Milton Keynes, built as an overspill town, has many achievements to claim – the roundabout, concrete cows, pretending to be New York in that scene from Superman 4. However, it also faces many urban design challenges, including an abundance of cars and a lack of access to public transport. Milton Keynes is a monument to Harold Wilson’s public planning of the Open…
Part One Part Two The Politics of a Federal UK While it’s fun to imagine structural alterations to the UK’s constitutional arrangements, there must of course be a point to this tinkering. Aside from rationalising the present devolution settlement and addressing the problem of inadequate local government accountability and provisioning, these federalising changes could go some way towards calming some of the…
I spend a lot of time talking with my mum. Sometimes when I’m at the tills, our conversations spin around in my head, oftentimes out of sheer bewilderment, but there’s a modest kind of genius that can only come from parental discourse in your mid twenties. About two months ago, during one such conversation, she made a bold statement – so bold,…
Part One Part Three A Federal England The most profound line in “Withnail & I” comes when Withnail brandishes the keys to his uncle’s country house and declares ‘free for those who can afford it, very expensive for those who can’t.’ It’s a line which, of course, reveals much about British life and the invisible network that holds together the class system:…
Part Two Part Three The Decline and Fall of Local Government It is commonly observed that the most consequential politicians are not always prime ministers, but most people would perhaps be surprised to learn that arguably the most influential and famous politician in the UK during the mid-1870s was the mayor of Birmingham. During his tenure as mayor from 1873 to 1876,…
As parliament returns from recess and the regular news cycle finally trickles back towards to normality, we have been given a welcome reprieve from one element of the discourse which gripped the political classes over Christmas. Namely, the seemingly perennial and exhausting argument over whether the Left should make the abolition of the monarchy a priority as an incoming government. I’m no…
Traffic. It’s something we’ve all experienced and something we all hate. While we bemoan the difficulties of transportation and the fact that motorway traffic seems to be increasing there isn’t a day that goes by without some sort of congestion. How do we deal with it? The answer is simple: through an investigation into the cause of the problem, and the presentation…
Mark Fisher’s Ghosts of My Life is an exceptional collection of cultural criticism. As I read it over the Christmas period, I couldn’t think of another writer better able to synthesise so many disparate sources into an overarching argument about our times. The whole book, with its theme of hauntology, had me thinking about ways in which the left interacts with time,…
