People who rent need secure jobs, decent, warm, insulated homes with green spaces nearby. In the UK it’s estimated that half of the UK population in 2022 (including teenagers and children) live in privately rented or social housing accommodation. Although home ownership is high in the UK it’s distorting the reality of who buys and […]

Featured Image: Metropolitan Thames Valley (MTVH)’s Pinnacle contractors Stuart and Dom (and Scott not in view) part of the groundworks team working under Metropolitan’s Richard Warriner and Pinnacle’s Mark Varley. I talked to Stuart to get an idea of what he enjoys about his work. Stuart’s interest in growing things started with his grandad who […]

Featured Image: Conservative MP for Broxtowe Darren Henry with pupils from Fairfield Spencer Academy after organising a virtual parliamentary question time during Parliament Week 14th -21st November 2022. Democracy is the energy of any economic system we choose to implement and we need its health as much as it needs ours. In many places affluent and […]

Rushcliffe is fantastic at change: growing, learning, evolving.  What people we have here.  Because Rushcliffe has grown (especially over the last thirty years (see presentation below) and when it has grown it’s taken the people with its growth which gives a boost to awareness of democracy: local parish, ward, county, regional structures. This is a great resource: over the next few […]

Featured Image: some of Nottingham’s local businesses who with the Nottingham universities, went to Parliament on October 28th 2016 14th-21st November 2022 was Parliament Week: in the coming year, the next 365 days, how can we understand ourselves as individuals in groups, neighbourhoods and communities better so we can achieve the creativities, productivities, social mobilities we […]

With the Online Harms Bill setting the first legal parameters on the internet wild west it’s great to see courses open to students, businesses and the general public that connect us with people who have experience, skill and the will to communicate their knowledge to more people, more of the time. Dryden Enterprise Centre’s Digital Deep […]

The Dryden Enterprise Centre was built during the pandemic to provide a state of the art enterprise, workspace and training centre for Nottingham Trent University students during and after graduation, local start up and hybrid businesses and Nottingham and Derby businesses in the D2N2 geography to have a brilliant connecting space.  The DEC that Natalie Gasson Mckinley chose for […]

Featured Image: Prof Alasdair Rae’s: Ranking of electoral results by political party linked to social and economic deprivation There are plans to reduce the number of political constituencies from 650 to 600: this is an act of vandalism against representation that we should oppose. When we rebuilt Britain after the second world war people returning […]

Jonathan Reeves is part of the groundworks team working across the Metropolitan Housing estate in Nottingham and Derby. Living in Derby with a young family he’s part of Dale Hayward’s and Shaun Thompson’s team with partner Jeremy Bult Working on groundworks mean they’re involved in anything: Jonathan is repointing cement around the drain at the rear […]

Featured image: Architecture and Urbanism’s People Powered Places brand that raises the possibilities for more representative neighbourhoods and communities, more of the time. In social housing there’s been a debate over the last forty years about how the cost of managing the privately owned housing estate can be efficiently run, supervised and scaled as well […]