Social Housing of Ham - past, present and future

Presented with an offer like "This year's annual Ham United Group architectural tour will follow a walking route with Richard Woolf, architect and building historian, as your guide." I was always going to say yes. 

Architecture is a keen interest of mine, Ham is another and Richard is a superb guide; I think I have been on all of his previous walking tours.

In my frequent walks to find pictures to feed my Ham Photos blog I have walked through all the areas of social housing many times and I was interested to learn more about the history of their development.

Richard was well prepared, as always, and in addition to the leaflet he gave us all he had several large pictures to show us with photos of old street scenes and floor plans of houses.

He also had an assistant, David Williams, who as both the former leader of Richmond Council and a local historian was able to add stories about how the various local councils in the area were involved.

The pamphlet marked out our route which started with the alms houses in Ham Street, not social housing in the modern sense but a precursor. Along the way we saw housing from various periods and, because of that, of various designs.

Our final stop was at Ham Close, where I took the picture above which is both the most recent social housing development in Ham and also the site for a new development over the next decade or so.

Throughout the tour Richard explained the national politics and social history that drove the development of social housing in various waves, perhaps most famously in the "homes for heroes" policy after WWI.

There were recurring themes of housing the poor and of making profit, and clearly these themes were often at odds with each other. Thatcher got a few mentions, and rightly so.

The variety of housing, including a few recent infills, was particularly interesting to me and Richard was able to explain the thinking behind the designs, such as the medieval inspired terraces of four houses where the two end houses were side-on to form a [ shape. I also liked the story of a row of houses commissioned by the long gone Ham Council which were designed with vegetable gardens in front of the houses.

Over two hours we walked a little and learned a great deal. It was exactly my sort of thing.

Learning about The Buildings of Ham Common

My favourite community events, by a country mile, are the local architecture walks and talks given by local architect Richard Woolf and organised by local community group Ham United Group so I was delighted to join his tour of The Buildings of Ham Common.

Ham Common, unsurprisingly, is the heart of Ham and it is ringed by an interesting collection of buildings from old cottages to substantial modern lodges. Richard squeezed eighteen of them into a fact-filled, informative and entertaining walk.

Here we see Richard explaining the rise of Neo-Georgian (Neo-Geo) houses and how the few examples on Ham Common sit uneasily with their grander Georgian neighbours.

I know the buildings on Ham Common pretty well and have photographed them all, often many times, for my community blog HamPhotos, but I was still absorbing new insights on their design and construction at a prodigious rate of knots.

This was a fascinating talk and it ended on the best possible note, Richard promised to do another walk and talk next year.

Beyond Bauhaus exhibition at RIBA

I worked in Central London for several years, lastly near Kings Cross, when it was fairly easy to get to exhibitions at RIBA, even if it meant taking a flexible view of how long a lunch hour lasts. That stopped when I started work in Teddington and I have struggled to pick the habit back up since retiring.

An exhibition on Modernism got me back there.

I made something of the trip walking up from Vauxhall, though walking around Buckingham Palace at Changing of the Guard was not one of my better ideas. Apart from that the walk went well and it was nice revisiting once familiar places like Berkley Square.

I hit another problem at RIBA with the cafe immediately on the right of the entrance and the one of the first floor both being out of action. I consoled myself by taking in the displays on the first and third floors which got me in an architectural mood.

Going back to the ground floor for the main exhibition I found where the cafe had moved to and was able to have a coffee and a toasted sarnie before going in.

The premise of the exhibition was that Modernism in Britain grew directly out of the Bauhaus movement with the relocation of some of the key players, notably Walter Gropius, from Germany to England, and this was the thread that the exhibition followed.

The staging of the exhibition was somewhat unusual, and I have mixed views on it. The extra space needed to display the photographs and drawings was created by adding pillars to the room but instead of mounting them on the outside they went inside and we peered at them through geometrically shaped openings, a bit like Play School. These shapes were included in the exhibition poster though I failed to determine their exact relevance.

That said, I am a sucker for architecture in general and Modernism in particular and I loved the exhibition. One favourite section was that on individual houses built for rich sponsors, often a good source for experimental architecture, and another was on industrial buildings.

In the post-Bauhaus section I was surprised to see several pictures of Eric Lyons' SPAN developments but none of their first on Parkley in Richmond, which is about 200m away from where I live. I cheekily raised this with one of the staff who was overseeing a tour group and she skilfully defended the curator's choice.

Other famous architects featured were Denys Lasdun (NT) and Erno Goldfinger (Trellick Towers) and there were other famous buildings by less famous architects which produced a peppering of works known to me amongst many that were not. Seeing both helped put the known into a wider context.

The exhibition confirmed my love of Modernism and of exhibitions at RIBA.

Two Towers

The saga of The Old Post Office (TOPO) in Kingston which started in 2014 still continues. The main decision to approve the scheme was made in 2016, despite the significant objections to it, but there was always a question over the main tower.

The Council wanted a visually striking building to mark the southern entrance to the town centre while residents wanted something as small and discrete as possible.

In the very proposal it was shown as 12 storeys tall and after the initial consultation it went up to 16, despite all the feedback saying it was already too tall. It kept changing slightly in size and quite a bit in shape and we finally got the scheme on the left.

There was considerable criticism of this and so a working group of the developer, residents, architects and others were asked to come up with something better. That's the tower on the right.

Over the week a number of drop-in consultation sessions were held where residents could give their views on the new proposal. I suspect that my views will be in a small minority but I prefer the original scheme to the new one.

The original scheme looks more modern and, I think, fits in better with its neighbours. There is also a lot more going on and I like that, one of the joys of the Lloyds Building is that there are things everywhere.

To me the new tower looks like it was designed by a committee (which obviously it was) and we have got a bland compromise. I presume that this scheme will go ahead so I just hope that it looks better in real life than it does in this drawing.

HAG talk: Ham's Modern Architecture

My involvement with Ham Amenities Group (HAG) is not that much to boast of but I do get to produce the posters for the events. An upside of this is that I get to know about the talks early and can be one of the first to book.

I was very keen to hear this talk for several reasons. I am interested in Ham and in Modern Architecture so this talk could have been made for me, and in a way it was. I had heard Richard Woolf talk about local architecture before and it was that which made me suggest him as a speaker for HAG.

I did not know beforehand that Richard also does lecturing and that came though in a superbly composed and delivered presentation.

The content was both detailed and authoritative. Richard certainly knew his subject and was enthusiastic about it too. That enthusiasm had taken him all over Ham and down no-through-road, like Sheridan Road, which I thought that only I walked down (for my Ham Photos blog).

Richard hit all the right buttons for me in the talk, and I would have been delighted with it whatever opinions he had, so it was a bonus that he seemed to agree with me on almost everything and as he was the expert that was even more gratifying.

The aim of the HAG talks is to interest and inform residents in some aspect of Ham and Richard Woolf did that magnificently. We are already trying to find a way to get him to do another talk.

Visiting the Huf Haus UK Show House

The success of Peter Huf's talk to Ham Amenities Group (HAG) was such that we were invited to visit the new Huf House UK Show House in Brooklands on a day that it is not normally open to the public and Peter Huf was there to guide us around.

The talk had been very good but it was far better to see the reality and to have Peter there for two hours, with his colleague Jack Eddy Architectural Technologist and Environmental Advisor, to go into more detail about the approach and the philosophy and also to answer all the detailed questions that we had.

The wide entrance hall set the scene beautifully. It was spacious and bright and you could see right past the dining area to the garden beyond. Just behind that hedge was a busy road but we could only hear the traffic when Peter opened a window to make a point about the sound insulation.

A Huf Haus connects with its setting and this was most obvious in the master bedroom suite with its large windows and the trees almost in touching distance.

The Show House was arranged as a three bedroom house with the master bedroom taking all of one side of the upstairs (to the right) and two good bedrooms on the other side.

The dining area was double height which produced this impressive view. The dining table is a good size with eight chairs around it yet it almost looks small in the space allocated to it. No squeezing past chairs here.

The landing was far more than a corridor. There was space for a substantial wall unit along one side and sitting areas with several chairs at each end.

The Show House is on an industrial estate, The Heights, and part of it faces on to a car park. Most of the house looks the other way and on the car park side there is the kitchen and an office.

The section of wall hides the plant room. This would normally be in the basement but this house is close to a stream and is raised above normal ground level to keep it safe from flooding so a basement was out of the question.

One corner of the house had this outside area. That is the main living space on the other side of the glass wall. The river is just off to the left, as indicated by the trees.

Looking the same way but from inside shows how wonderful that living area is with its natural views and huge spaces. The dinning area is just off to the right.

Beyond the wall with the paints on is a conference room which, with the office on the other side, enables the house to function commercially. If this was a wholly domestic property then those two rooms could have been more bedrooms or something like a gym or music room.

Huf Haus is designed to make you happy with good light and views and with all the annoyances, like heat and noise, dealt with by state of the art technology. This house operates without mains gas or electricity and because it is so efficient it only need around 10 Kw to keep it going.

We spent a lot of time talking about the technology of the wood and the glass and the energy systems while also appreciating the way that the design of the house makes the most of the sun and the least of the rain. That is why it can claim to be the best house in the country.

Traditional Craftsmanship Meets High Technology to produce outstanding houses

If ever I was going to go to a talk then this was it. In Traditional Craftsmanship Meets High Technology Peter Huf told the story of the Huf Haus with a strong slant towards the house almost completing construction less than a minute away.

The talk was arranged by Ham Amenities Group (HAG) which I find myself the publicity for, This meant that I got to do the poster for the event that was on display at the library, where the talk was given, and also the community noticeboard on Ham Parade. I like to think that my publicity contributed to the room being full to overflowing with a few disappointed people left outside. They should have paid attention to the notice at the bottom of my poster recommending that people book.

I should have read my own poster too and then I would have arrived for a 7:30pm start rather than the 7:00pm I was expecting.

The plus side of being ultra-early was a seat in the front row and a chance to have a quick word with Peter Huf in which I was able to compliment him on his 1 Like No Other shirt which I had recognised from some distance.

I had seen Peter Huf talk before, way back in 2011, and expected something similar and was very pleasantly surprised about how different it was this time.

Because I had seen some of it before, and also because I was paying lots of attention to what was being said and shown, I took only a few notes. These are them.

Design the house for the plot. A Huf Haus is built around the trees and because it is made of timber it talks to them. The point of the garden is to appreciate it from the house, not from the street.

Design features like roof overhangs and automated external blinds that follow the sun help to keep the houses very comfortable to live in while providing remarkably high levels of sustainability, far more than any existing standard requires.

The heavy wooden beams (they support concrete floors) use structural protection rather than chemical protection. For example, they do not touch the ground or the concrete floors. This also stops sound travelling through the house.

The electric cables in the house are shielded (Cat 7) to prevent electromagnetic radiation leaking into the house. There were several examples like that which showed just how much care and attention Huf Haus pay to the quality of life of those living in their houses.

Planner like Huf Haus as they are built exactly to plan.

Peter said that the planning system in the UK is too democratic leading to mediocrity as bold schemes are opposed. We have had an example of this locally with the third Huf Haus being delayed by an appeal being lodged by two residents against the planning permission granted by Richmond Council. They lost the appeal but it added an unnecessary delay to a simple project that will replace a very average house with a special one.

It was a very informative and uplifting talk that prompted many questions from the (mostly) friendly audience and, just like the last time, left me wondering what I had to do to get my own Huf Haus. I've not worked out how to do that yet so I'll just have to settle for visiting them whenever I can.

You can see more about the coming of Huf Haus to Ham and Petersham on my Ham Photos Blog.

Walking around Kings Cross with a camera

I will soon be leaving CGI and that means that I will soon stop working at Kings Place. I'll miss the Kings Cross area far more than I will miss CGI and I took advantage of a sunny lunch break to walk around some of the interesting places that have excited me many times in recent years.

These are all within a few hundred metres of my office in Kings Place. Several are part of the massive redevelopment that is still going on just north of Kings Cross while others are historical and there is even a patch that has escaped all attempts at industrialisation.

This is Lewis Cubitt Square, one of the new spaces on the Central St Martin campus. It is on the quiet north-west corner and has building works on one side so it is not very busy at the moment but I am sure that its time will come.

The graveyard and gardens next to the old St Pancras Church are somewhat unremarkable except for the one remarkable monument. Even more remarkably, it is a sundial.

Camley Street Natural Park is an oasis of natural calm amidst all the construction and usual city bustle. There is a loop walk around the edge of the small park which makes it an ideal place to take in during a walk.

The newest addition to the area is the Gas Holder Park which is based on the rebuilt and relocated Gas Holder No. 8. The steelwork is rendered almost invisible by the circle of mirrors that make walking around there slightly discomforting.

There is a little basin between the lock and the railway line that is home to a few colourful boats.

St Pancras Lock is small and I have never seen a boat go through it in all the many times that I have passed it while walking along the towpath. The trees at the top are in Camley Street Natural Park.

Just off Copenhagen Road, which parallels the Regent's Canal as it flows east from Kings Place, is Edward Square and by the entrance is the Tolpuddle Martyrs Mural on what was the wall of a pub. This is only a small section of it.

Granary Square is the centre piece of the area's regeneration and the fountains there are its main feature. There are four grids of fountains and each one if programmed to make interesting patterns. The square is always swarming with kids when it is hot, as it should be - public squares are for the public.

The Character of Ham and Petersham

The Ham and Petersham Neighbourhood Forum (H+PNF) is a neighbourhood forum (as defined in the Town and Country Planning Act 1990) and so will have a big impact on the area that I live and so I am very interested in what it is doing.

What it is doing now is holding a number of consultation workshops with residents on various aspects of the neighbourhood plan that the Forum will produce and then oversee its implementation. I have been to all of the sessions so far and have submitted several comments at each of them.

The next consultation is on the Character and Heritage and heritage of the area. I was asked to produce a poster showing what I liked about the area to prompt some ideas. They asked me because of my Ham Photos blog in which I have been documenting the area for the last nine years through a collection of photographs that now numbers over 2,000.

It took a little while to come up with a format that I liked but once that was done it was a simple matter to find the 16 photos required to tell my story. I am quite pleased with the final result.

It occurred to me once I had done this poster that it very much focused on open spaces and said little about the buildings, so I did another poster of just that and they are going to use that one too as a reminder to people of the variety that there is locally.

This one was very quick to do as I could reuse the format from the first poster and the only challenge was deciding which 20 buildings to choose.

The top row are some of the many grand lodges and manors in the area, dating back to when kings hunted in Richmond Park. The second row shows some of the estate-like development in the area, including the standard 3-bed brick built social housing, the iconic Parkley's development and the Wates Estate. The third row shows some of the more exotic new buildings and the final row shows some of the old cottages that are littered across the area.

Even with 20 pictures there was much that I had to leave out but I think I met my personal objectives of showing the variety that exists and of covering the whole area. I hope that the people at the consultation workshop like it too. I will find out on Wednesday 13 April!

Streets Ahead: The future of London's Roads at the Building Centre

Having escaped the office because of technical problems there I had an afternoon to fill and so one of the places that I went to was the Building Centre just off Goodge Street.

It somewhere that I go to fairly regularly, like RIBA, because it is easy to walk to at lunchtime and there is always much to see there. There were three exhibitions on at that time and I could have spent hours looking at all of them but I only had time to look at Streets Ahead, which had only just opened.

As with other things I had seen there, the exhibition was comprehensive, detailed, well structured and made good use of graphics and photographs. Because of that I learned a lot in a little time.

What I learned was a mix of good news and bad news. Very little progress had been made on improving London's streets for pedestrians and cyclists in recent years, despite the obvious success of Ken Livingstone's plan to create a walkway along the south bank that connects Trafalgar Square to St Pauls, but some small trial schemes were starting to show what could be done and there were examples in the rest of the world that London could learn from.

One thing that I would dearly love to see is some of Central London's main roads either buried out of site or just closed to cars altogether. An obvious place to do this would be on the north bank between Westminster Bridge and Blackfriars Bridge where a dual carriageway create a physical and emotional barrier between the city and the river.

The exhibition showed how Boston and Madrid had both managed to remove cars and to replace large roads with linear parks. This is the sort of city that I want to live and work in.

The river featured again on another of my favourite topic boards, on bridges. Looking at a map shows that there are quite a few bridges over the Thames but these are clustered with significant gaps between some of them, some are rail bridges so cannot be used by pedestrians and some of the road bridges are either quite narrow for pedestrians or are unpleasant to use because of the proximity to traffic.

It is no coincidence that the wonderful route from Trafalgar Square to St Pauls that I mentioned earlier has two new pedestrian bridges, the vastly extended Hungerford Bridge at one end and the iconic Millennium Bridge at the other.

We need more bridges like that and there are several good suggestions for them. One idea is to connect Rotherhithe with the Isle of Dogs, two peninsulas that are isolated by the river that almost surrounds them.

We do not need the Garden Bridge, however. It connects nowhere to nowhere, would be closed at night and for private functions, is not much of a garden and would interrupt the existing views from places like Waterloo Bridge.

There is scope to make London a much nicer place to be but it takes the imagination and leadership of somebody like Ken Livingstone to deliver it. All that Boris has given us is the fantasy cable car and the threat of the unnecessary and unwanted Garden Bridge.

I think that London needs to be a much nicer place too as it is dragging behind other major cities in creating nice spaces and pleasant routes between them.

Ham United Group Meeting: January 2016

I have been going to Ham United Group (HUG) meetings fairly regularly but have been much less good at writing them up afterwards and it is this tardiness that means my last post on HUG was two years ago, not my enthusiasm for the organisation.

I was keen to get to this meeting as it was discussing the proposed redevelopment of the Ham Close site and lots of other people were keen to discuss it too as the meeting room at Ham Library was full. I was not counting but there must have been around thirty of use there which is a good turn-out for a HUG meeting.

The main stakeholders in the Ham Close Uplift Programme are the landlord, Richmond Housing Partnership, and the other major land owner, Richmond Council, both of whom were represented at the meeting.

They opened by saying that the revised plans expected in early 2016 would not now be ready until the Summer and went on to say that almost everything in those plans was open for discussion. That was good news for residents who did not like the old plan but it made the discussion rather open ended.

For information only, this is what the previous scheme looked like. It redeveloped the whole site, encroaching on to the Village Green as it did so and it approximately doubled the number of units from around 200 to 400.

Current residents of the blocks in Ham Close (understandably) raised several issues of direct concern to them from the affordability of the new units and their size compared to the current accommodation. I am in no position to comment on the details of this but I think that securing the support of the current residents, leaseholders and tenants, is important.

Traffic was mentioned a few times by residents concerned about both the main Petersham Road that is the only way in/out of Ham and also the roads within Ham that already struggle with cars parked on narrow streets. There was a request that people be encouraged to walk, cycle or use public transport but not much in the way of ideas for how this could be achieved.

Design was the other main issue with comments like, "This is not Ham, this is just a land-grab." It was pointed out that Ham is rich with architects and one of them spoke about the architectural heritage which includes a lot of notable twentieth century development such as Parkleys and Langham Close. Several of us, including me, called for an iconic development rather than something bland like we had seen so far. It was suggested that the scheme should go out to architectural contest and that many imaginative firms would be keen to go in for this. I was reminded of a recent exhibition by Karakusevic Carson Architects at RIBA. Social housing can be exciting and I want that for Ham Close.

There were several comments made about the types of accommodation to be provided with calls for lots of social housing that is genuinely affordable and a mix of sizes to suit different families and also sharers.

It was a constructive and (generally) well-tempered discussion but while I generally support the idea of rebuild I was left with the feeling that there is a long way to go to get to a good scheme.

We ran through the other HUG news quite quickly. The Ham Hydro scheme has gone to appeal. This is an appeal against the Council so there is nothing we can do except sit back and wait. A Forest School was proposing to build a structure on Ham Lands. Not much information was known and views varied from it would only be a shed to there should be no more building on Ham Lands. St. Michael's Convent on Ham Common had been sold to a developer of retirement homes. While this suggested its new use but it was pointed out that in planning terms residential is residential so it could be any residential use, or mix of uses.

I left the meeting enlivened by the engagement with things that impact where I live and heartened that so many other people care about these things too.

Huf Hauser in Kingston Vale

I am interested in architecture and love Huf Hauser so I jumped at the opportunity to see inside a couple of them in Kingston Vale. The opportunity arose via the Kingston upon Thames Society - the houses (hauser) had won an award in their Townscape Awards and discussions with the owners over this had led to an invitation to visit them.

Each Huf Haus is carefully designed individually to meet the requirements of the owner and the features of the site. In this case the owner had gone for an Asian theme that was reflected in the landscaping, objects of art and the house names.

The first house was a single family home split over three floors. The impressive main living space was on the first (middle) floor which was also the level of the garden. This picture was taken with the kitchen area behind me, the dinning area immediately in front and the living area beyond that.

The room was very practicable, i.e. I could easily imagine myself living there, vast in size and had lots of glass to let the light and views of the garden to flood in.

This view of the approach to the kitchen/dining/living area gives more of an idea of how big that area was, that is quite a large dining table that is almost lost in the space at the far end, and also of how big the corridor space was; most rooms in most houses are smaller than that corridor.

Other rooms were more problematic. The house was littered with what were clearly bedrooms, i.e. they had en suite bathrooms, what could have been bedrooms and other rooms that could have been anything. This large room on the ground (lower) floor was a case in point. It was one of the larger rooms, even in this house, and had lots of light from the windows but I could not see how I would use it if I lived there. It could have been a home office, I suppose, but there were several other rooms that could have been that.

I said that Huf Hauser were designed to the owner's requirements so I am sure that each room had an intended purpose and that this would have been clearer had the construction completely finish and the rooms been furnished but impressed as I was by the enormous size of the building and the sleek design I just could not see how I could make use of all of that space.

The house next door was designed in the same style but for a different purpose and only over two floors. To be simplistic, it was like two family homes stitched together so that one of the halves could be given over to children, elderly relatives or even rented out as a self-contained property. It was much easier for me to see how all the rooms could be used in each of these scenarios.

The main space in the main part of the house was, again, the most impressive space. This time I took the photo from the far end of the living area which ran up to the first partial partition, the dining area next and the kitchen area at the far end with the units behind an island that ran almost the full width of the room. Add to this views of the garden on both sides and it was a living space that was both practicable and pretty.

I had already been a fan of Huf Hauser for many years and this visit just made me a bigger one.

Kingston Heritage Open Days 2015

The Kingston Heritage Open Days (HODs) are a major event for the Kingston upon Thames Society and this year I volunteered again to guide people around The Guildhall. "Guide" is probably too strong a word as I did little more that usher them from one room to the next and I relied on the objects to tell their own stories, luckily most of the exhibits on the walls were well labelled.

There were several parts to the short tour. The Guildhall was built in 1935 and is typical of that period. Kingston Council has maintained the period features over the years, I suspect more because they did not want to spend money updating the building than because they wanted to retain the heritage, and so the building itself was a significant part of the tour.

One of the rooms I took the visitors was the Council Chamber where the historical crest combined nicely with the ceiling light.

The main part of The Guildhall tour was the visit to the Mayor's Parlour. This was a room steeped in history, including the ceremonial mace, and interesting objects gifted to the Council over the years. We also had the current Deputy Mayor, Councillor Mary Clark, as our host and the official Mace Bearer, Brian, as our expert on the history of the Council and all the objects in the room.

Brian's talk and explanation of the objects brought the history of the Royal Borough to life. It was fascinating even though I had heard it before.

In the grounds of The Guildhall was the Coronation Stone which commemorates the crowning of Saxon kings in Kingston. The stone probably does not date back to that time but it is old.

Pictures inside The Guildhall show the stone in its original location a few meters away in what is now the middle of the main road. At first people and horses could easily move around it, then it became a mini-roundabout and finally the increasing volume of traffic meant that it had to be moved to its current location.

Before The Guildhall was built the Town Council (as it was then) met in the Market House which survives as the centre-piece of the Ancient Market. Looking down on the market was the golden statue of Queen Anne.

Kingston owes its existence to river crossings and when John Lewis was being build just over 25 years ago evidence of a previous bridge was found just downstream from the current one. John Lewis Partnership have been good custodians of the remains and these were open to the public for HODs.

The former Bentalls shop (now the Bentalls Centre) was designed by the same architect, Maurice Webb, who designed The Guildhall and he took Hampton Court as his inspiration. When the Bentalls Centre was build the original facade was retained, and it is easy to see why.

Out of Order is Kingston's most famous work of art and probably its most famous landmark. It is often used as the symbol for the town on postcards etc. I love it.

Aviation played a large part in Kingston's history and Sopwith had his main factory just north of the town centre until the company moved about a mile north to Ham. Sadly both sites are now housing (I live in one of them!) but some of the ancillary buildings survive. This one is in Canbury Park Road and is now the home to the marvellous BalletBoyz. It's a wonderful space put to wonderful use.

In another room was an exhibition on Kingston's aviation history that was packed with informative display boards, evocative photographs, models and paintings, and enthusiastic people. Kingston's aviation history is something that people are interested in and want to learn more about. The exhibition deserves a permanent home.

Kingston Heritage Open Days were a lot of fun for me and I was pleased to see so many other people taking part. I guess we will be doing HODs again next year.

In the Making – New Social Housing Projects by Karakusevic Carson Architects

A free lunchtime on a quiet day in the London office gave me another opportunity to walk to RIBA and visit one of their exhibitions. That is always a good thing to do as it feeds the mind and the body equally.

The walk there is about 2.5km, depending on the route, so it took me just under 25 minutes. As always I avoided the main roads (busy and ugly) but was forced to walk through Euston Station as the only way around it is a long way north, fine for just a walk but not so good when trying to get somewhere specific.

The subject of this exhibition was New Social Housing Projects by Karakusevic Carson Architects which interested me for several reasons. All architecture has some interest to me, new developments show the leading-edge of the profession and social housing is a sector that has been too quiet for too long (I blame Thatcher).

In RIBA terms, this was a minor exhibition using what was, essentially, corridor space around the atrium on the second floor (I think) and which is now branded as The Practice Space. It is an awkward space but this exhibition did a good job of using it with information boards on the outer walls of the meeting rooms and models around the atrium and in the open space by the windows.

I was delighted to see so many models as I find them the best way to appreciate buildings in context and the context of buildings is as important as it's appearance. Photographs are good for showing colours but for little else which, as an aside, is why property websites are a poor substitute for pounding the streets.

I did not know any of these schemes, nor any of the places that they were being built, but the models gave enough information about the locations for me to appreciate the character of the area. Most were standard East End (as "standard" is today) with large concentrations of social housing among Victorian streets and with plenty of open spaces.

As the hipsters move to places like Clapton because they cannot afford Camden those that used to live in places like Clapton are being forced further east or out of London altogether. New social housing can help to stem the exodus and so to keep the character that makes London London.

The schemes on show here were all different but tried to meet the same needs of producing good social housing that fitted neatly into the area. This was very different from most of our social housing stock that was built on either greenfield land or large areas of brownfield land created by post-war clearance.

The information boards were good in explaining how the designs had been arrived at and it was good to see the needs of residents at the heart of this. That may seem obvious but places like Battersea are full of blocks of towers that pay no attention to the needs of the people who live there, the insides of the flats may be good but there is nothing, no local shops or transport, outside of their doors.

I was not completely convinced by all the schemes, some seemed more solid and less permeable than I would like, but I am prepared to give the architects the benefit of any doubt by admitting that my views were based on a quick assessment of the limited information provided. Significant developments like these now come with colourful Design and Access Statements that run to over a hundred pages so it is unfair to expect a model to say everything about the development.

However, I was completely convinced about the quality of the exhibition. RIBA knows how to put on a good show that is informative and entertaining, even in a corridor.

Charles Rennie Mackintosh at RIBA

It was something of a luxury to visit RIBA twice in one day but I like to spoil myself.

I had wandered over there during my lunch break to see the The Future City exhibition and then I took advantage of the late night opening to go back again after work, this time to see the main exhibition on Charles Rennie Mackintosh. This had been on my must-see list since it opened in February and I was more organised than usual in getting to see it in the middle of its run rather than in it's last week.

Going to RIBA twice in one day was also excellent for my step count, something that I think about a lot these days!

RIBA, like the V&A, can seem to do no wrong with its exhibitions and I always find them interesting and informative even if the subject does not appear to be one that would naturally appeal to me. There were no such reservations with Charles Rennie Mackintosh as a topic so the exhibition delightfully combined great content with great curation.

It is also worth pointing out that RIBA exhibitions are free. I love free things not because they save me money but because their freeness means that people can pop-in for just a short while, e.g. in a lunch break, and can do so repeatedly. I think that a little and often is the best way to absorb culture.

The Mackintosh exhibition was in the (newish) main exhibition at RIBA, on the ground floor adjacent to the reception desk. It has the advantage over the other exhibition spaces in that there are no windows. I love the windows at RIBA but the light coming through them can play havoc with displays, as can still be seen on the first floor exhibition area.

The exhibition had plenty of drawings, as expected, as I was pleased to see quite a few models too.

The only slight gripe, and this applies to many exhibitions, is that putting the drawings behind glass meant that I was always juggling with reflections. This can be seen clearly in the top picture which has a reflection of one of the models on the left edge. If RIBA cannot solve this problem (at a reasonable cost) then I suspect that nobody can but it does seem strange that nobody has invented a combination of glass and lighting that solves this problem. At the exhibition I was able to get around this by looking at the same piece from several angles but a single photograph cannot so this.

The drawings were as detailed and as lovely as I hoped that they would be. The things that they were drawings of were lovely too.

This was a meeting of art and architecture and I could appreciate the buildings for their aesthetics as well as for the ingenuity of their design that created wonderful spaces to live and work in.

A surprise was how few buildings Mackintosh was involved in. I thought of him primarily as an architect but the exhibition informed me that he became disillusioned with architecture and turned his hand to watercolours instead. I was glad that the RIBA exhibition focused firmly on the architecture as that was what I was there to see.

The lack of buildings in quantity did nothing to diminish the quality of the works on display and I spent a long time peering at each drawing and model, and then I walked around them all again to remind me of the best bits and to make sure that I had not missed anything.

Obviously the Glasgow School of Art was a highlight and it was nice to see this complimented with several more modest buildings, though none of them were that modest. Rich people often like to commission edgy architects to build distinctive and impressive houses for them and architecture on this scale manages to be both grand and human, a combination that brings the best out of the best architects. That is why we remember places like the Red House and Villa Tugendhat and it was good to see Mackintosh's forays into this field.

I can always spend time happily looking at architects' drawings and models and when the architect is Charles Rennie Mackintosh it is understandable that I spent a lot of time and was very happy.