Moving India
Austin Williams | November 2007 The Indian railway holds misty-eyed memories for hardened travellers, but even for those who have never ventured to the continent it symbolises both the history and mystery of that vast country. With 39, 500 miles of passenger rail – twice the length of the British rail network – India still recalls the era of steam trains, tea and tiffin. In his ‘Great Railway Bazaar’ travel writer Paul Theroux...
More than Bricks and Mortar
Dave Clements | November 2007 In a speech given at Battle of Ideas 2007, Dave Clements argues that housing has become a vehicle for contemporary prejudices, anxieties and orthodoxies about how we live. The figures … The government’s plan is to build three million homes by 2020 The annual target is to build 200,000 homes a year We are already falling short by around 30,000 a year The target will increase to 240,000 a year from 2016...
London Property Review
Austin Williams | 14 October 2007 The architects of David Cameron’s so-called eco-house predict that ‘sustainability will be the critical word in architecture over the next 20 years.’ This is undoubtedly true. The problem is that sustainability is actually going to be the death of architecture. The editor of Environmental Building News is currently promoting the idea of ‘Passive Survivability’; Nick Rosen, author of ‘How to Live...
Recycling: Reducing waste or waste of time?
Martin Earnshaw | 12 October 2007 From hand-me-down clothes to the reuse of scrap metal, people have recycled throughout history. However, it was usually poverty that forced people to ‘make do and mend’. It is a sign of our affluence that we can now buy and throw things away without worry. We can afford to replace our clothes rather than mend them and ensure that we have good quality food at all times (a by-product of which is we can...
ESSAY: The political engagement’s off
Austin Williams | October 2007 The e:petitions web page was launched on Number 10’s website in November 2006 ‘enabling anyone to address and deliver a petition directly to the Prime Minister.’ Presumably, someone thought that it would be a good wheeze to minimise the photo opportunities for aggreived members of the public to present a paper petition to the Prime Minister in full view of the waiting media. Oh well, back to the drawing...
Immigrants: Your Country Needs Them
‘Immigrants: Your Country Needs Them’, by Philippe Legrain; Abacus, 2007. 384pp Reviewed By Steve Nash | September 2007 This is a thought-provoking and timely book. Thought-provoking in that it makes you think through your ideas about migration; timely in that it goes to the heart of society’s feelings about change and the modern world. The issue of immigration is never far from the news and raising the question of open...
ESSAY: Eating the greens
Austin Williams | July 2007 Tony Juniper, Executive Director of Friends of the Earth told a Local Groups conference in September 2006 that ‘environmentalists have had a reputation for being against change’. He went on to say that ‘this reputation, whether accurate or not, has enabled some of those who we seek to influence, to present us as a backward looking and conservative force.’ God forbid. But Friends of the Earth aside, the...
Something Stinks
Austin Williams | 28 February 2007 I’ve just finished reading Steven Johnson’s “The Ghost Map” about London’s 19th C cholera epidemics. Until Dr John Snow located the source of the problem in the water supply, everyone believed that the killer disease has something to do with the all-pervasive stench of the city; the ‘miasma’ permeating the over-crowded slums of the city. Using painstaking empirical data backed up by meticulous...
Abstinence makes the heart grow fonder
Peter Smith | 15 February 2007 Did you give flowers on Valentine’s Day? Planning to give Easter eggs next month? (Maybe eat them if not give them?) Be warned: celebrations and vacations are increasingly the environmental campaigner’s hook to lecture us on our bad habits. Noting that cut flowers for Valentine’s bouquets are increasingly imported to the UK, green campaigners have voiced concern over ‘flower miles’ applying the...
Building Esteem or Housing Discontent
Dave Clements | 27 February 2007 The government’s obsession with child poverty has always struck me as a little strange. I don’t mean to pretend it doesn’t exist. But why child poverty? Why not address poverty itself? Children are only poor because their parents are poor surely, not because they are poor parents. Perhaps by foregrounding the vulnerable child, awkward questions about how people can be so poor today in an otherwise more...
Listen in
Next meeting
Publications
NEW TITLE
