THE HERON - Penthouse or Shithouse?

I spotted this advert in the property section of the Sunday Times:  -

 LIVE WITHOUT COMPROMISE  -
The opportunity to live in an exceptional space. Expansive residences
above the 30th floor with unparallelled views over London.
An outstanding specification and first class amenities throughout
Prices from £3.6 million   

This 'opportunity' is brought to you by 'the Penthouse Collection' at THE HERON EC2. The ad featured a  photograph taken from the inside of one of these Penthouses which, incidentally, featured a large pair of super sized binoculars pointing straight at The Shard -suggesting that one of the attractions of the Heron is that you can play 'Peeping Tom' on the equally mentally sub normal cretins who purchased similar 'penthouses' in that idiotic aberration of a building.

Actually I think that they shouldn't be called 'Penthoses' but - 'Shithouses' - because -if there is one thing which is absolutely certain -the sort of people who are going to buy into the Heron 'penthouse culture' are going to be absolutely top of the Premier League international shits.

The Somerset Levels

I am a bit fed up with all the whining and whinging from the inhabitants of the Somerset Levels . Frankly it is  time they did some lateral thinking. For a start if you want to live in a house which is virtually at sea level why not build your house on stilts? It is not rocket science is it? Secondly let's be honest. The Somerset levels are just that - level - they are not -in short - a thing of great beauty or interest-  nor is the farmland of much value except, in the main, as grazing.

No the answer to the problems of the Somerset levels is not more dredging, drainage, pumping, and dykes but the opposite- flood it and keep it flooded. Imagine 30,000 acres of inland water. Forget the Norfolk Broads the Somerset levels could become a great holiday destination and revitalise the dormant economy of these parts. As for all those complaining house owners who whine about the fact that they are cut off - get a life and get a boat - and remember that waterside homes the World over always fetch a large premium. Make the levels into an inland sea and just watch property prices soar.

As for the cost it would - assuming compensation to farmers of around £5,000 per acre - be around about £150 million, chicken feed for an Agency which spent £31 million on establishing a bird sanctuary last year!

I have got a new hero - now that -in this modern world which is virtually devoid of heroes - is quite something. His name is Paul Sykes and he is the very rich Yorkshire businessman who has pledged his fortune to making sure that every one in this country understands exactly why we -in the UK - must leave the European Union.  Now according to the CBI, the club of 'big business' he shouldn't do this as they are fanatical in their desire to keep Britain in Europe. But you know there is a great big difference between the likes of Paul Sykes and the over promoted, over paid bunch of has beens in the ranks of the CBI - the difference -Paul Sykes built his company and his fortune from scratch - most CBI members got to the top of companies by climbing a greasy pole.

Paul Sykes is doing what he is doing because he is a patriot who loves his country and he is sick of seeing it give up its historic Independence and freedoms for the proverbial forty pieces of silver.  Unfortunately Nick Clegg - the moronic deputy Prime Minister- doesn't understand the meaning of the word patriotism (and people thing that Westminster was a good school!) . Apparently Nick Clegg thinks that wanting Britain to leave the EU cannot be patriotic because ; 'it would leave many people poorer, it would leave us weaker as a country etc.'  Well - actually - Mr Clegg -using your criteria - we would definitely not have gone to war in 1939 - nor gone to war in 1914 - as both those conflicts caused us no end of economic grief. But we did so as we honoured treaty obligations and to fight tyranny. Now a different sort of tyranny is abroad. It is the tyranny of unelected judges, the tyranny of unelected and unaccountable officials, the tyranny of the urban political elite intent on foisting there ideas and 'vision' on everyone in this land.  The destruction of these tyrannies is surely worth fighting for and that is why Mr Sykes (someday I hope him to become Lord Sykes or even Paul Sykes Duke of....) is my new hero.    

Great Fulford Restoration - An Award

Yes - contrary to much belief we do actually have a restoration programme on the house - it is just that it goes in stops and starts and only happens when funds are available.  One of the most depressing things about owning a large house  is that you can spend large sums on vital 'infrastructure' such as the roof and the wiring but there are hardly any visible evidence that you have done anything! So the casual observer will still think the house is crumbling into the ground blissfully unaware that the lead work on the roof has been renewed - so no longer leaks - that the wiring has all be updated - so there is no longer a risk of the whole house going up in flames due to an electrical fault.

Finally though we have done something really visible and the effect is stunning. Our big Double Cube ballroom -or great Drawing Room (42 ft l x 21 ft x21) fell into total disrepair in 1810 when the ceiling collapsed. It had been constructed within the Tudor walls of the house and - to get the height-  my ancestor had removed a floor -cutting through tie beams etc. and fatally weakening the building - the result -disaster a hundred odd years later.

In 1960 my father carried out vital structural repairs to stop the whole of that side of the house collapsing but had little money left to spend on interior decoration and installed a temporary ceiling. Now at last I have got rid of it and realised a long held dream by replacing it with a truly 'shock and awe' baroque plaster ceiling created for me by probably the greatest exponent of the almost lost art of stucco and plaster work - one Geoffrey Preston - who I found - by a fluke - living and working down the road in Exeter! 


So for the last eight months we have all laboured to finish this great work  Geoffrey has created a ceiling to gasp at - pictures have been rehung where they last hung over two hundred years ago and my wife and I -with some occasional desultory help from our children have personally applied no less than four coats of paint to the walls - which has been very good for our figures and entirely satisfying. 

The end result was that we entered the finsihed room for the Georgian Group Architectural Awards - the Oscars of architecture - in the 'restoration of a Georgian interior' category and being on the short list hoofed it up to London to attend the awards ceremony at Chrisites.  Sadly we came second - beaten by a short head by Andrew Lloyd Webber's restoration of the Theatre Royal in Drury Lane.  Still -as they say - I think - better to have tried and lost than never to have tried at all.   

The rich are different for you and me

Scott Fitzgerald wrote; 'The rich are different to you and me.' to which Hemingway tartly replied; 'Yes - they've got more money'

Well I am not sure that's the whole truth.  Knight Frank - the elite London based estate agents - have kindly sent me their lavishly illustrated Autumn catalogue featuring properties they are selling.   The average price of of these places is around £10 million with a valuation of around £3.5k per sq. ft. being the seeming going rate in central London.  Flicking through the tome I was struck by how outstandingly boring most of the interiors where and that something was missing.  Then it came to me - there where no books or magazines anywhere to be seen.  The rooms where all clinical and sterile, perhaps reflecting the mindsets of those who have the money to buy. No clutter, no cosiness and definitely no books.  

So yes 'The rich are different from you and me'  - but Hemingway was wrong- it's not just that 'they've got more money' it's that they never read a book, newspaper or magazine.     

Devon & Cornwall Police inhabit a vast headquarters building on the outskirts of Exeter.  When I was a small boy the then Devon County police operated extremely effectively from a building a fraction of the size and, what's more, the police where highly visible in the countryside and on the roads. Now the police are all but invisible. There must be a sort of 'parkinsons law' for police - the bigger the headquarters the fewer actual front line policemen there are.

I am writing this after chatting over a cup of coffee with someone who comes in and does the odd building job for me. Somehow we got onto the subject of drugs and he told me that he was horrified when his boys told him that drugs where openly traded at their secondary school. He demanded and interview with the Headmaster and asked him if he knew of it;

 'Oh yes' was the answer ' but it is no worse than any other schools.'
 That 's not the point my man answered; 'why don't the police do anything about it?
 'Because the police are not allowed on the school premises unless they are invited in '
 'So why don't you invite them in?'

And so on. Both the police and the headmaster knew of the problem, both had decided to do nothing about it. There is no better advert for private education than that. If that had been the headmaster of a public school the parent would have complained to the governors and he would have been dismissed the next day. Everybody knows that turning a blind eye to petty crime leads on to greater crime and encourages more crime yet here was the headmaster of a major secondary school doing just that. Worse the police where equally uninterested.  

Syria - Three cheers for Putin

Well Hurrah for Putin - he seems to have brokered a deal which allows everybody to save face without anybody having to fire missiles at each other. That is a major achievement and.  Now - hopefully - Cameron and Obama will leave Assad to get on with the task of winning his Civil War and stop flirting with the idea of supporting the opposition which - oddly - include Al Queda and other extreme Jihadist Muslim groups - which strangely - I thought we had been fighting against for the best part of the last decade or so!

Cameron's emotional demand for Parliament's sanction to bomb Syria was apparently fuelled by pictures of dead children - well excuse me but if pictures of dead children are now to become a primary reason for Britain's armed forces (which Cameron has spent the last three years emasculating) going to war then they are going to be very busy indeed in the future. Actually I think Prime Ministers and Presidents should be more driven by real politic of situations than by emotion especially when lives of our own young men are on the line.