even heard of pensions, recall the changes being announced. On the news on the TV, radio in the papers. Etc. There was never a case. They are just playing the victim card.
Oh know I wanted to retire at 60 and then it was all snatched away...
Same for me too, remember it well, 20+ years ago? And I can't really work out how they're financially disadvantaged - surely having to work for a few more years means their pension pots are bigger?
Asking people queuing for lottery tickets is going to understate the Greens, I'd have thought.
In village culture here, and maybe most places, the unofficial admission price to anything 'free' in village hall type venues is to buy a raffle ticket for £1 (minimum). In consequence you sometimes have to bring home some unwanted piece of well intentioned stuff. This week it was an unidentifiable plant of some sort. Intuition or guesswork suggests to me that polling this group of gamblers would reach a large number unreached by any other sort of lottery.
I love those kind of raffles. Used to attend Cancer Research events as a friend was on the committee. The raffle prizes were mostly terrible and plentiful. Towards the end the cry would go out "Put it back in..." as no-one wanted the 'prize'. I swear some things went round for years.
I turn up, buy raffle tickets, don't ask my name to be recorded and leave before the draw. My wife is slower than me so sometimes, like this week, has to come home encumbered.
Stephen Fry told a story about carrying 'fake' tickets in your pocket to avoid having to buy some. It probably originated elsewhere.
I heard Gyles Brandreth tell that story about John Major doing that.
One suspects its an old chestnut
Can't see how it would work... you'd have top have every colour available just in case for the standard lottery using cloakroom tickets. Easier to just say 'I've already got some', it's not as if anyone is going to ask to check them.
Allegedly you have a few different colours (and raffle strips are very generic).
But yes I suspect its not something anyone actually does.
BTW - how is the house - can you send your link to build hub again? I've run out of grand designs/George Clarke programs and need my property porn!
The guys lugging the marble top reminds me when we had the top delivered for our kitchen island. Two parts, each required 8 guys busting a gut to shift them.
The island is so large that if Trump hears about it, he'll want to put the American flag on it...
Is that @Benpointer’s new house?! I rather like it. Certainly a hundred times nicer than the average, windowless, Barratt home red brick rabbit hutch
We should build more wooden houses. Red brick, unless used with great skill, is intrinsically ugly and bleak, especially in the British climate
Really? I've always thought of red brick as a very warm and sympathetic kind of material, human in scale and reassuringly earthy as well as a nod to Victorian industrial structures, Elizabethan Manor houses and the like. To my mind the red brick is the most British of construction materials, in fact. It opens up the possibility of some nice patterns too, although perhaps less so nowadays when you have a single row of bricks and a breeze block inner skin. We replicated the Flemish bond of the existing house when we built our kitchen extension and used second hand London stock bricks and it looks beautiful. Our brickie was exceptionally skilled though. And London bricks are more yellow than red I suppose.
'To my mind the red brick is the most British of construction materials'
English (with a soupçon of Welsh and Northern Irish) really. Sandstone is the essence of Scottish construction, with a bit of granite thrown in for us teuchters. I remember in the febrile run up to 2014 some idiot rightwing hack was claiming Scotch expertise by reminiscing about being brought up in red brick Glasgow tenements. After a bit of guffawing she was quickly put right.
True and I should have known better having grown up in a sandstone Scottish house, although the stone was facing IIRC, with a layer of red brick behind it. Part of our garden wall was red brick too, and there were certainly brick houses in the area although often painted or rendered or rough cast. I spent part of my childhood in a red brick Victorian terraced house in NE England, went to an aggressively red brick college, lived in a red brick apartment in the US and currently live in a London brick house so I am attached to it as a building material! And I wouldn't say that rain-soaked dark sandstone under a grey Fife sky was a sight to gladden the heart.
Which raises the question: what architecture does look good in the wet? Personally, I always admire architectural renders which show the building on a rainy day. Anything can look good in the sun; it takes skill to look good in the rain. For me it is about how reflective the surface is: the new glass skyscrapers at the bottom of Deansgate look fantastic in the rain because they reflect the sky and the light, rather than absorb it. But glass isn't really practical in suburban housing. The point is, though: shiny.
As a city, York looks fantastic in the rain because of the way the stone of the pavements reflects the light.
Aberdeen (granite) does not look good in the rain. Bath (sandstone) looks OK. It would be interesting to hear what others think about other towns.
Whitewashed Devonshire cob and thatch looks fine. As does genuine Tudor half timbered black and white. Basically: white rendering of some kind, because grey wintry Britain needs light and white
Within the realms of the possible, why did we abandon stucco? Is it really that pricey? The Nash Terraces looks glorious in any weather, possibly at their best on a bright winter day
If we can’t do any of that, just dump red brick and use London stockbrick everywhere, with white trimmings for cornices, porches, pediments. Ie Poundbury
King Charles III was right all along
I think for the really wet places some colour goes a long way if there's no interesting structure.
I never understand the need for grey pebbledash / harling. Paint it in primary colours or something uplifting! Look at towns in the north of Scandinavia or Greenland. Maybe it is the grey car effect - neutral colours for neutral buyers.
The Glasgow sandstone is fine on its own, though. Mrs Flatlander had to survey a couple of the Locharbriggs Sandstone quarries in Dumfries and the colours stand out really well on a wet day.
I believe some was transported as far as New York (including for the Statue of Liberty).
But their campaign is to maintain state pension inequality, and against the equality of pension age.
I know. It was always the issue. Their essential case was that they deserved to be treated differently to men. Its classic having cake and eating it.
Plus, I, who was so far from retirement when it was announced that I barely even heard of pensions, recall the changes being announced. On the news on the TV, radio in the papers. Etc. There was never a case. They are just playing the victim card.
Oh know I wanted to retire at 60 and then it was all snatched away...
Same for me too, remember it well, 20+ years ago? And I can't really work out how they're financially disadvantaged - surely having to work for a few more years means their pension pots are bigger?
They didn't want to work for a few more years.
Sexual equality is a motherfucker, huh?
Should really be higher for women - at age 68 a man's LE is 86, a woman 88.
Comments
There are a few very handsome streets of red brick houses I can think of within 400 yards of here. But all of them are Victorian or Edwardian.
Actually, I can think of a couple of very handsome red brick houses on the street opposite - but both have been consciously built to look Victorian (one of which replacing a Victorian house which fell down after an unsuccessful cellar conversion), using more-expensive-than-necessary bricks. So it can be done. But it requires some commitment to quality and in these cases an architect not ruthlessly committed to modernism.
I would say it omits the most concerning, and quite possible, outcome - that the regime absorbs the attacks, continues to repress its people, and survives.
As far as the "danger" of falling into chaos, chaos would be marked improvement upon the Islamic Republic status quo.
Whether on drugs'n'hookers, or on soft furnishings is the only question.
The share of timber frame has increased substantially to around 25% in England, which is great, and is 75-80% in Scotland and in the self-build sector.
One interesting point Chez Ben is that there was a 200% variation in bid prices against a single design.
https://forum.buildhub.org.uk/blogs/entry/1098-week-8-and-pause-or-not/
https://x.com/i/status/2016839124963992038
English (with a soupçon of Welsh and Northern Irish) really. Sandstone is the essence of Scottish construction, with a bit of granite thrown in for us teuchters.
I remember in the febrile run up to 2014 some idiot rightwing hack was claiming Scotch expertise by reminiscing about being brought up in red brick Glasgow tenements. After a bit of guffawing she was quickly put right.
Also, I agree with OLB: lighter bricks (like London or Hull) is rather cheerful.
A Barrat box would look little better in stone.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hampton_Court_Palace
Key will be how much he gets involved and also which big beasts, if any, canvass the seat
On 13 January, plumbers found Yevgenia Besfamilnaya—"Baba Zhenya" to her neighbors—frozen solid in her apartment. Russian missiles had knocked out power and heat across the capital.
Outside: -18°C.
As an infant, Baba Zhenya somehow escaped Babi Yar, where Nazis murdered 34,000 Kyivan Jews in two days. An orphanage took her in and gave her a surname—Besfamilnaya, meaning "nameless."..
https://x.com/EuromaidanPress/status/2016551351136768387
So you want things like a contrasting plinth and string course somewhere, or a course of bricks set at 45 degrees below the gutter. I think it suffers in modern estate houses where everything is simple shapes with no overlaps at corners.
Often it is just skill and attention to detail, as the marginal cost for the look is very cheap in materials and labour, but requires more thinking time up front.
But that's a problem that plagues nearly everything these days, in these days of no money available and therefore undertrained workforces whether professional or blue collar. There are so many things which can be designed and built optimally for the same cost, but cost a fortune to retrofit fixes.
So the faulty version stays in place. My favourite example is still probably the Gadarene rush to roll out thousands of electric, before updating the "reference wheelchair" from the size of a wheelchair in 199x, to reflect the size of a wheelchair found by research in 2021. Obviously it will be built to the utter legal minimum, so perhaps 1/4 of wheelchairs will not fit the allocated spaces on the brand new buses.
So we are stuck with inadequate buses for another 25 years.
They should be forced to build in cut granite until they learn their lesson.
The warmth of sandstone and glitter of granite in sunshine sort of makes up for it.
One side is bombing military targets, the other is bombing civilian targets.
Puck Futin, arm Ukraine.
As a city, York looks fantastic in the rain because of the way the stone of the pavements reflects the light.
We still have molds from those days - used to make replacements for the cast concrete stuff.
So a window/bay is just a kit of parts.
https://benpentreath.com/masterplanning/smaller-developments/coed-darcy/
The biggest problem is simply that we restrict land supply then build far too densely, which means it all looks "wrong" even when built in the local style. There's an estate gone up recently near me - the houses themselves are quite pretty, but of a style that you'd expect to find sat in half an acre - they look ridiculous piled up together on a postage stamp each.
If they were focusing on bombing military targets, they would be doing more harm.
https://x.com/noelreports/status/2016817498822242309
Can’t imagine they have many of these left now, they’re massive targets when deployed, and they don’t have the capability to manufacture more of them.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c1jeyn3yxn9o
War sucks, but if you sign up to defend your country you know what’s happening.
Freezing old ladies to death in their homes is not the same.
Listenting to Starmer this morning talking-up deals with China that almost amount to nothing, I am now more certain than ever that we would be better off if Sunak and Hunt were still in office.
Mike Manning is Reform UK's candidate in an upcoming by-election on Redcar and Cleveland Borough Council
https://www.lbc.co.uk/article/nigel-farage-urged-suspend-reform-mike-manning-5HjdRYx_2/
https://x.com/sentdefender/status/2016845705076195370
Just as well I’m only about 150 miles from Iran.
Dull rows of redbrick simply look cheap and bleak. Unless there is that “great skill”
How does Starmer always end up with an agreement about coming to an agreement. Given all this stuff is agreed prior to the visit and the very little they have to announce, the least you would be able to say is from today all UK passport holders can come to China visa free for 30 days.
WASPI stands for “Women Against State Pension Inequality”.
https://x.com/cjsnowdon/status/2016856180966973751
But their campaign is to maintain state pension inequality, and against the equality of pension age.
The regime depends on large numbers of “foreign fighters” to do the really messy repression stuff.
They are quartered in distinct locations to keep them away from the locals. When they aren’t actually shooting them.
On the flip side, these locations are sometimes on the ground of the “mosques” - which are used by the regime as defacto government control centres.
We went to the Kelvingrove museum back in October. A nice little art collection. My favourite was of a tenement in the west end, covered in snow. It had a similar warmth against the weather to it. Next to it was sub idiotic modernist daubing by some Miro wannabe. It felt like a subtle bit of criticism by the curator. "All right, I'll display this crassness because I'm contractually obliged to, but place it next to someone who can portray life with skill and flair and allow the viewer to draw his own conclusions."
Women against state pension equality
Good to see that's how's it's played out.
Your regular reminder that HS2 was so expensive partly because contractors were so worried about it being cancelled and couldn't commit to a 20+ year programme of investment. And they were right to be so.
So Republican Alabama Rep.Barry Moore held a town hall in Baldwin County where he was asked why immigrants aren’t getting due process & he said they aren’t allowed it & his constituents let him know he was full of crap & it’s a violation of the Constitution & he fled out the back
https://x.com/Suzierizzo1/status/2016565573941956820?s=20
U.S. Trade Deficit Grew in November
In November, U.S. imports rose to $348.9 billion, while exports decreased by to $292.1 billion
https://www.wsj.com/economy/trade/u-s-trade-deficit-grew-in-november-18c570d7
Plus, I, who was so far from retirement when it was announced that I barely even heard of pensions, recall the changes being announced. On the news on the TV, radio in the papers. Etc. There was never a case. They are just playing the victim card.
Oh know I wanted to retire at 60 and then it was all snatched away...
Within the realms of the possible, why did we abandon stucco? Is it really that pricey? The Nash Terraces looks glorious in any weather, possibly at their best on a bright winter day
If we can’t do any of that, just dump red brick and use London stockbrick everywhere, with white trimmings for cornices, porches, pediments. Ie Poundbury
King Charles III was right all along
I'll be watching and comparing the Scottish and Welsh polls and results to see what that tells us. Especially on FON and YouGov. Norstat are usually best in Scotland - if that holds then its good news for the SNP.
https://www.liverpoolfc.com/news/jurgen-klopp-joins-lfc-legends-management-team-borussia-dortmund-match
https://avrilpaton.co.uk/prints/windows-in-the-west
Luvvly Bubbly.
I think anything stucco'd looks good even in the rain - so Brighton, for example.
You were damn right for calling Corbyn’s Labour Party out for posting eerie things like that.
Personally I would never buy something rendered unless I could get proof that it had been there for a very long time, because it is always put on there to hide something. My own first house is an 1850 cottage which was pebble-dashed because the bricks are cheap crap that get sodden, but the render is the original stuff from the mid-Victorian period.
Equally I'd never paint brickwork, because that only guarantees you will have to repaint it every 10 years, and (unless the colour is chosen carefully) it will look poor. I'd even probably say that of the dull grey Scottish render, which is there to protect against the howling gales.
Stucco is a problem because it is used to cover poor quality speculative Georgian builds. One of the possible problems from leasehold reform is that stucco London will really suffer. For its impact it depends on constant colour in whole areas, which is enforced by freeholders such as the Grosvenor Estate. That right could be lost.
He has no friends in the PLP, as the pathetic response to his blocking showed.
Naked ambition and nothing else. He ran away when he lost twice.
I never understand the need for grey pebbledash / harling. Paint it in primary colours or something uplifting! Look at towns in the north of Scandinavia or Greenland. Maybe it is the grey car effect - neutral colours for neutral buyers.
The Glasgow sandstone is fine on its own, though. Mrs Flatlander had to survey a couple of the Locharbriggs Sandstone quarries in Dumfries and the colours stand out really well on a wet day.
I believe some was transported as far as New York (including for the Statue of Liberty).