29 June: Cabinet Resources Committee - Grahame Park Project

Link to Barnet Council web site

"This report seeks approval for the deferment of historic costs owed to the Council from the Council’s developer partner for the regeneration of the Grahame Park Estate ‘Choices for Grahame Park (CfGP) Limited’, until 1st July 2012, in response to revised funding criteria imposed by the scheme’s principal funder.

"Deferring the payments would allow CfGP to fund these costs from receipts, rather than borrowing the money from their funder and CfGP’s parent company, Genesis Housing Association.

"The Grahame Park regeneration scheme has reached a critical point. Whilst the economy remains fragile, there are key risks associated with regeneration viability. By not enabling flexibility, and approving deferral of historic costs owed to the Council, continued project delivery is at risk.

"Deferring payment of the historic costs owed to the Council would allow CfGP to fund these costs from receipts, rather than borrowing the money from their funder and CfGP’s parent company, Genesis Housing Association. Under the deferment proposal, the Council will be repaid its costs on 1st July 2012, when all the new homes for sale currently under construction have been sold.

"The sales income is critical to the successful delivery of the project, one of the most critical factors in the viability of the project. Sales and marketing of the homes for sale is being delivered by Countryside Properties. Sales are currently progressing at a rate of five per month.

"In 2009, the Council and CfGP jointly appointed a Sales Valuer, who will certify to the Council that sales revenue, for each dwelling sold, represents proper value in the market conditions prevailing at the time of sale. However, CfGP has confirmed to the Council that payment will be made on 1st July 2012, irrespective of sales performance on Phase 1a."

bdonline: "Jestico & Whiles' estate revamp gets green light"

Link to bdonline.co.uk

"A team led by Jestico & Whiles has received planning permission for the next phase of the redevelopment of the Grahame Park estate in the borough of Barnet, north London.

"The London-based practice is working with Peter Barber Architects, Studio 54 Architecture and landscape architect Novell Tullett on revamping the 1970s estate, following the team’s success in an RIBA design competition in 2008."

Dept. for Transport: Road Safety Strategy, and 'Easier 20mph Zones"

Link to PDF file

"The 'Strategic Framework for Road Safety' sets out our approach to continuing to reduce killed and seriously injured casualties on Britain's roads.

"Our focus is on increasing the range of educational options for the drivers who make genuine mistakes and can be helped to improve while improving enforcement against the most dangerous and deliberate offenders. Additionally, at the local level, we will be increasing the road safety information that is available to local citizens."

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Link to press release

Ministers cut traffic signs red tape for local councils 

"Measures to reduce time-consuming and costly bureaucracy for councils wanting to use 20 mph schemes have been announced by Regional and Local Transport Minister Norman Baker.

"The changes - the first to be announced as part of the 'Traffic Signs Policy Review' - will mean that councils can use signs painted on roads as an alternative to expensive upright signs, cutting street clutter, as well as costs.

"In addition, the Government will reduce the need for councils to use speed humps in 20 mph zones, and make it cheaper and easier for councils to put in place variable speed limits outside schools, when local residents want these schemes."

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."