I’ve lived in Waterloo since 1996. Over the past six months I’ve been helping Mike Bruce with the digitisation of his A Story of Waterloo, a ‘tape slide show’ that since it was first screened in 1982 has achieved something of a mythic status in community circles. These days nobody has the machinery to play [...]
Each month the Mayor of London faces a grilling from the London Assembly, a kind of Mayor’s Question Time. It lasts up to a few hours and there is a webcast of it. But the image quality is spectacularly bad: I suppose this is what people mean when they talk about ‘faceless officialdom’. It’s only [...]
Credit crunch, sub-prime mortgage, collateralised debt obligations… Obscure terms that now feature in everyday pub chatter, even more so after this week’s spectacular events involving the collapse of investment banks, unprecedented interventions by governments and a looming global economic downturn. But can you, hand on heart, say that you understand what the credit crunch really [...]
The London Festival of Architecture goes from strength to strength and this year runs from 20 June to 20 July. Along with the exhibitions, talks, guided walks, debates and parties there is a series of excellent architectural podwalks produced by Ruby Wright. I did one about my neighbourhood, entitled ‘Backstreets of Southwark’. It was featured [...]
I want Ken Livingstone to be re-elected as Mayor of London. I believe that as a politician he is a cut above any of the other candidates and has the experience and record of achievement that entitle him to a third term of office. I have even made a small donation of £50 to his [...]
I spent Saturday at “barcampUKgovweb” and met a very interesting group of people who care about how government behaves online. Among the 60 or so participants, there was a roughly even split between people working for government, people working for companies and people who are – for want of a better term – civic hackers.
Help locate London’s fine heritage of Victorian drinking fountains, in celebration of the Metropolitan Drinking Fountain and Cattle Trough Association. Public drinking fountains are a simple, modest yet precious civic amenity under threat from neglect and the rise of environmentally catastrophic bottled water. Turn away from the bottle and join a treasure hunt and celebration [...]
Nick Cohen writes in The Observer about the unwillingness of the British government to do something about tax avoidance by the super-rich, which he sees as “debauching British society”. Meanwhile new figures from the TUC show that since 2000 the pay of company executives has increased 17 times faster than average pay. It is true [...]