About that Olympic host city...

Very pleased the other day to get my contributor copy of London After Recession: A Fictitious  Capital?, published by Ashgate on 28 Sep 2012 (ISBN-10: 1409431029 and ISBN-13: 978-1409431022). You can pre-order it at the links below. My chapter is called "Farewell Nathan Barley? The Rise and Declineof the Freelance Creative".

Xanadu-little

Over at the WalkerFox Blog, I share some thoughts on the Smart House, fuelled by Davin Heckman's book A Small World. Let's build!

I've had a bellyfull...

A guest post by me on the Walker Fox blog. Neil Davenport reminds me that Half Man Half Biscuit have a better critique though.

Park Hill Flats revisited

Over at the (interesting-looking) Reconstruction 9.3, I have a short review of Owen Hatherley's punchy Militant Modernism. Enjoy!

Eco towns and the uses of English

A recent snippet in The Times caught my fancy, when coverage of eco-towns threw up the following:
"All four in the first wave will be expected to have a zero-carbon school by 2013, and parks, playgrounds and gardens will make up 40 per cent of the towns. At least 30 per cent of affordable housing will be required, with one member of each working couple expected to work in the town." Are we to take it that 70 per cent of the housing will be unaffordable? Probably.

The Russian Royals

For a disturbing 20 per cent of my working life I have been passing the Royals Business Park on the way to work, and for most of that time it has been empty. "That's obscene", as an ex-girlfriend used to say. Why is the Royals like an astronomy student at Imperial College? Because it's taking up space in London.

In keeping with this spirit, the news page on the Royals' website does not appear to have been updated since 2004, and Ken Livingstone is still mayor there.

In fairness to this glass tomb of regeneration, it has seen a bit of activity in the last few months. Last night the Spooks season finale aired, and I finally got to see what the Royals Business Park has been used for. The Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation (FSB) houses its UK death squad there.

Another mystery solved then.

Still hacking away

Reconstruction; anti-construction

The latest issue of Reconstruction - Class, Culture and Public Intellectuals - is online now, with my co-editorial fingerprints all over it. It was a long haul, but I'm very pleased with the content (and the form: thanks Justin and Sean).

Meanwhile a return to the UK presents me with public life that seems to be a caricature of itself. Being away means missing the mediating links, but preoccupations with body image, plastic bags and cycling abound. In my old stomping grounds, a patch of industrial wasteland - the former Halex factory - will not be turned into flats and a supermarket, ostensibly in order to preserve the character of the area. Ironically, if the Halex factory was back in action, environmentalists would oppose that too. At least the residents of Rosia Montana are hitting back against the industrial counter-revolution; when are Brits going to do the same?

Tourism is not terrorism ...

... although you wouldn't think so from reading Leo Hickman's book The Final Call. Since the book was published, he seems to have softened his line on Spanish holidays, according to articles here and here.

Never a dull moment

Long ago, in happier times, I lived in Highams Park. This "green and pleasant neighbourhood" was profiled recently in the property section of the Independent (Robert Liebman, "It's a walk in the park", 14 February 2006, p.14). Local highlights in E4 include a blue plaque on Jubilee Avenue: "Plastics Historical Society: On this site, from 1897-1971, stood the Halex factory of the British Xylonite Company".

Steady on now.
Although I mock, I still think that closing the local hospital is a really bad idea.