The Pint of Milk Test

The Pint of Milk Test had this story way back in February 2008. The story is of a Surrey farmer who built this house...

on his own land, but had no planning permission. He hid it behind straw bales for 4 years to try and get around the planning system and a legal loop hole whereby you can apply for a 'certificate of lawfulness'. This is whereby homeowners can gain immunity from eviction who have lived in a property for more than 4 years without any objections. Unfortunately for the apptly named farmer Mr Fiddler, Reigate and Banstead Council decided that the 4 year rule was void because nobody had been given a chance to see the castle. 

The vital part of illegality which the council stated and the High court agreed with was that the house was invalid because the building and removal of the bales constituted a part of the construction process. Mr Fiddler has now been given 12 months to demolish the structure, remove any rubble and return the site to its existing use (a field). 

The BBC also has the story, as well as a short interview with Mr Fiddler himself who says he will fight on...

What are your views? Do you believe the council are right to object to this development as it could well set a precedent? Or do you think they should keep their noses out of it? View them over at the Pint of Milk Test Forum.

The battle to stop Heathrow's third runway is hotting up. Greenpeace today launched an architecture competition to design an "impenetrable fortress" on a piece of land fated for Heathrow's third runway. 

The site in question (above) is a 0.4ha piece of land in the tiny village of Sipson on which Greenpeace plans to build a zero-carbon structure on the site to defend it from the bulldozers. The "Airplot" campaign is welcoming designs from both architecture experts and from the general public. Amongst the 'experts' who will ultimately judge the winner of the competition is impressionist Alastair McGowan.

Even without the fortress the campaigners have tried to make it as difficult as possible for bailiffs to seize the piece of land. Over 66,000 people now own part of it, which means they will each have to be served with eviction notices once the bulldozers are due to come in. If all that effort isn't enough to stop the new runway then there is always the fact that one of the trees on the land has already been "sponsored" by David Cameron.

However, "local" campaigners including David Beckham, Teddy Sheringham and Ray "The Daddy" Winstone oppose the demolition of the stadium, hoping that it would become "bigger and better" than before. Problem is that it's been closed for a while, and, as one of our researchers can testify, even on the penultimate meet before closure, the "crowds" were fairly thin on the ground. 

In this month's Red Book update we make a series of predictions about the residential market in the year ahead. One of them predicts the dominance of the market in the short term by the cash-rich. Put simply, the road to home ownership for most people starts with a mortgage. Pre Lehmans they were giving them away, now you'll have to stump up between 20% and 30% for the deposit. If you're cash-rich, like Hong Kong based billionaire Joseph Lau, who paid £33 million for a house in Eaton Square last weekend, you probably don't even know what a mortgage is. The Standard has the story.

Bishopsgate Goodsyard is now a step closer to realising development. The site has been screaming out 'Develop Me!' for 40 years now where it has laid unused and dormant. The site to the north of the city and Liverpool Street covers a huge area (shown below).

The Mayor of London along with Hackney and Tower Hamlets Councils have now approved new planning guidance (it's a neck breaker!) that will shape its future with outline visions of up to 2,000 new homes, community facilities and employment space. The local authorities and the GLA have worked closely with the landowners and future developers Ballymore and Hammerson as well as urban designers Terry Farrell and Partners to produce the planning guidance.

An exciting feature of the proposed development will be the creation of a high-level public park above the listed Braithwaite Viaduct. This will create a Shoreditch version of the famous New York High Line park, which completed last year and has been a huge success. Somehow though I doubt it will match up to New York's High Line, this is 1.45miles long and pictured (below).

The new Shoreditch high Street station on the East London Line extension is set to open this summer and will surely be a catalyst for regeneration. Although not exactly pleasent to look at the moment it has been designed so buildings can be built on top of and around it.  

The question remains then: how long will it be until the Bishopsgate Goodsyard is developed and Shoreditch High Street Station is surrounded by high rise developments? The picture below shows the vision. Quite a while I would say.

This is the site of LandSec's Park House development on Oxford Street:

As you can see it's yet to start, due in no small part to opposition by law firm Fladgate Fielder who have offices near the site. They claimed that the noise of construction would be "three years of hell", Mr Justice Collins, at the subsequent court hearing disagreed however and works should start here at the end of the year. But the site will still generate an income. How so? In early October of last year the developer was granted planning permission for the temporary use of the site for "large entertainment uses". One idea was an ice rink but the latest plan is for a Dinosaurs Unleashed Exhibition. The attraction is to have 24 full sized, animatronic dinosaurs including T-Rex, triceratops, diplodocus and stegosaurus. Punters will be able to dig for dino bones, design a dinosaur on a touch screen, run down an interactive track to leave dino footprints and put themselves in a virtual prehistoric aquarium using green-screen technology. Blimey. All this'll kick off at the end of the month, tickets around £15 a pop.

To the north of the proposed Three Houses development and west of The Shard stands this building:

King's College London's Capital House. It doesn't have a "funky" name and with the best will in the world the architecture could not be described as cutting edge. All that, however, is about to change. The college plans to demolish the current building and erect a 28 storey, SPPARC designed, 500 bed student hostel on site called The Quill: 

Right at the start of 2009 I blogged about the Aldgate East Station site. In October 2008 it looked like this:

If you go down there today, it's going to look exactly the same. This was one of the first major developments to halt as a result of the credit crunch. The collapse of Landisbanki in this instance. I pass it quite regularly and have come to think that, if any building could be seen as a barometer of the current situation, it was this one. When this re-starts, so will the recovery. And that's how I was going to end this blog, until I noticed a small article, tucked in the bottom right hand corner of the In Brief column in the Estates Gazette (p18) this week. Here is that article, merry Christmas and happy new year:

Aldgate East project steams ahead once more

An £118m residential-led development above Aldgate East station, E1, that stalled following the collapse of Heritable Bank, is to re-start after developer Julius Properties settled its debt to the bank. Formation Group with JV Finance bought Julius out of the scheme and will seek to raise around £55m to build it.

Last August I blogged about the number of site visits we at LRR do each year*. Every week we're out there, whatever the weather, even if it's severe weather warning-don't travel unless you really have to-black ice-frost bite-wouldn't you rather be indoors kind of weather, like yesterday for example. You'd think that nothing much would be going on this close to Christmas, but you'd be wrong. This is Barratt's redevelopment of the South Thames Collage, Putney last August:

and this is what it looked like yesterday:

Now known as Putney Square, some units are already being marketed off-plan, ahead of the official launch. Prices range from £280,000 for a studio to £2.5 million for a penthouse. Looks like construction proper could start as early as March 2010. 

(*more than any other residential research organisation in London).  

Almost exactly 10 years ago, developer London & Bath submitted a planning application to erect a 31 storey office building on this site. After a number of refusals, re-submissions, amendments and nicknames ("The Chiswick Dick" was a popular favourite) the size went all the way down to 5 storeys, passing 26 and 15 storeys on the way.

So far nothing has been developed. However, London & Bath haven't given up. On the contrary, they have new plans for the site, designed by Ken Shuttleworth, already nicknamed "The Octopus". It'll look like this...

...and it needs to be built.

(Link)