Monday 1 August 2011

We haven't gone away, you know...

The lack of posting is mainly the result of an ongoing chest infection. Plus the depressing feeling that the world has gone mad and there's nothing to be done about it.

It's at times like this that one should read some history, and that's just what I've been doing.

I'm now about one third of the way through Austerity Britain by the excellent David Kynaston. I heard him at last year's Book Festival.

Here's a quote:

The Willesdenites were asked what form their new ideal housing would take; as usual, only a small minority (15 per cent) opted for the self-contained flat. But by this time the government had already introduced new subsidy scales for local authorities that in effect gave them a significant financial incentive to build blocks of flats of four storeys or more, as long as they had lifts.
What's fascinating is that the professionals - the architects and the planners - were convinced that people should prefer flats because they represented a more communal, or socialist, way of living, which would involve all kinds of state-provided leisure pursuits in each building.

The people, the mainly Labour voting people, didn't want to know.

And here's what happened in Dundee only yesterday:

And here's some more socialist projects biting the dust :

1 comment:

David Farrer said...

Comments made on previous template:

Neil Craig
I think it is the other way round. Not that they were originally a bad idea enforced by poitical fashion but that they became politically unfashionable and were deliberately allowed to go to ruin. In many places penthouse flats in a free market bring a premiunm  
 
This is a comment given to a blog of mine  
 
"I was brought up in the Red Road. I started my first Company .... from my flat in Red Road court. I had a warm, secure, well appointed home. I loved the place, but was forced to move in 1990 because the council were letting it slide just too far.  
 
The place is in the state it's in because of WILFUL neglect on the part of the City Fathers; no other reason. They let the buildings rot, effectively condoned the violence and drugs and deliberately used the place as a dumping ground.  
 
The original posters proposals won't see the light of day for one reason and one reason only; Those holding the controls want their skin; their wedge off the top. Nose-in-the trough time for the City's fatcats and to hell with the ordinary weegie!  
http://a-place-to-stand.blogspot.com/2005/03/red-road-flats-herald-letter.html

18 September 2011, 19:07:37 GMT+01:00
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Colin Finlay
In that remarkable BBC TV serial, 'Our Friends In The North', we are treated to a thinly - veiled account of Labour's putrid, faux - concern for the hapless, double - digit IQ (and frequently Irish  immigrant - descended people) whose dysgenic, taxpayer - financed breeding has been presented as the raison d'etre for council house construction.  
 
 Also, the fact that the BBC produced a programme in which Socialism is shown to have failed (well, it was based on the actuality of T.Dan Smith's Newcastle of the Seventies) makes this DVD a 'rara avis' indeed.

9 August 2011, 08:21:46 GMT+01:00
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james higham
Flats are Ok, except for:  
 
1.  
2.  
3.  
 
etc. etc.

8 August 2011, 11:12:39 GMT+01:00