Returned from an excellent weekend to Glasgow last night, which included plenty of cultural pursuits. Travelled there by train, trying not to feel too smug about it - on the way up we took a sleeper and the return was during the day. There are the usual comparisons you would make between rail and air - cost, comfort, time etc.
There's a gargantuan (8,000) word dissertation on the Olympics by Iain Sinclair in this week's London Review of Books. It's a typically hazy and impressionistic offering by the author of London Orbital, entitled 'The Razing of East London, the Olympics Scam.' It's too big and hard to follow and tiring to read.
Two strong pieces of content in this week's Building Design, both focused on east London. The first concerns the paper's fantastically well supported campaign to save the Robin Hood Garden - editor Amanda Baillieu widens the argument from the architectural to the sustainable, vigorously claiming that the east London block of flats "is a sustainable community". Surely there must be red faces all round at quango English Partnerships, who is proposing the demolition of the estate.
The Independent bagged the scoop that all buildings will have to be zero carbon by 2020. Caroline Flint will apparently announce that the country will join France and the US to make plans for zero-carbon commercial buildings in just over a decade. Paul King of the UKGBC says the industry is ready to go and that several developers can go zero carbon pretty pronto. Dan Labad of Lend Lease said that waiting for the Government was a mistake.
Not sure what to make of the current race to become London mayor. Ken is being portrayed as rather less than scrupulous, whilst Boris is a buffoon. The latter is interviewed in this month's Regenerate magazine, which is dubbed the sustainability issue. He comes out green, although it doesn't quite feel like it's from the heart.
Powerfully argued article in today's Evening Standard (which very annoyingly I'm unable to find on their site) by Zac Goldsmith on the upcoming decision to go-ahead with a new generation of nuclear power station. The campaigner-cum Tory party candidate for Richmond Park picks apart the argument for pressing ahead with nuclear. "If nuclear power genuinely offered a solution, we would have to embrace it. But it doesn't, and nor does it address the looming energy crisis we face in this country," he writes.
Plenty of coverage over the weekend on energy, from the upcoming government announcement on nuclear expansion this week to soaring gas/fuel/electricity prices. The Westminster Hour on Radio Four ran a report on the struggles facing the renewables sector currently last night, from getting planning permission for large scale wind farms in the first place to connecting such facilities into the grid.
So we end 2007 with yet another report and yet another major piece of future legislation for the industry to grapple with. This one's for non-domestic buildings and the report has been worked on for government by the UK Green Building Council. Although the code is some way off the UKGBC is talking 2020 as the date when zero carbon buildings can be achieved. It would be easy to dismiss as another document with heady ambitions leading to botched delivery but I see the report somewhat differently.
I had a brief but very interesting chat with a technical manager from the Environment Agency last week. The body is working on a major piece of work mapping out potential flooding scenarios for the Thames Gateway so as to plan out what should be done in the near future. The irony of the EA having a stand bang in the middle of the Thames Gateway Forum appeared to be lost to most of the delegates.
If as I just wrote 2008 (and beyond, of course) should be the year of delivery what are we to make of the Olympic green targets set yesterday? Permanent buildings to perform 15% better that Part L 2006 standards? Homes to reach Code Level 4? A legacy target of reducing emissions from the Olympics Park by 50%? I'm sure the clamour to keep costs down on this job has probably hampered the environmental ambition. So our next challenge for the next year and beyond is achieve the dream, to prove that the sustainable solution is the lowest cost one. It's a target set by a evangelical consultant I met last week and if he nails it I'm thinking he's found a licence to print money.
What's stopping clients, especially private ones, from taking the plunge and pressing ahead with financing, building, buying or renting a sustainable building? Evidence, of course. This is the overwhelming feedback I'm getting from people grappling with sustainability come back to me with. Without hard facts, figures and benchmarks the market will only pick up in a patchy and piecemeal fashion. Hence I'm detecting some frustration amongst those trying to push ahead with bold and exciting projects about how they can truly persuade those that really matter, ie the guys or girls with the cash, to come on board.
Guest post by blogger Mark Brinkley
How cuddly is this? Gordon Brown has just promised us another five eco-towns. I don’t know about you, but something sticks in my craw when I hear announcements like this. New towns, whether eco or otherwise, are not things to be dispensed with, at the whim of a prime minister, as if he was tossing sweets out into a pantomime audience. Yes, I feel patronized and, what’s more, it’s a patently absurd way of running a supposedly sophisticated economy. Try substituting the word airport for the word town. And then putting the prefix eco in front of it, as in “I have decided we shall be having another five eco airports.” It just sounds barmy.
I've been putting off writing this post for some days, given how ear-bleedingly complicating the issue is. It's carbon intensity and I attended a debate on the issue, orgainised by the UK Green Building Council and Building Services Journal, last Tuesday morning. As far as I understand it the nub of the problem is this - is the current way of measuring the carbon make-up of grid electricity correct?
Continue reading "Intensely complicated, intensely important" »
I'm becoming more interested in the growing sustainable movement in the West Country and Wales. This is both from local and regional authorities as well as amongst committed individuals. One movement which is particularly intriguing is low-impact developments, where 10-20 residents team up and create dwellings that blend in with the surrounding woodland. Some blend so well into the environment that they are hand to actually pinpoint and traditional yurts or roundhouses rely on construction techniques such as rammed earth, mud, straw bales and local timber. Photographer David Spero took some photos of a some of these developments in Pembrokeshire and Somerset (these are on show at a Tate Britain photography exhibition I went to last weekend) and Observer writer Lucy Siegle wrote an interesting piece on the phenomenon back in 2005. I'm not sure how widespread the movement will become but it's certainly laying down a challenge for mainstream developments.
Just picked up story in the Independent on Sunday which gives a depressing statistic on the take-up of micro-generation renewable systems. Suppliers of solar panels and wind turbines are reporting a 90% drop in demand for their products after the Government cut grants for the products in May. "This whole system is not working," says Rajiv Bhatia, head of renewable energy supplier Alternergy. "Tony Blair said the UK was leading the world when it comes to emissions and greenhouse gases but I don't see that from where I'm standing."
Quite a challenge for new environment secretary Hilary Benn. Can he and his Government convince us they are in any way on top of the flooding issue? The Observer reports today that ministers were warned months ago about the threat of inclement weather over the summer by the Met Office. And Benn's assertion this morning on Radio 5 Live that this was "exceptional rainfall", while true, is beginning to sound rather hollow. Until there is proper responsibility for flooding - that is both the planning for, mitigating and responding to - the groundhog day of the last few weeks will continue.
I picked up a report produced by the College of Estate Management yesterday. It sums up succinctly the flooding crisis our country is currently in, and how much worse it's going to get in the future. It looks at flood insurance and concludes that the issue "has the potential to seriously undermine both the economic and social fabric of Britain, and as a consequence its political stability as well... it seem that flood risk in many parts of the country is changing to flood certainty and, in such a situation, will cease to be an insurable risk".
Continue reading "Welcome to the world of flood certainty" »
In yesterday's Guardian historian Tristram Hunt delivers a stinging condemnation of the Thames Gateway project. He says the £6bn scheme - one that promises 120,000 new homes and 180,000 jobs - will destroy much of the historical meaning and geographical beauty that make up many parts of the Kent and Essex coastlines.
The proposed Severn Barrage - a barrier that would stretch between Weston-Super-Mare and Lavernock Point, on the south coast of Wales, has been approved by Tony Blair in his closing days in office. However, the barrage has encountered fierce criticism from environmental groups and commentators. George Monbiot, author of Heat, recently said that, "It will cause too much environmental damage: there are far better ways of getting energy from the sea."
Continue reading "Severn Barrage: one thing Blair and Brown agree on" »
Network Rail chief executive John Armitt, who is set to leave his post this year, offered a useful snapshot of rail as a sustainable transport system. In spite of a rosy picture about how the energy use in rail was reducing Armitt was realistic in the significant challenge for the industry ahead.
To the British Library today for a fascinating exhibition London: A Life in Maps. It's obviously a history of cartogrophy, but also a timely reminder of the phenomenal growth of our capital in the last five centuries. The exhibition - there's a fantastic amount on the library's website for those of you who can't make it - begins by pointing out that the city remained within the old walls before 1550.
Progress, progress as century followed century. The exhibition ends with a nod to the capital's future development ahead of 2012 (how much will that cost?) but I left wondering what the next century will offer. Will the growth curve continue? Can we demolish and rebuild the City as we have done in the last 30 years (more of the financial heart of the city was pulled down and redeveloped since 1975 than in the Blitz)? Or any other major UK city?
I have an ally in Times writer Richard Morrison. His piece yesterday broadened out my thoughts last week on design in housing. Morrison takes the findings of last week's CABE report on housing quality and expands it into how as a culture it is second nature to see products as throwaway (by the way I only stumbled into reading his piece via a discarded Times newspaper left on the Tube - oh the irony). Computers only last 18 months, mobile phones probably about 18 weeks etc. This built in obsolescence exists for housing, says Morrison. Why are rubbish residences being built? "Quick bucks, unscrupulous developers, lax controls" is his pithy reckoning.
Valuable new information reaches my inbox from property consultant Drivers Jonas on on site power generation. Local authorities are now beginning to follow the lead of London, which is demanding 10% of energy to come from renewable sources on site. National guidance is now in draft from but research from Drivers Jonas has unearthed how the 10% rule is starting to spread through the regions.
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