The Numbered List.
After a few weeks of focused articles, I’m returning to a numbered list of random thoughts—covering what caught my attention this week. Warning: very little to do with architecture. Climate change, a dirty station, and the housing crisis are tackled instead.
1. Avoid room service pizzas at the Hilton in Belfast. They poisoned me.
2. The Giant’s Causeway is smaller than I imagined. The coastline and surrounding geology are far more impressive. Don’t go near the edge in search of the more interesting hexagonal stones—they tell you off.
3. How does the small town of Portrush on the Northern Ireland coast have a better retail offer than a city of over 200,000 people? A tremendous little high street, complete with a small department store where you could walk in and buy a jacket, an air fryer, and some cutlery. Refreshing.
4. Speaking of populations, 350,000 seems to be the sweet spot for a city where interesting stuff happens most of the day.
5. Never visit Portsmouth and Southsea station. It’s a disgrace. I doubt it’s been cleaned since at least 1991. How can a city-centre station be so horrible and suffer such underinvestment?
6. A fascinating exhibition at the Building Centre in Islington this week—a prototype modular house for emergency housing. Whatever you think of housing people in hotels, basic economics suggests that London boroughs spending a fortune on them isn’t a sustainable plan. But you know things are broken when young professionals walk past the emergency housing and say, “That’s better than the flat I rent.”
7. I’m not particularly bothered either way about electric cars. But, weirdly, almost everything aside from your sit-on lawnmower is powered by electric motors. Imagine putting petrol in your kitchen blender. How did it take so long? My dad was driving electric milk floats in the 1960s. Chevrolet had an electric car prototype in 1973.
8. What do we do to grow the UK economy? Answers on a postcard. It’s not green energy. As far as I can tell, that looks more like a vehicle to extract wealth than add it. And that’s not a statement for or against green energy. I’m just totally fed up with wealth extraction. It’s got to stop— surely, debt at 97% of GDP and growth at much less than 1% should focus the attention.
9. This week, I discovered the economic model of a single representative agent. The assumption is that a single, average decision-maker represents all individuals in an economy. So, if Bill Gates walks into a football stadium, everyone there becomes a millionaire—on average. This might explain why so many economic models fail to capture the reality of inequality. If the model assumes we all share in the wealth, then the fact that most of us don’t becomes a bit of an inconvenience.
10. Manufacturing. It’s surprisingly 8.8% of the UK economy, or 22% when the wider supply chain is considered. Not bad since I often hear ‘we don’t make anything anymore’.
All the best
Main Image credit: Bad pizza, wealth-draining wind farms, and thriving cities. (DALL-E)
