As a well-travelled chap, I have recently returned from visits to London and Middlesbrough. Not locations that are commonly bandied about in the same sentence, unless they’re abridged by the words “is much better than”. However, I do believe the planners and architects of Glasgow, my beloved home city, could learn a thing or two from both places. Yes, even Middlesbrough.
London is a very big place, so it stands to reason that its landmarks are far more landmark-y than might be expected in Glasgow. From the 63rd floor of the Shard, you can admire buildings as diverse as Westminster, the Tower of London, the Gherkin and the Walkie Talkie. (Incidentally, did you know that the French for walkie-talkie is talkie-walkie? Made me laugh for ages, that did, and I don’t even know why.) Anyway, I am not suggesting that Glasgow should become home to phallic skyscrapers or 11th-century prisons. What I am suggesting is that Glasgow should borrow some of the architectural ideas seen elsewhere in this country, because there are critical errors needing to be corrected in our city’s fabric.
Consider Harley Street. Forget about the presence of the London Leech Therapy Clinic, or psychologists who charge £395 per hour to nod sagely while listening to your first-world woes, and instead look up beyond those buffed brass door plaques. These elegant four-storey terraces sport substantial front doors, simple rooflines and railings a few feet from each elevated ground floor window. It’s a brilliant streetscape that would work equally well in contemporary materials, and I am absolutely convinced that if buildings of this calibre were created in Glasgow, they would walk out of the sales suite. It worked for the Georgians, and they didn’t even have Cat5E cabling or rainfall showers.
Which brings me onto the rather less evocative setting of Middlesbrough. I have a real soft spot for this place, even though it’s a bit rough and industrial, because I appreciate the fact that Middlesbrough’s town planners didn’t try to run before they could walk. The skyline is low-rise, because there was no need to economise on land by building upwards. The grid-pattern streetscape actually works better than it does in Glasgow, because (if you ignore the dockside districts), there is far less wasteland or brownfield than you might expect. There is greater harmony in the choice of building materials, and it feels like the place is actually finished, regardless of whether or not you like the end product.
Now contrast this with Glasgow, where entire swathes of the east end lie empty and overgrown, often because land has been zoned exclusively for housing associations with no interest in actually building anything. Travel along Gallowgate, Carntyne Road, Duke Street or even London Road, and there are regular expanses of scrubland where tenements or factories once stood – gaping holes in Glasgow’s welcoming smile. It’s an absolute sin, and it’s an issue throughout the city – Balmore Road in the north, Pollokshaws Road in the south, and even Beith Street in the west end, which borders Byres Road, for God’s sake. We have more land than we know what to do with, so why are we sanctioning housebuilding on the edge of the city, in places like Whitlawburn and Newton? Where’s the sense in building 18-storey residential towers at Glasgow Harbour when the land immediately west of it is undeveloped? Why aren’t builders being incentivised to construct quality dwellings on these desolate spots, when there’s a housing shortage and particularly high demand for new homes?
If I won the Euro Millions lottery, I would set up a property company and start planning elegant terraces of high-ceilinged tenements for as many of these gap sites as I could. Combine traditional aesthetics with modern specifications, engineer in good soundproofing and secure off-street parking, and residents would flock into areas that are currently little more than urban wastelands. It’s a guaranteed money-spinner and it would fill in all the missing pieces of Glasgow’s urban jigsaw, making this the city it should be rather than the (incomplete) city it currently is. Now all I need to do to realise this Utopian vision is actually win the Euro Millions. Can anyone lend me £2 for a ticket? I promise I’ll pay you back in full within 48 hours of striking the jackpot…
Tuesday 29 October 2013
Wednesday 16 October 2013
Blamethrower
You might have read in the papers recently that a young Welshman called Gareth was offered a fairly high-profile new job a few weeks ago. He wasn’t sure whether to take it, since it involved relocating abroad, but the monthly salary of £1.11 million was enough to swing his decision. His old employers were paid an £86 million lump sum by his new ones, and everyone ended up happy. Actually, that’s not true. The only really happy people were Gareth, his representatives, and the owners of the two respective businesses, one of whom now has loads of money to re-invest, while the other is planning a marketing campaign in the Far East to cash in on Gareth’s new-found celebrity.
Gareth, you see, is pretty good at his job – in fact, he’s acclaimed far and wide for his talents. So much so that his £256,000 a week salary is earned for roughly a 25-hour week, including around three hours of high-profile work in the community. He also gets lots of additional revenue for his image rights, which is a bonus in every sense when you’re not exactly a looker, and Gareth also has some new friends with whom he can party during his extensive amounts of free time. Indeed, there’s more free time than even Gareth expected, because much of the time, his talents are deemed surplus to requirements, and he’s told to stay at home while other people do his job.
If you re-read those opening paragraphs and think of Gareth as a consultant, or a solicitor, or a motivational speaker, or pretty much any career imaginable, it seems utterly obscene that someone can be paid so well for effectively a part-time job, particularly when the country he’s moved to is Spain, with 56 per cent youth unemployment and a rapidly contracting economy. However, as the more astute of you will already know, young Gareth earns his crust by kicking a plastic sphere into an onion bag strung between three pieces of fibreglass, and he is therefore apparently worth every penny.
Fucking disgusting, isn’t it? The problems and poverty that exist in the world today, and Spurs get £86 million for selling a midfielder to Real Madrid. But that’s the hyper-inflated bubble of football. While you and I balance our cheque books each month and battle to live within our means, the football elite get to enjoy a real-life Brewster’s Millions – every weekly salary of £100,000 or £150,000 needing to be spent on something. The problem is, though, when you’ve already bought an eight-bedroom mansion in Alderley Edge and filled its quadruple garage with Ferraris and Bentleys, what else do you do with your cash?
Well, drugs are out for a start. RDTs and Diego Maradona have put paid to that. Prostitutes are risky, especially now the whole super-injunction thing has been cruelly exposed by Twitter. You could buy more houses in Alderley Edge, but since all your team-mates and players from several other clubs are competing to do the same, that’s not really viable. Foreign holidays are a limited commodity when you only have every second summer off (and even then you often end up doing overtime in China or America), and there aren’t many yachts that can fit up the Manchester ship canal. Your wife would probably love to go on high-end shopping sprees, but even a Victoria Beckham dress is priced in the upper hundreds rather than the thousands, so that’s not going to empty your bank account. Maybe artworks hold the answer, but since most footballers couldn’t tell a Canaletto from a Cornetto, that’s probably not going to happen.
All of which makes me wonder why more footballers don’t use their astronomical wages to do some good in a world that’s clearly desperate for their assistance and cash. A notable few do their best – and quite often the players you’d least expect. Uber-merker Rio Ferdinand funds various charitable initiatives in his childhood suburb of Peckham, while Cardiff’s nutter-with-a-putter Craig Bellamy has a truly heart-warming footballing foundation set up in Sierra Leone for children who wear rags and live in mud huts.
Sadly, these are the glorious exceptions to the inglorious rule. For the most part, the money in football is raised from Sky subscribers, given to football clubs, lavished on player wages and then…what? What do they do with it? Where does it go? How many billions are sloshing around in offshore tax havens, unspent and pretty much unwanted? And, most depressingly of all, how much further does this bubble inflate before it bursts, leaving people like Gareth earning less than ten times as much in one week as the average British worker earns in a year?
Gareth, you see, is pretty good at his job – in fact, he’s acclaimed far and wide for his talents. So much so that his £256,000 a week salary is earned for roughly a 25-hour week, including around three hours of high-profile work in the community. He also gets lots of additional revenue for his image rights, which is a bonus in every sense when you’re not exactly a looker, and Gareth also has some new friends with whom he can party during his extensive amounts of free time. Indeed, there’s more free time than even Gareth expected, because much of the time, his talents are deemed surplus to requirements, and he’s told to stay at home while other people do his job.
If you re-read those opening paragraphs and think of Gareth as a consultant, or a solicitor, or a motivational speaker, or pretty much any career imaginable, it seems utterly obscene that someone can be paid so well for effectively a part-time job, particularly when the country he’s moved to is Spain, with 56 per cent youth unemployment and a rapidly contracting economy. However, as the more astute of you will already know, young Gareth earns his crust by kicking a plastic sphere into an onion bag strung between three pieces of fibreglass, and he is therefore apparently worth every penny.
Fucking disgusting, isn’t it? The problems and poverty that exist in the world today, and Spurs get £86 million for selling a midfielder to Real Madrid. But that’s the hyper-inflated bubble of football. While you and I balance our cheque books each month and battle to live within our means, the football elite get to enjoy a real-life Brewster’s Millions – every weekly salary of £100,000 or £150,000 needing to be spent on something. The problem is, though, when you’ve already bought an eight-bedroom mansion in Alderley Edge and filled its quadruple garage with Ferraris and Bentleys, what else do you do with your cash?
Well, drugs are out for a start. RDTs and Diego Maradona have put paid to that. Prostitutes are risky, especially now the whole super-injunction thing has been cruelly exposed by Twitter. You could buy more houses in Alderley Edge, but since all your team-mates and players from several other clubs are competing to do the same, that’s not really viable. Foreign holidays are a limited commodity when you only have every second summer off (and even then you often end up doing overtime in China or America), and there aren’t many yachts that can fit up the Manchester ship canal. Your wife would probably love to go on high-end shopping sprees, but even a Victoria Beckham dress is priced in the upper hundreds rather than the thousands, so that’s not going to empty your bank account. Maybe artworks hold the answer, but since most footballers couldn’t tell a Canaletto from a Cornetto, that’s probably not going to happen.
All of which makes me wonder why more footballers don’t use their astronomical wages to do some good in a world that’s clearly desperate for their assistance and cash. A notable few do their best – and quite often the players you’d least expect. Uber-merker Rio Ferdinand funds various charitable initiatives in his childhood suburb of Peckham, while Cardiff’s nutter-with-a-putter Craig Bellamy has a truly heart-warming footballing foundation set up in Sierra Leone for children who wear rags and live in mud huts.
Sadly, these are the glorious exceptions to the inglorious rule. For the most part, the money in football is raised from Sky subscribers, given to football clubs, lavished on player wages and then…what? What do they do with it? Where does it go? How many billions are sloshing around in offshore tax havens, unspent and pretty much unwanted? And, most depressingly of all, how much further does this bubble inflate before it bursts, leaving people like Gareth earning less than ten times as much in one week as the average British worker earns in a year?
Tuesday 1 October 2013
State of the world address
I’m not going to go on a hate-filled rant about cheese today, or spend six paragraphs discussing why Rise Against are better than Enter Shikari. Instead, I’m going to make some serious points about something that could change our lives if we’d only let it – working from home.
Every major population centre in the UK experiences gridlock and mayhem on its roads for several hours each weekday, as increasingly ignorant motorists vent their frustration on everyone around them. The trains are crowded, slow and unreliable, while the Glasgow subway is a rattly old shitbox and London’s glossier alternative is simply too crowded to function properly at rush hour. Meanwhile, buses are grubby and erratic stab labs - the last time I was on a bus, the windows got bricked. Clearly, commuting isn’t working in this country. So why do so many of us do it?
Putting aside road accidents or the wrong kind of air around train tracks, most congestion builds up during the ever-lengthening “rush hour” periods because too many commuters are trying to get to (or out of) one place at the same time. Remove the need for everyone to channel their way into overcrowded employment zones, and the sea of people will melt into a more manageable river of humanity. The simplest, most obvious way to achieve this (other than everyone working different hours, which would be a logistical nightmare) is to allow employees to work from home.
When you think about it, home working is potentially a cure for many of the nation’s ills. It offers us the chance to save vast amounts of time, reduce the horrific burden on public transport, lower the numbers of road traffic accidents while cutting pollution and congestion, save everybody pots of money, and create happier staff who will take less stress days (which is now the biggest cause of workplace absenteeism, lest we forget). The time and money saved by not commuting can be redirected to people’s loved ones, so families would benefit and children could become happier than they are in their current latchkey states. Meanwhile, employers would benefit from greater staff productivity, workplace satisfaction and employee retention rates, not to mention smaller offices that in turn save money on overheads.
Obviously, home-working can’t be applied to all jobs – someone has to drive the Mr Kipling cakes to Morrisons, and doctors certainly shouldn’t video-conference an oncology consultation - but most companies will have a percentage of staff who could be based at home either part-time or full-time. Do graphic designers need to be in large city centre offices? Couldn’t call-centre workers operate from home if their employers paid the phone bill? Why are middle managers forced to attend meetings when teleconferencing is now a practical alternative? I spent ten years driving across Scotland to sit at a desk and email documents to people in the next room – now I do it from home and save a fortune on petrol.
This, then, is a direct appeal to any managers or directors who are reading this blog. Why not try letting your employees work from home? Set them work-related targets each Monday, keep in regular contact using the panoply of modern communication methods available nowadays, and if the targets have all been met by Friday teatime, it’s working in every sense of the word. Alternatively, if they end up watching Loose Women and the targets are missed, bring them back to the fold, discipline them, or sack them – they’re probably on Twitter all day in the office anyway. Do the whole country a favour, and start alleviating the rush hour misery that your outdated employment policies are inflicting on society. You know it makes sense.
Right, that’s enough seriousness. Next time I’ll explain why cheese slices are better than heroin.
Every major population centre in the UK experiences gridlock and mayhem on its roads for several hours each weekday, as increasingly ignorant motorists vent their frustration on everyone around them. The trains are crowded, slow and unreliable, while the Glasgow subway is a rattly old shitbox and London’s glossier alternative is simply too crowded to function properly at rush hour. Meanwhile, buses are grubby and erratic stab labs - the last time I was on a bus, the windows got bricked. Clearly, commuting isn’t working in this country. So why do so many of us do it?
Putting aside road accidents or the wrong kind of air around train tracks, most congestion builds up during the ever-lengthening “rush hour” periods because too many commuters are trying to get to (or out of) one place at the same time. Remove the need for everyone to channel their way into overcrowded employment zones, and the sea of people will melt into a more manageable river of humanity. The simplest, most obvious way to achieve this (other than everyone working different hours, which would be a logistical nightmare) is to allow employees to work from home.
When you think about it, home working is potentially a cure for many of the nation’s ills. It offers us the chance to save vast amounts of time, reduce the horrific burden on public transport, lower the numbers of road traffic accidents while cutting pollution and congestion, save everybody pots of money, and create happier staff who will take less stress days (which is now the biggest cause of workplace absenteeism, lest we forget). The time and money saved by not commuting can be redirected to people’s loved ones, so families would benefit and children could become happier than they are in their current latchkey states. Meanwhile, employers would benefit from greater staff productivity, workplace satisfaction and employee retention rates, not to mention smaller offices that in turn save money on overheads.
Obviously, home-working can’t be applied to all jobs – someone has to drive the Mr Kipling cakes to Morrisons, and doctors certainly shouldn’t video-conference an oncology consultation - but most companies will have a percentage of staff who could be based at home either part-time or full-time. Do graphic designers need to be in large city centre offices? Couldn’t call-centre workers operate from home if their employers paid the phone bill? Why are middle managers forced to attend meetings when teleconferencing is now a practical alternative? I spent ten years driving across Scotland to sit at a desk and email documents to people in the next room – now I do it from home and save a fortune on petrol.
This, then, is a direct appeal to any managers or directors who are reading this blog. Why not try letting your employees work from home? Set them work-related targets each Monday, keep in regular contact using the panoply of modern communication methods available nowadays, and if the targets have all been met by Friday teatime, it’s working in every sense of the word. Alternatively, if they end up watching Loose Women and the targets are missed, bring them back to the fold, discipline them, or sack them – they’re probably on Twitter all day in the office anyway. Do the whole country a favour, and start alleviating the rush hour misery that your outdated employment policies are inflicting on society. You know it makes sense.
Right, that’s enough seriousness. Next time I’ll explain why cheese slices are better than heroin.
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