HS2: bonkers?

I've just been listening to Transport Minister Justine Greening announcing the go-ahead for HS2, the high speed line to connect London with Brum, Manchester and Leeds. She's sounded so upbeat, so full of promise. But every time I hear about this project, my own heart sinks. There have been hundreds of thousands of words expended on this subject already, mostly by people with a far better grasp on rail travel than me, but I feel like unloading my take on it. That's what a blog is for, isn't it?

Firstly the amount, widely reported as being around £33b, roughly three times the cost of the Olympics (don't get me started on that). Except there don't appear to be any sponsors or private investment. If it's that good a deal, why aren't private investors coming forward, like they did when the Victorians first put railways in place? Why is the government suddenly acting like a Soviet republic? Could it be that no one much cares about the few minutes shaved off journey times? No one wants the higher fares this will involve, and no business is daft enough to stump up?

And compare this to how stingy the government have been over Feed In Tariffs. As you may well have sussed by now, I'm no fan of FiTs, but the total subsidy is still small beer compared to HS2. Not to mention the fact that the government wasn't actually paying for FiTs - it is coming from everyones' electricity bills.

If the government were to replicate the same way of producing funds for HS2 as they have for FiTs, then the £33b could be spread amongst the 1.35billion passenger rail journeys made each year. If you added £1 to all of these journeys for the next 25 years, that would pay for HS2. Of course, only those travelling along the HS2 would benefit, but that's pretty much how FiTs are designed to work, so why not?

I'll tell you. Because the outcry would be so great that every right wing paper would have a fit of a very different variety — think stealth tax — and the plan would be dropped before you could say Justine Greening.

So no, instead the money is coming from the CapEx section of general expenditure, no doubt spread out over 50 years to make it look small. But it's a bollockingly large amount of money. It's £500 each. How many of us would elect to pay £500 for HS2 to be built? Now we have no choice.

What really browns me off is the point that I hear Christian Wolmar often making. That the rail network could badly do with a make-over and this £33b won't get spent on it because it's all going on HS2. To get from my home town, Cambridge, to Manchester by train takes 4hours. From London, 50 miles further away, Manchester is just 2hrs 10min, with a service running every 20 minutes.

Birmingham is worse still. 2 hours 40 mins from Cambridge by train — a distance of just 97 miles. In contrast, London is 118 miles distant but the journey takes just 1hr 25m. OK, Cambridge is a small town, but you could just as well substitute Bristol, Southampton, Cardiff, Swindon, Derby, you name it: the trains to them will all go at half speed or less than the London connections.

Our trains services always have been very London-centric and it seems absurd to me to be making them even more so. If we really want to get more people out of their cars and into a train, then how about improving cross country services?

House 2.0 meets QI?

Here’s a vaguely interesting question. Which is worth more: the UK stock market or the UK housing market?

The housing market wins. It’s aggregate total value is somewhere around £4 trillion, somewhat over twice as much as the stock market. A trillion is 1,000 billion, which is itself is 1,000 million.

The value of the stock market can be checked here.

The value of the housing market is a bit more hazy, but by taking the rough number of houses (around 25 million) and multiplying them by the average value (£163,000 according to Nationwide) gives you an answer around £4 trillion.

The gilt (government debt) market is currently worth £700 billion - that’s £0.7 trillion - doubling in the past four years. It’s still a tiddler compared to property and equities, but then again it’s a mortgage, not a store of wealth.

You want more of this? Try comparing the value of individual companies to the value of housing in towns and cities. Our largest company (by market capitalisation) is HSBC which is currently worth £112 billion. That’s equivalent to 700,000 average homes, enough to house a city of 2 million population - say Greater Manchester. Of course, property in Manchester itself would be worth far more than the sum total of its housing stock, but then I’m not considering commercial or council property values here.

The 100th biggest company listed on the UK stockmarket is currently Thomas Cook, the travel agent. It’s value is £1.9 billion, equivalent to around 12,000 average houses, or a the housing stock of small town with a population of 30,000.

The Copenhagen Blues

The great Copenhagen climate summit is now well underway and many people seem to be making encouraging noises. But at the same time, there seems to be a huge and growing amount of scepticism around. Such is our suspicion of politicians and opinion formers these days, that if they all seem to agree on one thing, then they simply MUST be wrong, or so the thinking goes.

For me, the worry isn’t about
• whether or not climate change is happening (it surely is),
• nor whether it is caused by our carbon emissions (it surely is – I’ve not been in any doubt since I first saw the ice core readings a few years back, I think that’s what clinched it for me. You can stick sunspots up your arse)
• nor how serious it may be (Bjorn Lomborg is beginning to sound more and more shrill, or maybe he’s just annoying because he is so smug)
• but just what the hell are we really going to do about it.

Yesterday, I heard Ed Miliband, our climate change minister, being interviewed on Radio 5 by Simon Mayo. He was game for a few questions and one enterprising listener in Japan asked the population question. Like “if we can’t cope now, how are we going to cope with 3 billion extra people on board?” And Milliband minor answered thus: “By 2050, our economies will be six or seven times larger than they are now, and so we must ensure that all that growth is low or zero carbon growth.”

I took a proverbial double take. Six or seven times bigger than 2010? That assumes something like a 10% annual growth rate every year for 40 years. And yet carbon emissions are due to fall by 80% by that time. Just how is that going to work?

Historically, economic growth has been fuelled by carbon – almost every innovation we come up with involves substituting machines for human labour, which involves burning carbon somewhere along the line. Now we may be able to make machines which are less carbon intensive, but do you really think we will be able to get to zero carbon by 2050 whilst at the same time expanding the world economy by six or seven times? It seems staggeringly unlikely, given the state of the technologies we have available right now.

Then someone else popped the 3rd runway at Heathrow question. And this is what Miliband said: “It’s not inconsistent to support a 3rd runway because it is within a framework of holding our emissions by 2050 at current levels. I don’t think it’s realistic to freeze the amount of flying. We just have to have bigger cuts in other areas. Flying is going to become more expensive, but we can’t cut back on it or freeze it.”

Why exactly should flying be a special case? No sensible explanation was proffered. Why not driving cars? Or having copious supplies of hot water? Or eating meat? Or keeping pets? We are, by implication, going to have to cut right back on these so that we can keep flying.

Or was this just a case of an intelligent man talking gobbledegook?

If we were really serious about the problem, it’s economic growth that we should be freezing, at least until we have sorted out our problem with burning carbon. But we can’t do this because:
a) the governments have mortgaged off our future and are now totally dependent on economic growth to pay the bills over the next 20 years. Without economic growth returning, we are all effectively bankrupt.
b) no one will vote for hairshirt policies anyway so its democratically unacceptable.

But the carbon problem won’t go away. If emissions still continue to rise onwards and upwards through the 21st century, then our way of life will be under threat, we will be bankrupt and we will get hairshirt whether we like it or not. The climate sceptics keep pointing out (in their more effusive moments) that this is all some sort of Commie-inspired conspiracy to bomb us back to the Stone Age. And they may well be right, except that I don’t think it’s a conspiracy nor Commie-inspired. It’s unfettered economic growth that has got us into this pickle, and to really change things around, it’s the model of endless economic growth that is what has to be challenged. Without some alternative model of how the 21st century might pan out for us all, it seems just a tad unlikely that we are going to really get to grips with this mess.


And of course the problem is that the poor nations don’t want to stay poor and the rich nations can’t afford to stay where they are. Something has to give sometime, before the climate comes along and whacks us one. At the moment, cap and trade is the only game in town, but it seems rather unlikely to succeed because it avoids the really difficult issues which isn’t just the huge amount of carbon we are burning, but the vast differences in how much each country burns.

I have no doubt that Copenhagen will end up with smiles and photo opportunities and platitudes, but the underlying politics are ugly and about to get a whole lot uglier.

Should Barratt be rescued?

Rumours in the City have it that Barratt will soon be coming cap in hand with a rights issue. It wants to be baled out of its debt mountain. If it happens, then expect a flurry of activity from the other quoted housebuilders who, with the notable exception of Berkeley, all seem to be sinking in debt that they can’t service. They are all waiting on an upturn in the housing market to enable them to get back to business as usual, get building and start raking in the profits once more.

If Barratt was a single householder, it would have been repossessed by now. “Behind on the mortgage payments, are we? Well, you’ve got two weeks to get out.”

But of course the UK housebuilders are collectively too large to be repossessed, so the banks don’t dare pull the plug. For a start, there would be almost no one around to snap up all the land which would be sold off, and this would put further downward pressure on prices, which the banks fear as much as anyone.

But what if the fabled upturn fails to materialise? What if the way things are now is how it’s going to be from now on? Maybe this is what a stable housing market looks and feels like? Instead of forever looking for signs of whether house prices are going up or down, just accepting the fact that they really don’t change that much from year-to-year and learning to live with the consequences.

One of which would be that we wouldn’t need cash-hungry housebuilders anymore.

Prince Charles v Whitehall

I watched Prince Charles’s Dimbleby lecture last Thursday. In it, he argued that economic growth had hit the buffers and that the future lay in sustainable development. Nothing new there; it’s standard green thinking.

However, it seems to have hit a raw nerve in the rest of the Establishment. Yesterday, the Times carried reports from “senior Whitehall sources” saying basically that the Prince was misguided and that his vision was fatuous. The question is, why should a senior Whitehall source be minded to offer up this stuff to the Times?

The Whitehall growth monkey has some very strange observations to make.

“Within its core, represented strongly in organisations such as Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace, environmentalism still has an ideological greenness that does not like the way we live and does not believe this is what creates fundamentally decent society. That continues to infect the way they think about the changes that we need, so in that sense it is fundamentally wrong.”

Look at the way he uses the word “infect?” Is he worried, or what?

He goes on: “We are aiming to cut emissions by a third in the next 10 years and then by 80% in the next four decades. These things are not happening because the population has had a green psychological transformation,” he said.

“If that were true, we’d never get anywhere, we’d never have got rid of slavery or brought in seatbelts or abolished hanging. No social change is force-driven by mass psychological change. It is about government leading and people changing accordingly.”

Is he right? Reading between the lines I think he’s hinting that the Metropolitan Elite fashion and the proles are then corralled into changing their behaviour. He could have mentioned the ban on smoking in public places as a more recent example. But what if the Metropolitan Elite decides that we can’t go on pursuing endless economic growth because it’s fucking up the environment? What would the Whitehall mandarins do then? Or do the Whitehall mandarins somehow control the Metropolitan Elite, and hence the government?

Everybody knows that green living involves a bit of hair-shirting, but then so does having a recession every ten or twenty years. The reason the green arguments have such resonance at the moment is that the orthodoxy of economic-growth-at-all-costs has imploded and is failing to deliver the promised goods.

And I think the reason Whitehall is worried this time is because the government finances are in such a mess that a return to economic growth is the only way they can be baled out, and even then it will take 20 years or more. But what if economic growth refuses to come back? What if we have hit the buffers this time?

Is this slump all about peak oil?

We were hearing a lot about peak oil last summer when the oil price went to $147 a barrel. Since when, of course, the price has fallen through the floor, back down to 2005 levels, and, lo and behold, stories about peak oil have dropped off the radar.

But the issue refuses to go away and at least one serious commentator, Steven Koppits, suggests that we may have already passed the peak oil moment and that the global recession is the result.

Ultimately, the inability of the oil supply to keep pace with global demand proved to be a key contributing factor to the current recession. I would note, however, that the proximate cause of the recession is China, not peak oil. China ultimately provided both the financial liquidity and the commodities demand which brought down the global economy. Were China not so large and not at its current stage of development, peak oil could pass without anyone noticing for some time. As it was, China hit its stride just as the oil supply was stumbling. The issue was not, therefore, peak oil in and of itself, but rather the supply/demand imbalance caused by the inability of the global oil supply to adjust to China’s incremental demand.

It’s a very interesting, thought provoking piece and, to me, it makes a lot of sense.

Trying to Stay Positive

It’s been a very strange year or so, hasn’t it? I have just been reviewing my blog posts since I started in July 2005 and have concluded that my contribution level is down by a half. I peaked in the summer of 2007 – 14 posts in July that year. In stark contrast, this post will be only the 9th for the first two months of 2009. It feels as though my output is mirroring the general lack of construction news and events, sitting as it all does in the midst of the most dire recession in living memory.

Other building bloggers seem rather quiet as well. There’s been a fair amount of discussion about the various government consultations doing the rounds, but it’s been against a backdrop of “does it really make any difference.” Everyone is so concentrated on keeping afloat amidst the bad economic tide that it seems not that many people have the energy to discuss the rarefied points of zero carbon, especially as it all seems to have been conceived in a world of ever-expanding growth, a world which now seems to have hit the buffers. Is this all but a temporary blip? Or is it the beginning of a new era of human development where growth will no longer be taken for granted, nor even particularly desired?

I have no idea, no more than anyone else. But I do detect a subtle shift in the mood of friends and colleagues, which might be summarised in the phrase “Enough Tat!” It’s almost as if everyone has been sated with consumer goods and experiences and now they just want to be left alone in peace.

Take foreign travel as a good example. A generation ago, flying off to exotic places was aspirational and appealing: today, it’s become the humiliation that is RyanAir where you are penalised if you want to bring a suitcase with you. And the chances are that, when you get to where you are going, it will have already been ruined by mass tourism. There’s something very depressing about that, isn’t there?

Sometime last year, I was listening in on a conversation where some young thing was boasting about having “discovered” some wonderful beach where there simply weren’t any tourists. It was the sort of conversation we have all been party to over the years. Twenty years ago I would have thought “fantastic, I’d love to go there.” Today my condolences go out to the beach.

Bankers say sorry, Brown doesn't

I caught part of the bankers’ apology to the Treasury Select Committee yesterday whilst pounding the treadmill at my gym. My impression was that the bankers themselves were a lot more dignified than the politicians, who seemed to want to act like a lynch mob. The questioning was lightweight and feeble, of the kind that was obviously trying to score a few cheap points, rather than shedding illumination on what really happened and why.

And, of course, what none of the politicians would admit was that this whole credit crunch has been a systematic failure and that they have been as much a part of it as the bankers. This morning the news that Sir James Crosby has resigned from his post at the FSA, having been undone by an HBOS whistle-blower, merely puts the whole thing into perspective. Crosby was once a chief executive at free-wheeling HBOS and was specifically selected by Gordon Brown as a key economic advisor.

Meanwhile Gordon “I’ve put an end to boom and bust” Brown marches on defiantly, as if this is all a minor irritation. But his economic boasting whilst Chancellor was absolutely central to the national mood to carry on borrowing. He must know that, even if he feels unable to admit it. I suppose that it’s difficult for a politician to own up to gross negligence whilst still holding onto power, but Brown would be far more likeable if he could show a little humility and stop blaming everybody else. He prides himself on setting the Bank of England free to set interest rates back in 1997, but then ignores the fact that he gave them a bogus inflation target to aim at, ignoring as it did both the cost of housing and the mortgage rate. Consequently, the property bubble and its accompanying borrowing binge was allowed to continue unchecked. Keeping Britain out of the euro was meant to give us the freedom to control this type of problem, but it made no difference. Brown didn’t see it coming, any more than the bankers of RBS and HBOS. Only the nutters over at Houseprice Crash called it right. Now how come they aren’t invited to sort it out, now that the discredited Crosby has gone?

We all know that Brown has a blind eye. What we didn’t know was that he depended on it.

Beckett on housing

Interesting interview in today’s Times with Margaret Beckett, currently the housing minister. It seems to me that property commentators are divided into bulls and bears and that Beckett, and by inference, the government are siding with the recovery bulls.

If demand starts to turn up before supply turns up, you’re immediately back in inflationary pressures, and it’s just not economically healthy, she is quoted as saying. Well, yes that’s true, but inflation seems to be about the least of our concerns at the moment, so complaining that such a situation would be inflationary is akin to telling a cancer sufferer they would feel better if they had a haircut.

She goes on: when the upturn comes, there will probably be a mad rush. How does she know this? There wasn’t the last time, nor the time before, so is she privy to some inside knowledge that the rest of us are not? And if so, why didn’t she warn us about the crash two years ago?

Next up: We’re going through a recession when we know there’s a substantial built-in growth of householder demand in the pipeline.

Almost by definition, falling prices are a result of falling demand, so what she is saying is that this is only temporary and that it’s just a matter of time before we return to the status quo ante. Again, how does she know? And what business is it of a minister to predict the future like this?

Interviewer Isobel Oakeshott asks if we should be more like the Germans, and accept that sometimes renting is better? Beckett won’t have it.

You could turn the question on its head. Why is it that people in places like France or Germany or the Netherlands, or wherever, don’t want to, don’t care, about owning their own homes? Maybe it’s they who are the people whose attitudes are a bit surprising.

Well, yes, it’s an interesting line, but why not answer the question? Afterall, behind it is the suggestion that we had become too keen to use housing as an investment and that this became a principle cause of the bubble.

Beckett prefers this line: People do feel that if you are just paying rent for years, it’s money down the drain. It isn’t, in the sense that it’s providing a roof over your head, but a lot of British people do feel like that and I don’t really see much sign that will change.

This seems a very strange observation and one that suggests she doesn’t get out enough. There is nothing intrinsically British about owning property and the perception that it’s a sure fire winner is surely changing in front of our very eyes right now. Paying rent may be money down the drain, but it’s a much smaller drain that paying a mortgage for a depreciating asset.

So why is Beckett so bullish? Why does she appear to be so certain that in a year or two everything will back to where it was and house prices will once again start rising? She may well be right — though personally I doubt it — but that still doesn’t explain just why she is so keen to see a return to the old days. It’s not as though they were so wonderful, was it? One of the persistent problems being faced was that hardly anyone could afford to buy a house. Admittedly, this justified a huge government housebuilding programme, but the point of this was ostensibly to make housing more affordable.

Could it be that, at this point in time, the government’s entire strategy is to try and turn the clock back to 2007 when everything in the garden appeared to be rosy and under control. Hence the constant exhortations to the banks to “get lending”, even as they are being berated for lending too much a mere 18 months ago. And the panic measure of reducing interest rates to 1.5%, as if that will persuade people to go out on a borrowing binge. The problem here is that if the economy does take off, Beckett style, then the first thing that will happen is that interest rates will go back up again. And if it doesn’t, then house prices will go on falling. As it stands, these near-zero interest rates look about as enticing as a stranger offering you sweets if you get into his car.

What’s just as interesting are the comments left by readers. At time of writing there are 28 such and only the estate agent appears to think that Beckett could be right. I particularly liked this one from Michael in Tunbridge Wells (presumably disgusted!) : If she's wrong, will people who lose out by taking her advice have a claim against the government?

Solving the Housing Crisis

Remember the 3 million new homes that were needed by 2020? It wasn’t so long ago that this target was being spoken about seriously. Well, today a study by AA Insurance has found that a) 70% of UK homeowners have never had a lodger, but b) that 20% of these are now considering it. At least I think that’s what the figures mean. Let’s assume this is so.

There are around 25 million homes in the UK. So 70% of this is 17 million, give or take. Now if 20% of these 17 million (that’s 3.5million) are now actively thinking of taking a lodger, that will create 3.5million new bedrooms. That’s probably not far short of the number of bedrooms built in creating 3 million homes, as around 90% of these were envisaged as being rabbit-hutch style singleton flats.

So the credit crunch appears to have solved the housing shortage already, without so much as a brick having been laid. And all within 12 months.

How to stop the Property Crash (Part 1)

Big pictures are made up of lots of little observations. That’s pretty much what’s happening with the credit crunch at the moment. No one really seems to have a complete understanding of why the markets are so gripped with panic, but gripped with panic they are. We are not about to go to war, there isn’t an asteroid about to impact, we aren’t all dying of plague, and Spurs have started the season with their customary flourish and lie bottom of the table. In fact, in many ways, it’s quite a normal autumn. So why are banks in Europe and America going down like ninepins? And why has the housing market come to a complete standstill?

Here’s my fourpence worth. We have a big problem with land values. We’ve enjoyed (or some of us have) a 50 year bull market in building land which has caused a huge disparity between the value of ordinary land (i.e. designated as agricultural) and building land. Like, building land being around 250 times more expensive than fields. This is all because of planning restrictions, or what the Americans would call zoning. The value of building land has inflated slowly and steadily during this period, accelerating in the past fifteen years only.

The point about this bubble is that it’s been so slow to inflate that people haven’t recognised it as a bubble. On the contrary, it’s been seen as being “as safe as houses”. And people have got very wealthy by buying building land (and the houses that sit on it) and just sitting there and watching the bubble inflate. And banks have lent bucket loads of money, secured against these inflated house prices. The more the land goes up in value, the more mortgages get repaid, the more money the banks had to lend to the next generation wanting to ride this gravy train.

And the government in this country has stoked the fire by claiming that there is a housing shortage and that we have to build millions more houses in order to make them more affordable. There isn’t a housing shortage, any more than there is a road shortage, but if people say it loud enough and often enough, everyone gets drawn into the illusion.

Everything has conspired to make this particular bubble seem very real and very permanent.

And yet, and yet. Eventually something has to give. Eventually people started saying “enough is enough, I have better things to do with my life than pay 50% of everything I earn to service a mortgage for a crap house.” The worm started turning about four years ago. Just a few people, a trickle no more. It greatly affected the quieter districts of the country — it took me a year to sell a house in Norfolk back then. But then it spread. More and more people stopped believing in the inexorable rise of house prices and sometime last summer it tipped the balance and prices started falling across the board.

The image that keeps coming to mind is the tide. All these deals which made sense when the tide was coming in no longer make sense now the tide is going out. They are left exposed on the beach, the loans that supported them looking naked and ashamed. That is why it’s the banks that are copping it, because a huge chunk of banking over the past 50 years has been based on property values. At the moment, it’s the banks that took on the riskier loans which look exposed, but if the tide keeps going out and prices keep falling, then the so-called safe loans, made at 70% of value, start to become exposed too. As long as property prices keep falling, then more and more bank loans will loose their security. This is why the banking system is now in crisis. The more conservative banks are best placed to ride through the storm, but ultimately all banks could be at risk if the storm doesn’t pass.

So what we really need to bring back stability to the system is for house prices to stop falling. It doesn’t matter so much whether they fall by 15%, 30% or 43%, just so long as they stop falling.

We can already see a pattern emerging. The governments around the world are moving in to bail out the distressed loans. As a result, they may well end up owning lots of houses that these loans have defaulted on. Private houses will become council houses, and mortgage defaulters may find themselves council house tenants. Afterall, it makes no sense to throw all these people out of their homes: you’d end up with a million homeless families and a million empty homes, so they might just as well stay put.

There is a better solution to this crisis than buying up distressed debt. Instead of bailing out the banks that made these loans, the government could instead bail out the people who took on the loans and can no longer afford to service them. In effect, the government could and should become house buyers of last resort, so that if someone wants to sell a house and they can’t find any buyers, the government would have to take it off their hands at a reasonable price and then make it part of their council housing stock. The price paid for the house would have to reflect the rent achievable so that the government borrowing would be supportable. And the purchase could include a right-to-buy scheme so that in future the tenants could once again become property owners, should they wish.

In effect, government intervention could set a floor on how far house prices will fall. Once we have a floor, then stability can return to the markets, the banking system will pick up again, builders will be able to dust off their toolbags and financial meltdown will be avoided. We’ll still have a nasty recession because the housing bubble is over for a long time to come, and there are all manner of businesses (the banks being a prime example) that have built their business models on ever increasing land values.

But if we can at least stabilise house prices (and the government has the power to do this), then we can start to repair the damage that’s already been done. But it’s not going to happen until the government comes out of its state of denial about the nature of the housing crisis, and its fruitcake aim of building 3 million new homes by 2020. That is the sort of thinking that has caused this problem in the first place.

Upton Update

It’s a year since I last went to Upton, the much written about urban extension to Northampton. I called by again today to see how it’s developed. It was like a ghost town. Work on the new sections of the development has almost come to a standstill, and much of the finished housing lies empty. It must be very sad for the people working there, and not great for those who’ve already made their homes there in the hope that it would be nearly finished by now. The credit crunch has more or less left it high and dry.

There is some very strange housing there and a lot of it is very ugly. None more so than an extraordinary development at the south western corner of the estate by David Wilson Homes, now part of Barratt. Just take a gawp at this showhouse: it really is an eyeful, and not in a good way. The reason I took this picture was to highlight the fact that the cedar shingles they have used for the cladding already look completely different on the west face than on the south face. But the camera I am using isn't quite up to the job of picking out the discolouration. However, it’s done an excellent job at highlighting just how bizarre it looks. Like almost everything else in Upton, it's been stretched upwards to get a third storey. Whilst this may make good use of the footprint, it just looks all out of proportion for a detached family house, which is what this is meant to be. And the windowless south face makes it look like a warehouse. Covered in shingles. My prediction is that the cedar shingles will have to be replaced within five years because they will look awful by then. There are places where they can look great, but this is not one of them.

Around the corner, Dunster’s Zed homes are now nearly finished and were taking a last lick of paint. Despite it being fairly windy, the roof mounted wind turbines were barely spinning at all and the Dalek-like wind cowls seemed to be revolving in a near random fashion, though my photos shows the seven of them broadly aligned towards the breeze. All this roof-top wizardry gives the terrace a faintly toy-town feel which at least brings on a smile, and the proportions actually look very good, at least compared to many of the other developments.

It really is a very weird place, Upton. If you want to see what an eco-town might look like, then take a visit. In fact take a visit even if you don’t want to see what an eco-town might look like. There’s something more than a little disturbing about the whole place and I can’t quite put my finger on it.