London mayor Sadiq Khan has announced a £13m fund for public, private and third sector businesses to transform the Royal Docks. The grant money aims to “make it a more attractive place to live, work, visit and invest”.
And it couldn’t have come at a better time, as Khan and team prepare to relocate City Hall to the area. A spruce-up ahead of a potential move to the Crystal (pictured) next December would definitely soften the shift from the South Bank to the Docklands.
The money could also come in handy for building owners GLA Land & Property. The day before the fund was announced the GLA revealed the move will cost around £18m, with £10m in dilapidation costs for its current home. Diary expects it won’t be so lucky to get any funds for regeneration in SE1 though.
What a racket!
Diary was kept on tenterhooks until well past 10pm last week for Hammersmith & Fulham Council’s decision on Westfield London’s plans to turn its House of Fraser store into flexible workspace. However, there were plenty of heated discussions in the lead-up to it that kept us entertained.
One of these – an applicant’s retrospective application to install padel tennis courts at Bishops Park – was the subject of much consternation. But what, Diary wondered, is padel tennis? Thankfully, one naysayer had the answers.
“The game is fast paced, and balls hit the ground and the walls at high speed,” she described to a straight-faced committee. It also produces many “screams of excitement”, arguably even more than traditional tennis does. Diary was equally impressed and intimidated.
Sparks also flew when the committee chair’s late evening proclamation to move on to the Westfield vote was loudly interrupted with “Agreed!” by one particularly outspoken councillor. “Because of the online nature of this meeting, I still have to do the roll call, unfortunately,” the chair said composedly, to which he replied that she could “always ask if anybody is opposed”. Unruffled, the chair stuck to her guns, to which the councillor shrugged: “You’re the chair.” She got the final word in, though – “I am!”
Nowhere to sitcom
Anyone who watched Friends will have wondered how those 20-somethings could afford to live in their multi-bedroomed, New York loft apartments on what could only be low-paying salaries. Diary certainly has. Surely, if a fictional flatshare in New York is anything like a real flatshare in any UK city, the open-plan living room in Monica’s flat, the scene of so many Friends moments, would have been utilised as a bedroom. Luckily for us, our friends at flatsharing site SpareRoom have had a play around on the computer and visualised what Monica’s iconic apartment would look like without a living room. Diary still thinks it looks massive and if anyone complains about living in a space like Monica’s, they should have come and lived with this Diary writer in their flat in Penge.
How the rise in divorce put an end to the gospel hall
When the Plymouth Brethren left their gospel hall in Waltham Cross for a new building some miles to the north, Diary wonders if they might have prayed for a different use for their former meeting place. A new self-storage unit and attached Lidl supermarket may well be just what the people of Waltham Cross need, but will Lok’nStore’s 100,000 sq ft proposals be welcomed by the site’s former occupiers when they learn that divorce is one of the potential factors behind the growth of the self-storage sector? According to a Savills report, filed with Lok’nStore’s planning application, divorced or separated people are more than twice as likely to use self-storage than the rest of the population. Praise be.
Size matters
A momentous day for the PM’s Project Speed last week saw housing secretary Robert Jenrick present radical plans to parliament to allow redevelopment of vacant commercial buildings for flats free from the shackles of planning consent. An announcement commending the controversial permitted development rights was swiftly followed by a second, less-enthusiastic report. The Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government-commissioned study into said PDR concluded that these homes are, in fact, worse, and raised concerns over the “health, wellbeing and quality of life” of residents.
Housing select committee chair Clive Betts took the opportunity to alert Boris Johnson of the findings the next day at PMQs.
Betts explained that the report found homes as small as 16 sq m.
“To put this in context for the prime minister, 16 sq m is just about the size of the base of the ministerial limousine that he gets driven around in each day,” he said. “Will he now change the rules and ensure that we never again allow slums to be built and people to be asked to live in a space as small as his ministerial car?”
