Today sees the deadline for the submission of the second round of ‘City Deals’. Twenty cities and city regions are putting proposals to DCLG based around four ambitious objectives to: • Boost local economic growth • Rebalance the economy spatially and sectorally • Decentralise the powers and levers cities need to drive local economic growth […]
Heathcote Williams is a story teller best known for his epic poems such as ‘Whale Nation’ and ‘Autogeddon’. His latest collection of sixteen poems described as a ‘meditation on science technology and natural history’ reflects this story telling skill. It is by turns topical, political and personal. ‘Being kept by a jackdaw’ is a […]
I was lucky enough to be in the United States for much of the final stages of the US presidential campaign and got to see all the presidential debates. Commentators noted that it was the first time since 1996 that the debates made no mention of climate change. Indeed the most notable reference to it […]
It is eighteen months since the meltdown of the Fukushima Daichi nuclear power complex after the earthquake and tsunami that hit Japan. Globally, reaction to this series of events has been mixed, with a number of countries including Germany reaffirming their intentions to get out of civil nuclear power generation, others like China and Indonesia […]
My reflections on a couple of great books on some of my favourite subjects, by Paul Farley and Michael Symmonds Roberts ‘Edgelands: Journeys into England’s true wilderness’, and Owen Hatherley, ‘A guide to the new ruins of Great Britain’. ‘Edgelands’ are those spaces where the veneer of civilisation peels away. They are the debatable spaces […]
As we celebrate the end of the first ever United Nations International Year of Cooperatives, there is a sense of the dawning of a ‘golden age’ for co-operatives in the UK. All the main political parties are signed up to co-ops. The buzzword is ‘responsible capitalism’ and there is a realisation that the existing […]
The Mandarins in the DfT have egg all over their faces. But some are very relieved. Finally the penny dropped somewhere near the top of the office that they couldn’t be saying both that there was shed loads of unused capacity on the West Coast Mainline (the basis of First Group’s up-till-yesterday successful bid) and […]
Local government could never be described as fashionable, yet today there is more talk than ever about the importance of ‘the local’. However, this has converted into less, rather than more, freedom to act locally. Whitehall’s desire to control is strong, as the current freeze on council tax rises demonstrates. Local government hasn’t suffered as […]
The last few weeks have really brought home to me the vulnerability of subsistence farmers across the world to unpredictable weather. I have had an allotment for thirty years and it is a very useful supplement to family food supplies with plenty of fresh fruit and veg in season. But of course I don’t rely […]
Like nearly everybody else I know, I have watched more of the Olympics on TV than I expected to. I found it gripping, moving, inspiring, uplifting and a little bit escapist. A couple of times I heard reference to events of Olympics in the past now dropped, including chess, poetry, art, architecture and town planning. An […]
I have written articles for magazines for many years; some such as Vole which passed into history 40 years ago. I still write a regular column for Town & Country Planning. I started that in 1986. These days I guest-blog in various places as well as having my own blog Lord Muck, on this website. The articles posted here are a mixture of these blogs and other published writing. I will try to post here every 3-4 months. Hope you find all this stimulating and do respond!
I have spent four years documenting the people who live on Divinity Road and their surroundings. Here is the result.
My new book records a year in the Covid-19 pandemic through the masks that people wore.
