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I'm sad to see Laura Smith abstain. I rather like her as she repesents the nearest labour area to where I used to live.
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Oct 23, 2019 21:09
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Subbz posted:8 labour abstained against the NHS amendment also. Apparently Ronnie Campbell is ill and Laura Smith has seriously ill family member. Don't know about the others. Remember recorded abstentions may be legitimate absences (and also might be paired in some cases) Josef bugman posted:I'm sad to see Laura Smith abstain. I rather like her as she repesents the nearest labour area to where I used to live. I think she has seriously ill family member. Ed: Not sure it is Laura Smith but one of them anyway. Jaeluni Asjil fucked around with this message at 21:15 on Oct 23, 2019 |
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Oct 23, 2019 21:10
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Jaeluni Asjil posted:I think she has seriously ill family member. Oh that is more than understandable then! Poor her!
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Oct 23, 2019 21:12
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Jaeluni Asjil posted:Apparently Ronnie Campbell is ill and Laura Smith has seriously ill family member. True, but I got this from a reply to retweet’s Lou Haigh made about the LDs abstaining, when she did also? I mean, what?
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Oct 23, 2019 21:14
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We should definitely link to tweets instead of articles, because when I need to catch up on the thread I can just flick the screen and stop it scrolling when I see a tweet fly past, and that's usually how I know something potentially interesting is being flagged.
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Oct 23, 2019 21:16
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But what's even their alternative to a GE? A zombie Tory government? A VoNC that probably leads to a GE? Thank you for the excellent effort-post! VVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVV Debbie Does Dagon fucked around with this message at 21:28 on Oct 23, 2019 |
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Oct 23, 2019 21:18
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As either atonement for my whinging or punishment for all your off-topic chat, have the first chunk of an effortpost I mentioned earlier and then promptly forgot about until I saw it when reviewing my own posts - it was originally just going to be about the redevelopment (read: economic cleansing) of a single block but as always I ended up getting a bit too overambitious - as a result this first one will be just about the general history of the area, then there will be a second one about social housing generally, and then, probably sometime around 2022, a third one about the actual cleansing of Balfron Tower itself. I've always said the "redevelopment" of the the old London docks went way beyond simple capitalist insanity - that someone, somewhere was deliberately driving a symbolic (and literal, 50-storey steel) stake through the heart of the birthplace of the modern trade union movement. In a way - like all conspiracy theories - it's actually a reassurance. Malevolence is preferable to the idea that these things happen randomly - at least with malice somebody's actually thinking about you. A perfect microcosm of this has been going on at one block of flats 10 minutes walk from the phallic scrum of Canary Wharf.  This is - or it was - Balfron Tower. It might look familiar, and we'll get to that eventually. At first glance its towering brown/grey concrete, contrasting with the low-rise mock-terraces around it, makes it look like another of those horrible 70s blocks that makes internet bores drone on about the horrors of Brutalism. The story of Balfron Tower and it's surroundings though are far, far more complex than the rantings of architectural phrenologists claiming that all the ills of society can be explained by a lack of pointy roofs and exposed brickwork. Let's start with those surroundings. Balfron Tower sits at the eastern edge of Poplar, perhaps the least-fashionable of all of the hundreds of little villages flying in tight formation that make up London. There’s the name itself - Poplar. It's called that because Poplar trees grew there. That's it. The East End is littered with such imaginative names - neighbouring Poplar are Bow (there was a bridge shaped like a bow), Canning Town (it was built by a bloke called Canning), Blackwall (there was a wall on the Thames painted black), Millwall (there was a wall on the Thames with mills on it) and Limehouse (there were some lime kilns there). These are placeholder names, hastily slapped on the area once it had enough stuff in it to appear on a map. There’s no romance or beauty or deep history because the people who get to name places never live in these places. You end up in these places because you’ve nowhere else to go. That's not to say the history of Poplar itself is dull or hopeless. Well, it's frequently one or the other, but rarely both together. The thing it's most famous for (apart from being the birthplace of Harry Redknapp) is the Poplar Rates Rebellion, where George Lansbury (yes, the grandfather of the Murder She Wrote woman) and the rest of Poplar Council went to prison rather than setting a budget that would pass money from the poorest borough in London to the richest. Incidentally repeating this nowadays would get you ejected from the Labour Party, because something something fiscal responsibility blah blah real world. Keir Hardie was MP for West Ham, just the other side of the River Lea, and Clement Attlee himself was MP for the area. The Durham Miners Gala may be the spiritual home of the party, but the physical home of most of its greatest figures has been tucked away in this little strip of land. I could literally write a book on the social history of the East End (and maybe I will, if enough used tenners aren’t sent my way - you’ve been warned) but that’s not what this post is about, it’s about housing, so let’s zap forwards to 1945. The first waves of what we now call social housing mostly missed Poplar. The late-Victorian slum clearances focussed on the rookeries of Whitechapel and Wapping, and the Depression-era LCC “mansions” - effectively the first council housing - replaced the hunched terraces of Stepney and Limehouse. Poplar, meanwhile, had once been the posh bit of town (by East End standards). Close enough to the docks for an easy walk, but far enough away to not catch the smell of the open sewer of the Thames, it was where what passed for a middle class in the area lived - clerks, draughtsmen, and the owners of the hundreds of big and small business supporting the docks. While they had mostly moved further out of town with the coming of the railways, the buildings they left - solid Georgian and Victorian terraces and townhouses (“Captain’s Houses” to the locals) - were good enough to not warrant replacement. Indeed it was this very solidity - they even (mostly) had indoor plumbing! - that helped contribute to the higher precept that led to the Poplar Rates Rebellion. What could possibly go wrong?  The first night of the Blitz saw over a hundred homes destroyed in Poplar by blast and fire. The area around where Balfron Tower now stands took a particular pounding, sandwiched between a major rail junction, the still-extant Thames shipyards, and the docks themselves. By 1945 over a million houses in London had been destroyed, and Poplar had taken more than its fair share, with only Bermondsey losing more of its housing stock. Incidentally, occasionally some bore will tell you that Croydon had more bombs dropped on it than any London borough, which is technically true. However Croydon wasn’t in London at the time, and was way bigger than any of the then Metropolitan Boroughs, meaning it’s not really a valid comparison. Also most of the bombs dropped on it were Luftwaffe planes just dropping their loads (fnarr) and running as soon as they hit the anti-aircraft defences around London. The only time bombs were deliberately aimed at Croydon was at the end of the war when the Double-Cross System was used to divert V1 and V2 bombs away from London. That’s right, we had to trick the Nazis into dropping bombs on Croydon because nobody on either side gave a loving poo poo about the place. Ahem. Next post we’ll get onto how Poplar became the Petri dish of social housing, a completely different kind of Irish Problem, and how a Bond villain came to be involved with both.
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Oct 23, 2019 21:18
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jabby posted:https://twitter.com/GuardianHeather/status/1187061177647620096 Now that Boris has broken been forced to break his 'do or die' promise, is Corbyn trying to bring this deal back into the headlines where it can be scrutinised, amended and put down for good? It would be a bit better going into an election after days of negative articles about the detail of the WAB followed by it failing the final reading because an amendment has killed ERG support.
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Oct 23, 2019 21:22
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Well knock me down with a feather: I wonder if she's feeling well? Laura K: "We have as ever to be careful of flannel at PMQs" and points out a few things "not completely true". https://twitter.com/Rachael_Swindon/status/1187037168469991424?s=20
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Oct 23, 2019 21:27
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Ms Fuchi posted:But what's even their alternative to a GE? A zombie Tory government? A VoNC that probably leads to a GE? hoping extensions continue on until the EHCR report somehow forces corbyn out
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Oct 23, 2019 21:33
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I've seen a few tower blocks with that weird flying tower design and I was never quite sure what it was for, other than possibly the architectural equivalent of doing donuts in the car park in your body kitted corsa.
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Oct 23, 2019 21:37
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OwlFancier posted:I've seen a few tower blocks with that weird flying tower design and I was never quite sure what it was for, other than possibly the architectural equivalent of doing donuts in the car park in your body kitted corsa. Do you mean that small adjacent tower? It's a service tower with stairs, lift, plant. Apologies if that's not what you meant. Erno Goldfinger design: https://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/features/who-was-ern-goldfinger Jaeluni Asjil fucked around with this message at 21:44 on Oct 23, 2019 |
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Oct 23, 2019 21:41
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Yeah I mean I don't get why it needs to be in a separate tower rather than, y'know, just building it inside the main tower so you don't have to walk over to it... I mean I know I'm biased because I have pretty serious acrophobia and get nervous standing too close to an upstairs window, but living on an upper floor of that building would be utterly harrowing if the lifts/stairs are all in the other tower.
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Oct 23, 2019 21:46
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goddamnedtwisto posted:Balfron Tower Jaeluni Asjil posted:Do you mean that small adjacent tower? It's a service tower with stairs, lift, plant. Apologies if that's not what you meant. OwlFancier posted:Yeah I mean I don't get why it needs to be in a separate tower rather than, y'know, just building it inside the main tower so you don't have to walk over to it...
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Oct 23, 2019 21:46
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That's the great thing with Brutalism, no flammable cladding
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Oct 23, 2019 21:48
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OwlFancier posted:Yeah I mean I don't get why it needs to be in a separate tower rather than, y'know, just building it inside the main tower so you don't have to walk over to it... Something to do with being able to have windows on two sides of each dwelling. More about these hideous structures: https://www.archdaily.com/151227/ad-classics-trellick-tower-erno-goldfinger
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Oct 23, 2019 21:49
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As far as I'm aware the normal way you do it is you put the emergency stair riser in a sealed concrete block so that it can't catch fire. The reason grenfell went up is because some moron drilled a bunch of holes in the 1970's original safety design and ran a gas main through it and then coated the outside of the building in napalm.Jaeluni Asjil posted:Something to do with being able to have windows on two sides of each dwelling. I mean, I like the look of it, I just wouldn't want to live in it 
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Oct 23, 2019 21:49
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If you don't think the Goldfinger-designed towers are extremely cool then I don't know what to say.
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Oct 23, 2019 21:52
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What is the EHRC and why could they/it supposedly topple Corbyn?
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Oct 23, 2019 21:54
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Brony Car posted:What is the EHRC and why could they/it supposedly topple Corbyn? Equality and Human Rights Commission. Doing a supposedly 'independent' review of the anti-semitism complaints.
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Oct 23, 2019 21:55
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Complete bollocks. https://twitter.com/nicholaswatt/status/1187099659925368832 How credulous do you have to be to think 237 MPs, including nearly all the front bench and well over half of the shadow cabinet, would break a three-line whip in order to vote against a general election? It's utter nonsense propaganda to reinforce the message that Labour is terrified of an election. Considering a two-thirds majority can be achieved even if over a hundred Labour MPs rebelled, the chances of a significant number actually attempting it is tiny.
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Oct 23, 2019 21:55
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You should totally write a book if you're up for it twisto, you know enough to tell a lot of cool storiesJaeluni Asjil posted:Well knock me down with a feather: I wonder if she's feeling well? Tense scenes as one of the panel goes rogue
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Oct 23, 2019 21:56
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I think most of the 60s and 70s concrete blocks would look fine if they just had a coat of paint, tho I guess that means more maintenance. Anyones Ive been in have been fine on the inside. Its just grey buildings against a grey sky surrounded by grey roads and maybe a smattering of trees looks a bit dismal.
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Oct 23, 2019 21:57
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Some nice bright white polished concrete would be nice, but again, I do not like architects who design things to show off how clever their engineers are because I have to walk on the bastard things.
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Oct 23, 2019 21:59
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Talking about tower blocks, has there been any progress on the Grenfell inquiries?
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Oct 23, 2019 22:01
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jabby posted:Complete bollocks. goddamnedtwisto posted:
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Oct 23, 2019 22:02
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If you like Brutalism, check out the beautiful AT&T Long Lines Building  
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Oct 23, 2019 22:03
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So how about this band I randomly encountered: Red Razor: The Revolution Continues (thrash metal, Brazil) There's loads of metal bands from Latin America, also loads of these currently fashionable neo-thrash and neo-heavy bands Another semi-related band I guess would be Satanarchist
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Oct 23, 2019 22:04
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For anyone aware of my very occasional posts regarding the goings-on in the Enfield North CLP - as they look for a candidate to replace Joan 'Loadsamoney' Ryan - the NEC have decided that locally-sourced candidates are, in fact, a waste of time. So the 4 candidates include only one from the borough (a neighbouring constituency) and the rest from around London. If - like me - you consider the NEC running roughshod over the CLP for the last 12-18 months to be a result of a campaign to prevent members of a Turkish background from gaining a position of power within the CLP, then you may consider the fact that none of the candidates is Turkish to be a concern. Even more so if you consider that 3 candidates nominated by their wards before the NEC yoinked control away from the CLP were Turkish, including the only 2 candidates to be nominated by more than one ward. It stinks, basically.
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Oct 23, 2019 22:07
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jabby posted:Complete bollocks. It's amazing, Peter Oborne calls out the political media for repeating anonymous government sources uncritically, this guy thinks the sensible way to balance it out is to call Tom Watson and get him to give an anonymous Labour quote?
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Oct 23, 2019 22:12
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Ms Fuchi posted:If you like Brutalism, check out the beautiful AT&T Long Lines Building Let me tell you, the photos really don't do any justice to how imposing the loving thing is in real life. New York smells like piss but man the skyscrapers blew my mind. Also street pretzels are good
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Oct 23, 2019 22:13
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forkboy84 posted:To stay on-topic (of being off-topic), I have over the past several months been reading Marvel comics from Fantastic Four #1 onwards which was a silly thing to start doing. Early X-Men books are really bad, Thor is really good. Important I tell you this. I've tried doing this in the past and I inevitably falter somewhere around 1967 when Marvel's lineup had enough D-list material they they never properly bothered to archive it anywhere.
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Oct 23, 2019 22:13
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Azza Bamboo posted:Talking about tower blocks, has there been any progress on the Grenfell inquiries? There was a story a little while back about the report being released on... Oct 31st
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Oct 23, 2019 22:14
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I get voting Tory - you're a bad person, you have to protect your interests. But voting libdem... how loving dumb do you have to be to vote libdem?
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Oct 23, 2019 22:15
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jabby posted:Complete bollocks. This could be interpreted as Labour MPs not supporting an GE specifically this very moment as the extension needs to be confirmed first but gently caress knows with these so called reporters and their "sources"
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Oct 23, 2019 22:16
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R. Mute posted:I get voting Tory - you're a bad person, you have to protect your interests. But voting libdem... how loving dumb do you have to be to vote libdem? It's just the Tories for people who pretend to like minorities, anyway
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Oct 23, 2019 22:17
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I enjoyed this and await the next one.Pochoclo posted:Also street pretzels are good I joke of course they're human. OwlFancier posted:As far as I'm aware the normal way you do it is you put the emergency stair riser in a sealed concrete block so that it can't catch fire. The reason grenfell went up is because some moron drilled a bunch of holes in the 1970's original safety design and ran a gas main through it and then coated the outside of the building in napalm.
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Oct 23, 2019 22:20
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https://twitter.com/hendopolis/status/1187116106697400327
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Oct 23, 2019 22:21
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Successful and dense high-rise housing in rich cities elsewhere in the world - Hong Kong, Seoul, any number of minor Chinese cities with populations larger than all of Scotland - are not Brutalist slab blocks but are almost wholly point blocks with numerous windows, giving a remarkably pigeon loft look Architects hate it - the first impulse in private high-rise towers is to interrupt or hide the regular spaces opened as windows. Still, when costs impinge, it's back to the pigeon loft Socialism is better off without brutalism - it bet the public-housing farm on the aesthetic and promptly lost both
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Oct 23, 2019 22:21
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jaete posted:So how about this band I randomly encountered: Red Razor: The Revolution Continues (thrash metal, Brazil) Communist war metal
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Oct 23, 2019 22:21
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