‘What I Love About The Fire Fighters (At Grenfell) Was That They Weren’t Denying The Fact That They Needed Us To Communicate With Them: Because Where They Were They Couldn’t See What We Could see’: When Normal Relations Between People Are Resumed And We Stop Excusing Social Exclusion….

Featured Image: Release of Doves at Grenfell Memorial 15th June 2019 We live in a society that since the election of Margaret Thatcher in 1979 has discouraged people from different backgrounds communicating while at the same time eroding a sense of shared space, place, belonging and social mobility. The quote in the header comes from […]

Local Talent (4) Illustration By Bosley (That’s Laura): A New Way Of Story Telling: Out Of The Magic Of Shadows….

The importance of understanding and improving dubious, risky and life threatening supply chains around the way we work and live highlights why keeping Grenfell fresh in our minds and linking it in our hearts and history to the same types of supply chains that resulted in the coal slag heap behind an Aberfan primary school […]

Local Talent(3) Allanah Coggins: How Architecture Affects People: Small And Beautiful: The Architecture of Social Nourishment

The thinking, resourcefulness and aesthetic behind carefully designed and managed cancer centres intrigued Interior Designer Allanah Coggins in her final year project before qualifying. Like Berlin based architects Rumlabor who work to pass on knowledge skills and resources to people in a localising way: Above: a bee. Allanah used a central metaphor of Colony Collapse syndrome in […]

Puretech Window Cleaning: Feet On The Ground: Spirit of Traditional Service Driven Better by Technology

Every window cleaner wants to give you a great service: but think about the men (and women!) who do this demanding job. Traditionally it’s the up the ladder with mop and squeegee (invented by Italian Immigrant Ettore Steccone in 1936). Window cleaning is hard work and like gardening, you see the results as soon as […]

Support And Promote Local Talent (2) Growing Hospitality Businesses On Our Doorsteps…? The Local: NTU Interior Designer Amber Arif

I really enjoyed the 2019 NTU Interior Architecture Final Project Show: Small Is Beautiful: eighty students looking, thinking, researching, reflecting, making, testing what they assume, believe and aspire to individually and together. One of the students who thought in terms of local growing and Farm to Fork is Ambareen Arif in her project: The Local: “Farm-to-fork […]

How Small Is Beautiful Can Create So Much More Than Money: Community Wealth In The Generative Value Of Growing People Like Seeds…

Featured Image: Stonebridge City Farm established 40 years in Nottingham Small is Beautiful: Rethinking Economics (As If People Mattered) by EF Schumacher allows you to think about the humanity of economics. Published in 1973 and available as an audiobook, it wasn’t really that long after the horror of the second world war where so many people […]

Support and Promote Local Talent (1) Kyle Biggs Art, Interior, Set Design NTU 2019

Featured Image: Portrait by NTU trained designer Kyle Biggs The world needs talent, change, creativity: take a look at the work of ingenious Kyle Biggs, 2019 graduate. Above: examples of the work of Kyle Biggs: from left: visual for ‘The Jackdaw Ship’ Model of a Sicilian villa for adaptation of Garcia Lorca’s Blood Wedding, Drawing of street using […]