July 2007 Archives

...will provide 10% of the required power for the Stock Woolsencroft designed development at Bow Common Lane. The site was formerly the Phoenix Business Centre. Phoenix, ashes, wood pellets...there's a link in there somewhere...

...is not a computer game but it is going back home as part of the planning obligation on the 1 million sq ft Walbrook Square development. It's not going far though, just across the street from Queen Victoria Street to Walbrook.

Every quarter London boroughs publish a list of breaches to the planning control system. Here's one from the London Borough of Bexley...

"use without planning permission of a garden shed for hypnotherapy and Tarot card reading"

...the offenders should have seen that one coming.

...a categorical piece of demolition in the City

Sir Robert Walpole, Britains first prime minister's house is being converted to form luxury flats. Walpole, whose hobbies included beagling (don't know what this is but the Downing Street website says he enjoyed it) lived here before and after becoming PM and eventually died here in 1745. The house in question is not 10 Downing Street however (he was given that by King George II when he became PM) but 4-5 Arlington Street, a Grade 2* Listed building next to the Ritz.

Unavoidable CO₂ emissions at Berkeley's West 3 Apartments (average price £445 psf) are being offset through the support of a small scale micro-hydro electricity project in Bulgaria.

If you were watching Channel 4's new drama Cape Wrath last night and wandering where the thing was filmed... well it wasn't the St James development on the old sewage works in Worcester Park known as The Hamptons as I suspected. The real location strangely enough was by the same firm a few miles away to the west in Maidstone at Leybourne Lakes.

HIPs (Home Information Selling Packs) will become compulsory for anyone selling a house with more than three bedrooms from August 2007. The average cost of a HIP is between £400 and £700. The question is, when is a bedroom a bedroom? Call it a study and you could save up to 700 notes. In a survey by Saga Home Insurance 74% of homeowners would do just that.