Recently in Place-making Category

One of my moles was at the South London Business Property breakfast last week - a hotbed of gossip and innovation if ever there was one - where that well-known urban regeneration veteran, Eric Reynolds (last mentioned in this blog 30 April), was among the speakers.

Eric cut (or more likely ground) his teeth around Elephant & Castle in the 70s and specialises in the re-use of historic buildings, including, for example, the oldest industrial building in London, which he apparently saved from demolition.

The image of him chained to the chimney stack as the bulldozers rolled in is hard to completely expunge from my brain.

Anyway, Eric was also behind Gabriel's Wharf (pictured) - the tourist market on London's Southbank, where he spent £70,000 building facilities on an empty site, and which many years later produces more than that a year in rent, yet remains unaltered.

I was complaining - on an email (I should know better really) - to Scary Ange the other day that I had a bit of a hangover, she emailed back telling me about a new club that she has formed: "Welcome!" her email read, "welcome to my recently founded members' club - BD. There are various levels of membership BD, OBD, MBD." Well! I went back to her, totally mystified by this of course, and then she sent back the explanation:

BDs: Binge Drinkers

OBDs: Occasional Binge Drinker

MBDs: Major Binge Drinker

At which point all became crystal clear. Her club has only been founded in the last four weeks but has already gathered quite a few members and, indeed, at every level. Well, she does work for a shed load (collective noun) of surveyors I guess. And this from a woman who has a simply enormous basket of shoes under her desk; none of which you could ever possibly wear when drunk (and I would struggle when sober).

Anyway, I conquered the hangover to rock up to a Place West London Steering Group chaired by the very wonderful Richard Barnes (pictured, right), deputy mayor of London. Blimey, he was on such good form! He burst into the room apologising for being late (a whole two minutes) saying that he had been waylaid in the foyer of the building by a previous deputy mayor of London who was, er, visiting his lawyer. How we roared! And then we had a lively debate around the Place West London event being held at Chelsea Football Ground. It was a great meeting but where was my OBF (as opposed to OBD), John Izett from JLL we ask?  

Grant Shapps made rather a splendid speech at the RIBA yesterday (alright, alright, so I admit I wasn't actually there but I received a copy - independently - from three of my best moles!). He began by 'fessing up his political apprenticeship as a candidate in the council elections for the Borough of Brent in 1994 (which, needless to say, is very Handy-Harry since I am hoping he will come to our assistance in South Kilburn!).

In 1994, the ward that Mr Shapps's was contesting was dominated by the Chalkhill Estate, which (just like the South Kilburn Estate) was built in the late 60's and comprised of the notorious "Bison Blocks" (or dirty great slabs of concrete, to you and me). The design of the Chalkhill Estate was based on that of Park Hill in Sheffield (Park Hill was back on the telly yet again last night, did you see?). The blocks were linked by 'Walkways in the Sky'.

                                                 Park Hill, Sheffield

Mr Shapps tells a charming story thus: "One day I came across an elderly man who had lived in his sixth floor Chalkhill flat since it was built. 'The milk float used to come up in that lift and then drive along this 'Walkway in the Sky' to deliver bottles to my front door,' he explained as we chatted in the draughty walkway outside his flat. And there it was. For the briefest of moments I fleetingly recognised what the architect of the Chalkhill Estate must have had in mind as he sketched out his utopia in the sky."

Hindsight is an exact science and one of the things that the more puritan element of the urban regeneration lobby sometimes forget is that some of these mistakes - on a monumental scale admittedly - but mistakes, honestly made, were by people who knew no better. In our current climate of political correctness and litigation and paranoia it is almost impossible these days to publicly admit you made a mistake, and that is indeed a most terrible shame.

If I were ever to appear on Mastermind my specialist subject would have to be London. Never mind old Peter Ackroyd's brilliant biography of London stuff (STILL not managed to finish that worthy tome btw), I would have to confine myself to the regeneration story of London over the last (nearly) 30 years; from the point where - and I kid you not here - we invented regeneration at the London Docklands Development Corporation (LDDC) in 1981. Ah, those certainly were the days. There were none of yer squabbles over whose planning jurisdiction we were in, or any question of a two tier planning decision, or a higher or alternative authority, none of these niceties. No, we determined everything - from Cabot Tower at Canary Wharf at the one extreme through to Mrs Miggins's back extension in Island Gardens at the other - it was a shining example of benevolent dictatorship at work.

It was certainly clear. And, there is no question, it did work. Leaving aside issues of democracy (and I always struggled here) and putting also to one side the national scandal of the jobs story (the defining theme of my career came as a result of watching the Docklands jobs go to anyone and everyone except Docklands residents; it was an utter bloody disgrace and I did - ahem - say so rather vociferously at the time and indeed have done ever since) we would never have secured London's future as a world financial centre - the financial centre of EMEA - had we not been able to underpin our economic future with the 14 million plus square feet of chrome and glass citadel that is Canary Wharf.

Greetings from the land of King Tut!

Tell me, have you ever been to Sharm Elshiekh, Egypt? It is a truly bizarre resort cleaved from a scrap of reclaimed desert, which couldn't bear less relation to the pyramids if it tried. It consists of an airport, a road and hotels. The runway for the airport lies along one side of the road and a series of huge resort hotels built to an identical fomula lie along the other side of the road, facing the sea. And that's about it really; the desert stretches into the distance. It is a land of studied artifice and has a sort of 1980s conspicuous consumption feel to it; I seriously dread to think what must be the size of its carbon footprint!

It was in a moment of exhausted collapse on a freezing February Sunday morning that my daughters (a kidult of 18 and a poppet of 11 - the lanky loud lad of 16 was having none of it!) ambushed me to go onto one of these last minute websites to book some "winter sun". Needless to say 'im indoors wasn't playing either, muttering darkly about being "too busy at work" (he does PFI projects so your guess is as good as mine!) so the lads have stayed home and it is just the three of us gels out here in this strange place soaking up the rays. Or not, since it's too hot for me to lie out in (what a wus!), the kidult's got Montezuma's and the littley's got sunburn, so we're cowering under umbrellas reading trashy novels and - in my case at least (although the kidult has one too) - fiddling with our Blackberries. Oh happy holidays.

My mate, the lovely Paul Clark (that's Paul Clark of CBRE currently on secondment to the LDA, not the energetic Labour MP for Gillingham, although I am proud to say he's a mate too) has e-mailed me to say that I'm "against the curve" and really should be in Scarborough on my hols and that has got me thinking - again - about the fraught future of tourism for the UK citizen.

The government does have a propensity for making places up. And, needless to say, we regeneration types are very happy to join in, especially if there's the sniff of grant funding as reward for playing along.

Sometimes the making-up of places works very well in terms of communicating growth zones to the market, the most obvious example being the "Thames Gateway". But we do need to understand the grave limitations of these made-up concepts. These constructs have their place in the technical world that we all occupy but they are not the concern of real people. 

This is a personal bugbear of mine. One of the dafter things that was forthcoming during my sojourn in the Gateway was the then-ODPM spending literally millions on establishing the "Thames Gateway" as a recognisable brand in the eyes of residents who, needless to say, were not having any of it! If you live in centuries' old settlements such as Gravesend or Tilbury (or Dartford, North Woolwich or Purfleet) you will defend to the hilt your right to continue to live there rather than in some regional planner's paradigm. Have the residents of Elephant and Castle ever heard of "London South Central"? I think we should be told! And would it be of any use to them at all if they had? Where is Heathrow City? I don't recollect a cathedral there (although there is a very nice chaplain - who I have met!).