BBC: "Air quality row may hit Olympic Games" (and the rest of us)

Link to BBC web site

"The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) has admitted many cities will not meet EU targets on air quality before 2020, while meeting London's targets could be as late as 2025.

"Existing levels are thought to cause about 3,000 people [in London] to die prematurely each year. Alan Andrews, an air pollution specialist with the environmental law organisation ClientEarth, said:

"We knew meeting the original 2015 target was going to be difficult, but I thought they'd give it a go - but they seem to have thrown their hands up and said 'it's too difficult'."

Planning, the Law and your Rights!

Talk Action and Friends of the Earth are doing a residential weekend in July (along with a Saturday ‘taster session’) on planning, the law and your rights. It is a weekend of workshops and networking to empower people to make a difference. Click below for details!

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.

Location of new 'Countdown' digital bus stop displays announced

Click above to enlarge

Colindale transport in 2050 (it is not as if Barnet can be bothered to think ahead)

Euroclick for Eurolink to Eurosite

Press conference on the adoption of the EU White paper on Transport 2050:

Today we present our Roadmap for the Future of Transport 2050. Freedom to travel is a basic right for our citizens, and it is critical to the development of a Europe's business sector. We need a competitive European Transport System, which delivers transport for people.

We have meet very challenging goals by the 2050s, [including]:

• No more conventionally-fuelled cars in our city centres, by the middle of the century
• A 50% shift in middle distance journeys, by both passengers and freight, from road to rail and other modes.

The speech WE would give: "£1.5-billion of Colindale development - and no transport infrastructure"

Link to web site

Keynote speaker:

Director of Planning, Housing and Regeneration, Barnet

Professional
Chartered Town Planner and corporate member of the Royal Town Planning Institute (MRTPI).

Profile: a strategic development and regeneration expert in London involved in some of the largest development and regeneration schemes in the Capital for 20 years including the Olympics/Thames Gateway, Kings Cross, Wembley, London Bridge, Brent Cross Cricklewood.

Daily Telegraph: "A global energy war looms"

Link to Telegraph

"It should indeed be possible to accommodate the rise of China and other emerging markets without exhausting resources or destroying the planet. But it’s going to require massive collective will, of a type the US and others have been unwilling to contemplate up until now."

Jeremy Warner, assistant editor of The Daily Telegraph, is one of Britain's leading business and economics commentators.

Beaufort Park - Catalyst Housing advert

"Unfinished London" videos - get the set!

Evening Standard: "We need architects who understand this city"

Link to web site

"While modern architecture is often seen as the problem, you don't see people throwing street parties to celebrate the completion of the latest Prince Charles-inspired brick boxes, or the latest estate of executive suburban homes, either. A long time ago, the development industry lost the public's confidence. Think of St George Wharf in Vauxhall, one of London's ugliest buildings, or the overbearing blocks appearing now at Hale Village in Tottenham.

"It is not conservative taste that drives the public's scepticism, but the often negative transformation of the city into a place of monocultural housing blocks, with cheap supermarkets on the ground floors. These are not what London is made of."

Criticism of "LegoLand" Housing by Ministers

Link to The Guardian

"Previous housing ministers have railed against uniform design, largely driven by developers' lower costs. Ministers hope that the concept of neighbourhood plans, designed and voted on by communities themselves, might drive architects out of their complacency.

"Planning and Decentralisation minister, Greg Clark, joins Housing Minister Grant Shapps in condemning British household architecture, saying 'banal, identikit housing schemes have given development a bad name'."

The Guardian: "Air pollution in areas of heavy traffic shortens life expectancy"

Link above to The Guardian

"The high concentration of many fine particles, largely due to emissions from diesel engines and heating systems, knocks almost two years off the average life expectancy of residents of Bucharest, and six months off the life of Parisians."

'Barnet Eye' pulls off "PROHIBITED" videoing of council meeting

Further details about this video are in this first 'Barnet Eye' post.

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Click above for second 'Barnet Eye' post

On the right is a second Barnet Eye post, regarding the end of that council meeting: