"The resemblance between one of London's largest redevelopment schemes and the political vision it is supposed to fulfill appear increasingly small"
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"The argument long made by Hammersmith and Fulham council (H&F) for the wholesale demolition of homes, businesses - including the famous Earls Court exhibition centre - and London Underground maintenance facilities in Earls Court and north Fulham is that doing so will clear a space in which a 'decent neighbourhood' can be created.
"The council began using the term 'decent neighbourhoods' in public as long ago as June 2009, when an important planning policy document published for consultation listed neighbourhoods it intended to make decent. Part of the council's case was that the Labour government's 'decent homes' programme had been a sticking plaster measure against social disadvantage in housing and that something much bolder was required. Five neighbourhoods were picked, and they included the territory since encompassed by the Earls Court Project, one of London's largest redevelopment schemes.
"Last Thursday, H&F approved the plans of its developer partner, the property giant Capital and Counties (Capco), for the construction of part of this promised new neighbourhood."
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"Quality Street: Peabody rolls out the Future of Affordable Housing"
"Rising above a bend in the railway tracks at Bethnal Green in east London stands something of an architectural anachronism. Front doors pop out from a stately two-storey plinth, clad in bottle-green glazed bricks like a Victorian pub. Inside, there are big flats, with tall ceilings and views in two directions, looking out over a shared courtyard garden.
The building has the generous scale and quality of an old factory conversion, the kind now reborn as million-pound studio flats, luxury lifestyle solutions to be snapped up in London's crazed housing super-bubble. But it is nothing of the sort. It is a new affordable housing development, built by the Peabody Trust and designed by the young architectural practice Pitman Tozer.
" 'We were inspired by the design of some of Peabody's first schemes, built back in the 1860s,' says Luke Tozer, standing in the newly named Mint Street, framed by the building on one side and railway arches on the other. 'They were all about using a limited palette of substantial materials, with simple details and the occasional decorative flourish. And they've stood the test of time, 150 years later'."
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