Election odds

Gamble on the election while you can. Soon afterwards having a flutter will once again be under attack by establishment Puritans… or simply by those people who think you have a ‘problem’.

Generation Wars

On Friday 20th September, I joined the children, parents and teachers gathering in Manchester for the Climate Strike where Mayor Burnham proudly announced: “Our generation has failed you. I’m not arguing with you. We are giving you your voice and power.”

Book Bites: Paul Morland’s “The Human Tide”

Once the Malthusian link is broken and enough food and liberating technology is available, progress begins to feed through to the general population.

Milton’s Paradise Regained

If we are to build a new city, then Milton Keynes represents the experiential cornerstone. It symbolises the kind of bold, creative masterplanning that we desperately need but haven’t seen the like of since those crazy days of the 1960s.

China’s environmental transformation

“The environment” has long exercised the minds of the Chinese government. It was one of the first developing nations to introduce sustainable development on a national and regional policy level and it rewrote its Constitution way back in 1982 – five years before the Brundtland Report – pledging to “protect the environment”.

Blade Runner’s Retro Futures

by Dr. H J McCracken

We are now only two years from the dateline of the original Blade Runner. Ray Bradbury’s melancholic future of Martian settlement and abandonment, The Martian Chronicles, has since long passed, and along with it of course, 1984.

The middle-class home

Compared to the many stories recorded about the British aristocracy or the Dickensian working class in London, there is still very little known about the capital’s middle classes and their domestic lives.

Tianjin in perspective

by Austin Williams | 19 August 2015 “Disasters on the scale of (this) tragic explosion … tend to provoke a brief wave of statements that such things must never happen again. With the passage of time these sentiments are diluted into bland reports about human error and everything being well under control… (but), there is a real chance that the death toll could trigger meaningful changes in a neglected aspect of...

Playing Rough

Review by Matt Bloomfield | 01 August 2015 This summer in London has seen the opening of two exhibitions, both set against a backdrop of brutalism and with a pronounced vein of playfulness. The RIBA Gallery is currently occupied by The Brutalist Playground, an interactive installation created by architecture and design collective du jour- Assemble, in collaboration with artist Simon Terrill. Meanwhile, the Hayward Gallery on the...

A Tale of Two Cities

by Rozie Saunders | 10 July 2015 Are soaring property prices that push young Londoners out of their city, simply a price for London’s global success? Is London becoming a millionaires’ playground rather than a bustling model of urban living? We report on the city’s perceived identity crisis. London is allegedly losing its sense of self. The consensus seems to be that ordinary people are being priced out of the housing...