Edgelands: "Wilderness that is much closer than you think"

BBC iPlayer, week of 15 April 2011

Author: Michael Symmons Roberts, Paul Farley

Format: Hardback

ISBN: 9780224089029

Published: 17 February 2011

Publisher: Jonathan Cape Ltd

"Edgelands explores a wilderness that is much closer than you think: a debatable zone, neither the city nor the countryside, but a place in-between - so familiar it is never seen for looking. Passed through, negotiated, unnamed, ignored, the edgelands have become the great wild places on our doorsteps, places so difficult to acknowledge they barely exist.

"Edgelands forms a critique of what we value as 'wild', and allows our allotments, railways, motorways, wasteland and water a presence in the world, and a strange beauty all of their own. Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts - both well-known poets - have lived and worked and known these places all their lives, and in Edgelands their journeying prose fuses, in the anonymous tradition, to allow this in-between world to speak up for itself.

"They write about mobile masts and gravel pits, business parks and landfill sites in the same way the Romantic writers forged a way of looking at an overlooked - but now familiar - landscape of hills and lakes and rivers. England, the first country to industrialise, now offers the world's most mature post-industrial terrain, and is still in a state of flux: Edgelands takes the reader on a journey through its forgotten spaces, so that we can marvel at this richly mysterious, cheek-by-jowl region in our midst."

The Guardian: "For Richer, for Poorer"

Link to The Guardian

'So You Think You Know About Britain?'

by Danny Dorling, 308pp, Constable, £8.99

"What is most valuable about this book is that it is angry, rather than indignant. You are asked not to wring your hands, but to examine the relationship between your place in society and the place in which you live, and in so doing to recognise that there are winners and losers, rather than the deserving and undeserving.

"For our towns, cities and villages to become as socially mixed as they were back in the mid-1970s, from when all markers of inequality in Britain began to rise, nearly 2.5 million of us would have to move – poorer people to richer areas, and richer people to poorer ones. This shows how many people have won or lost, more dramatically than was possible before 1979, under the new rules of the "property-owning democracy".

Evening Standard: "Joined up thinking of Pimlico's Peabody Avenue"

Link to Evening Standard

"In housing today, there are probably two strands that have emerged - one concerned with superficial branding to do with novelty and marketing. Then there is a quieter, understated strand, of which we're certainly a part, that wants to invest the maximum amount of a limited budget, in durability, and the inherent qualities of the architecture."

Shoot down Brian von Coleman at 10,000 feet...

Harrow Times: 'Scratchwood-to-Wembley Railway'

New web site in Hendon Constituency: OffordWatch

Link to web site

"[This blog] will be publishing every question, speech or quote that Mr Offord asks or gives – to give the voters the knowledge, come the next election."

Barnet Times: "Construction to start this week on Zenith House site in Colindale"

Link to Barnet Times

"Genesis Housing Group has appointed construction group Hill to build the 309 home development on the Zenith House site on the corner of Colindeep Lane and Edgware Road.

"The project, built around a central green courtyard, will feature 174 private apartments and 97 social housing units, with 38 going to shared-ownership"

Approval for Zenith House, Edgware Road

Link to 'European Urban Architecture'

"European Urban Architecture has obtained planning consent for the redevelopment of Zenith House on Edgware Road in London on behalf of the applicant, Genesis Housing Group."

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Earlier report in Barnet Times.