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idyll, can distract from the less-than-idyllic realities of rural life (Shucksmith, 2018 ), and well-being in rural communities will be heavily influenced by individual and place-based circumstances. This chapter explores the contributions that outdoor recreation and access to nature more generally make to well-being in rural areas using Scotland as a case study. In Scotland
As the tragedy of the Grenfell Tower fire of 14 June 2017 has slowly revealed a shadowy background of outsourcing and deregulation, and a council turning a blind eye to health and safety concerns, many questions need answers. Stuart Hodkinson has those answers. Safe as Houses weaves together Stuart’s research over the last decade with residents’ groups in council regeneration projects across London to provide the first comprehensive account of how Grenfell happened and how it could easily have happened in multiple locations across the country. It draws on examples of unsafe housing either refurbished or built by private companies under the Private Finance Initiative (PFI) to show both the terrible human consequences of outsourcing and deregulation and how the PFI has enabled developers, banks and investors to profiteer from highly lucrative, taxpayer-funded contracts. The book also provides shocking testimonies of how councils and other public bodies have continuously sided with their private partners, doing everything in their power to ignore, deflect and even silence those who speak out. The book concludes that the only way to end the era of unsafe regeneration and housing provision is to end the disastrous regime of self-regulation. This means strengthening safety laws, creating new enforcement agencies independent of government and industry, and replacing PFI and similar models of outsourcing with a new model of public housing that treats the provision of shelter as ‘a social service’ democratically accountable to its residents.
Manchester: Something rich and strange challenges us to see the quintessential post-industrial city in new ways. Bringing together twenty-three diverse writers and a wide range of photographs of Greater Manchester, it argues that how we see the city can have a powerful effect on its future – an urgent question given how quickly the urban core is being transformed. The book uses sixty different words to speak about the diversity of what we think of as Manchester – whether the chimneys of its old mills, the cobbles mostly hidden under the tarmac, the passages between terraces, or the everyday act of washing clothes in a laundrette. Unashamedly down to earth in its focus, this book makes the case for a renewed imaginative relationship that recognises and champions the fact that we’re all active in the making and unmaking of urban spaces.
Knowsley Heights in Huyton, Liverpool, was linked to the absence of fire breaks in the gap between the cladding and the block’s walls. In June 1999, a 55-year-old disabled man died in a fire in the 14-storey Garnock Court in Irvine, Scotland, after the fire spread via the combustible plastic cladding. Three people were killed, two of them firefighters, in the 17-storey Harrow Court fire in February 2005, in Stevenage, Hertfordshire, when a fire developed and spread from the fourteenth floor up the outside of the building to higher floors. In July 2009, six people were
level in communities where these factors intertwine and reinforce one another. Drawing upon our work with local communities in Scotland, we argue that cultural heritage can provide the mobilising factor which links together different groups within the community in a common project which generates civic pride and a sense of place (Wallace et al
-standing supporters lived and worked over the eight decades of its existence. Built by the doyen of stadium design, Scottish architect Archibald Leitch, stadia such as City’s were typically hemmed in by row upon row of small terraced houses. The layout of this realm remains somewhat labyrinthine, cut across with numerous streets and cobbled alleys, and was interspersed with corner shops, fast-food eateries and pubs, with larger spaces occupied by schools and community centres. Accordingly, Maine Road could be accessed via a myriad of different routes from all directions. The Old
a place for such things to exist, thereby challenging our notion of what constitutes the urban and our assumptions of where a wilderness is. If you judge wilderness differently – as places that are overlooked, unplanned and undervalued – then the Highlands of Scotland would score low, while this wildscape in inner-city Gorton would score highly. Although rarely valued as beautiful by conventional aesthetic standards, their beauty 257 Manchester: Something rich and strange commonly lies in their ‘out of placeness’, which can surprise and stimulate. The greatest
transforming itself to enable PFI to take off. Bankers were seconded into the Treasury to help manage the PFI programme, and 15 senior representatives of the City, industry and the civil service, including leading corporate executives from companies that would benefit from PFI contracts, like General Electric, SAH.indb 60 30/01/2019 12:44:50 Regeneration meets the Private Finance Initiative 61 Tarmac, Scottish Power, Serco and pension fund manager Hermes, were appointed to the government’s Private Finance Panel, which had an agenda to ‘introduce private finance into all
a total of £905.17 million was raised in senior debt from banks and bond issues for these 17 schemes. Using the interest rates and terms disclosed, I estimate that these loan agreements will generate £721.73 million in interest income to these financiers. We can also see that some banks have done particularly well, with the Nationwide Building Society and the Bank of Scotland providing senior debt finance in 9 of these 17 schemes. Now let us look at the estimated interest income earned by the owners of the SPVs across these 17 schemes, which is set out in table 6
writings are in many ways reminiscent of the work of Barry Lopez in the Arctic, of John McPhee in his deep storying of the geology of the United States, of Robert Macfarlane in his tracing of old paths in England and Scotland, or of Nan Shepherd in her wonderfully poetic and rigorous account of the Cairngorms in the north of Scotland. However, his decision to base himself physically in his field of studies for half a lifetime, his background as a mathematician and as a visual artist, his scientific interests and his openness to folklore and myth give his work ever new