Since I rebuilt this blog/portfolio (johnlongbottom.co.uk) in December just over 41,000 of you have read my writing, and looked at my photos and checked out my graphic design too. It hardly even needs saying that this has blown me away, so I’d also like to take this opportunity to say how much I appreciate your support, stay tuned and, as always, thanks for reading!

-John

Normal service will be resumed shortly.

Throughout the afternoon, a selection of speakers took the mic on a rudimentary stage that had been set up at the foot of Nelson’s Column. The speakers had gathered from all over Europe to express their disgust at the on going occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan. Amongst the speakers were some familiar faces such as punk band The King Blues, and rapper Low Key. One speaker, a refugee from war-torn Afghanistan, was even broadcast through the speaker system via telephone from a Dover immigrant detention centre.

Members of rock band Enter Shikari, and Sam from Get Cape, Wear Cape, Fly were present in the crowd, no doubt helping to draw a younger audience to the Stop the War cause.

The day concluded peacefully with a song from The King Blues, which aptly featured the lyric “Going to war… to prevent war… is the most stupid thing I ever heard“. Following the brief performance singer, Itch, took to the mic for some closing words in the form of a powerful spoken poem, regarding the state of politics.

Below is a gallery of photos which document the afternoon’s events:

Dixons.co.uk - The last place you want to go

The campaign, by M&C Saatchi, takes a swipe at department stores John Lewis and Selfridges, using their own brand identities to describe the process of visiting to high street stores to get the lowdown on a product, before going home and buying it online. Many savvy, albeit cheeky, consumers will be more than familiar with this scenario already, and at this point I should probably come clean, hold my hands up, and admit to having done this a couple of times myself.

So, having had first hand experience of this, the ad initially made me smile… until I read the tag-line “The last place you want to go”. Wait… what?! As a retailer fighting for customers, why would you spend thousands of pounds telling the public that your website is the last place they want to go?

I understand that it implies you should go to their website last, following a visit to the high street, but surely this could have been better worded than “The last place you want to go”.

I personally like the advert, and although the design leaves a lot to be desired visually, the use of the department store’s own branding is essential to make the concept work so well . The tagline however just bewilders me. M&C Saatchi… what were you thinking?

Is there more to this than meets the eye? Leave a comment.

Alex, St Thomas' Hospital Roof

At noon I was still sat in my boxers checking my emails – which had subsequently turned into trawling Facebook, Twitter, various news websites etc, as tends to happen slightly too often for my liking. Flicking back to Facebook for the hundredth time that morning, I was duly informed that two of my largest, and hairiest, male friends had ‘Become a fan of Rough Sex’.

“Jesus Christ”, I thought. I need to get out of this house and away from this goddamn screen. I knew that one more mental image like that of the two grizzly-fatties riding each other violently through the night, may finally drive me to gauge my eyes out in an attempt to ‘un-see’ such a disturbing, wrong, and unnecessary piece of information.

Throwing on a pair of shorts and a t-shirt as quickly as I could, I grabbed my camera and headed out in the city. The fresh, albeit contaminated, city air filled me with a sudden sense of optimism, and still rubbing the sleep out of my eyes I headed for the nearest tube station.

Until I entered the station it hadn’t occurred to me that I had still to make a decision on where exactly I was going to spend the rest of this beautiful summer afternoon. A quick scan of the tube map prompted me to remember that the ‘Press Photographer’s Year’ exhibition was open at the National Theatre in South Bank, which sounded like a decent enough option to me.

After a fiendishly hot and stuffy tube journey, which at times made me wonder if I was heading to South Bank or Auschwitz, I scrambled up the escalator and out into blue skies and sunshine. I crossed the Thames via footbridge and proceeded along the riverside, stopping every so often to watch some of the many buskers whom occupy most of the pathway in that area.

Drawing close to the National Theatre, I headed up a flight of concrete stairs and as I rounded the corner at the top of the stairs, I was almost decapitated by what I immediately suspected to be a ninja. I paused for a second to work out what had just happened. I knew I had scaled the stairs, I knew that I had rounded the corner… then… wait… did a black guy with a huge afro really just front flip over me? Turns out he did. And little did I know that this close-encounter was to spark a change in my plans for the rest of the afternoon.

I glanced around to see where the flying afro was. Gone. Not a trace of it anywhere. Then suddenly, over the top of a great concrete wall the mass of hair came flying, head first, towards the ground, landing casually on his feet a few metres away. Just by looking at this wild character, and seeing him bound effortlessly across the concrete, I could tell that I too had fallen on my feet.

I recognised parkour, or ‘free running’ as it is sometimes known, when I saw it. A relatively new urban sport which originated in France less than a decade ago. The French sometimes refer to it as “l’art du déplacement”, which in English translates to “the art of movement”, and if you are not already familiar with it, it basically involves skilfully hurling yourself around a city environment, flipping over bollards, jumping from walls, and running across rooftops being just a few of its defining features. Parkour is so visually impressive that over the past 5 years it has been hijacked on numerous occasions by hipsters in marketing departments around the world to try and make their often mindless media product seem both exciting and contemporary.

You may recognise the sport from anything from music videos, to computer games, to films. Even the BBC ran a popular ‘ident’ featuring Frenchman David Belle (credited as the founder of parkour) hurtling across the rooftops of London in order to get home from work. With all this in mind, I knew I wasn’t going to break any ground by covering parkour in the magazine, but I knew I would be able to get some decent photos out it at the very least.

“Hey!” I shouted, eager to catch him before he vanished over the top of a wall which he was scaling. “Hey! Excuse me! I’m working on a magazine. Arts! Music! Urban culture!” I yelled, “Would you mind if I take a few photos?”. The huge haircut shook from side to side and the owner launched himself from yet another perilously high drop. Landing a few feet away. I approached, and shook his hand. He had the hands of a builder. Coarse and rough to the touch, almost as if that by handling bricks all day, their hands have been infected by the masonry itself.

“My name’s John” I said, “Could I take a few photos of you doing parkour”. “Of course” he replied in an accent which I couldn’t quite place. The voice was European, I knew that much. The look on my face was apparently one of a man struggling to place an accent, and this was no doubt what prompted him to speak further. “I am from the Netherlands. My name is Alex. Pleased to meet you”, he said awkwardly.

“Netherlands eh?” I thought. What little I know about Holland was learned in a weekend which I spent in Amsterdam for my birthday a couple of years ago, during which I travelled on an expired passport, stayed in a hovel, forgot almost everything I knew including the PIN number for my bank card, and watched a woman at a ‘live show’ perform unspeakable acts on stage, involving a banana and one of my close friends. “…Probably just the kind of activity that citizens of the Netherlands despise”.

“Ohh Holland eh?” I said, trying to think of something quickly to move the conversation on. “Yeah” replied Alex, “Have you been?”. Balls… “Yes, I visited briefly once” I said distractedly. “Amsterdam?” Alex said, with a knowing smile. “Errrm yes, yes it was Amsterdam, lovely city, beautiful architecture.” – I felt like Basil Faulty up against Sybil. He could see right through me. He knew what I’d been doing in Amsterdam, he knew about the passport, and the PIN number, and even the banana. How did he know? Because it’s the same debauched tomfoolery that every other Brit he has met who has admitted to visiting his home-country has partaken in on your average ‘architecture admiration’ visit to the Netherlands.

After a short absence, the journalist in me kicked back in. “So… Alex, how long have you been doing parkour for?”, “About three years, I saw a video of it on TV and thought ‘I have to do this’”. At that point, he took off, sprinting towards a low wall. At the last second he jumped up onto the wall, and somersaulted cleanly forward, with his afro pulsing in the breeze.

Alex, South Bank

For the next 15 minutes we didn’t talk much. There was a mutual understanding. He knew that I wanted some dramatic action shots of his acrobatics, I knew that he wanted to be left undirected – freerunning in the true sense of the term, with no artistic direction, just the will to move.

I snapped some photos of him, doing my best to anticipate which part of the immediate urban jungle he might employ in his next stunt.

In between vaults and flips, it was fascinating to watch Alex’s face. Nestled in the cushion of hair, his expression was that of a musician waiting for their part in a tune. A look of patience, with a palpable edge of concentration. Waiting for the exact second in which it is their turn to take the spotlight. Alex however had no audience to burst into spontaneous applause when his tricks were performed flawlessly. Occasionally a passing family or businessman would pause for just long enough to watch Alex hurtle gracefully from walls to rooftops in this area which had become his domain, but there was no reward for his daredevil acts, other than the clear satisfaction he got from landing cleanly on his feet.

In that moment, watching Alex flying from pillar to post, I saw the city in an altogether different way. From Alex’s perspective, looking out from beneath that huge haircut, each element of the city looked like a piece of play equipment in the biggest playground in England. The bollards weren’t there to stop cars – they were there to be vaulted, low walls weren’t barriers – they were for flipping from, while high walls were for scaling up, and leaping off.

“I’m bored” remarked Alex, shattering my somewhat romanticised view of his sport. “I know this other place… a rooftop. We could go there”. “Sure, why not” I replied. My plans to visit the ‘Press Photographer’s Year’ exhibition were, by this point, as forgotten as my PIN number on that cold weekend in Amsterdam.

Sometimes, you just have to go with your gut, and my gut was telling me to accompany Alex to the rooftop. Sometimes though your brain has to kick in and point out the blindingly obvious; how the hell am I going to make it onto a rooftop? I may be a photographer, but unfortunately I’m not Peter Parker, and while Alex may have the gift of flight, I have not developed such dramatically physical skills. I decided to worry about this problem later, putting it to the back of my mind as I talked some more with Alex.

He told me that he was flying home to Holland the next day, he told me that he had spent the last two weeks surfing in Newquay with friends, and he told me that he was a member of a parkour ‘crew’ back in the Netherlands. He handed me a business card from his pocket which detailed his crew’s website, and went on to tell me about the work him and his crew had done for advertising agencies. This made me smile, but I hid it, and let him carry on with his tales. They were of his travels with friends around Europe, and of his hopes to visit Sydney, New York, and Beijing, clearly eager to see what each new playground had to offer.

Alex, St Thomas' Hospital Roof

We made our way along the riverside, before climbing up onto a wall a few feet taller than myself and then swinging under fences which intersected the wall top and jutted out over a drop. Every time we reached a fence he would leap over it, then I would hand him my rucksack and scramble clumsily after him, grazing my wrist and both my knees as we proceeded. Finally we reached the building which supported the rooftop he loved so much. A large dilapidated sign on the building’s wall stated it was ‘St Thomas’ Hospital’, although this was clearly an abandoned, older, and thankfully slightly lower wing than the towering hospital itself.

Alex ran along a wall-top and jumped over an alleyway, grabbing onto the roof of the hospital at the last second and pulling himself up. “Bugger” I thought, “This could be where we part ways”. After a minute of scouting around, I spotted a window with thick bars, both vertical and horizontal, covering it – an ideal ladder for an amateur urban explorer such as myself. I climbed up the bars to roof height and then realised that I had to make a step across a gap slightly longer than I was comfortable with, or capable of, making. Alex reached across, holding out a granite hand. “Trust me” he said, his European accent and choice of words instantly reminded me of something from an Arnold Schwarzenegger action film, but it was no time for laughing.

I may have only known him for less than an hour, but I did trust him. “If I didn’t trust him, I wouldn’t be halfway up this building in the first place”, I thought to myself. I reached out and grabbed his hand and was subsequently hauled by my arm onto the rooftop. “Thank god for that” I sighed. During the ascent, I had had a feeling that I can only liken to how an old woman must feel watching teenagers charge up a flight of stairs. Alex had been on the rooftop in a split second, while I had taken about 5 minutes to haul my body up the window bars and had ultimately needed his help to drag me to the summit.

“He’s the freerunner, I’m the journalist” I told myself. “I’m not meant to be charging up onto hospital roofs… a couple of hours ago I was just sat in my boxers on Facebook”. This thought made me cherish the freedom which the rooftop offered. I must’ve shot a hundred photos on that rooftop, but not one of them could possibly fully capture the spirit of that boiling summer afternoon. After an hour or so of shooting, Alex was shattered. His decent from the rooftop was as rapid as his accent and mine was just as slow, awkward, and painful as before.

In the shade of the old hospital I shook his hand once more and wished him a safe journey back to the Netherlands. I was heading to one tube station, he was heading to another, and after exchanging email addresses we parted ways almost as quickly as we had met, only with fewer somersaults.

Some days exciting things just happen, and some days you have to go out of your way to make them happen. Last Thursday was the second type of day.

Millenium Square, Leeds

It was only 11am but it was already hot as hell, and as I ventured from the shade of the station, I was greeted by what was possibly the sunniest day that Leeds had ever seen. It was one of those rare summer days when the heat crushes down on you with such force that you feel compelled to glance to the skies, just to make sure that there isn’t a six year old sadist holding an enormous magnifying glass over the entire city centre.

It was during one of these momentary upward glances that the sun’s fiery rays forced their way my pupils and blazed through my retinas. Still, even while half blind, stalking a punk was easy. So easy in fact, that at some point during the dawdle to Millennium Square I entered a deep, walking coma-of-a-daydream in which I pondered just how ‘punk’ it is to spend hours on end grooming your hair and quietly sewing away in order to ensure that your denim jacket is a flawless tapestry of Operation Ivy patches.

Before I knew it, I had reached my destination. I knew this because en route to the square my unsuspecting guide had looked like a cockerel amongst pigeons, his dyed red comb starkly nodding its way through the busy city streets – but now we had reached the battery farm. Mohawks were in abundance, and so too were the pork-pie hats of ‘rude boy’ ska fanatics. In fact, if you squinted hard enough to erase the occasional contemporary civilian, you could easily transport yourself straight into any of the hot, steamy summers which I imagine to have occurred in the closing years of the 1970s.

Now all I had to do was find my good friend Timothy Taco. This wasn’t going to be too hard. Timmy was as broke as I was, and there was no way on Earth that either of us were in a position to pay the thirty-five quid required to purchase a ticket into the walled arena which had been assembled within the square. Standing outside the arena on a hot, carefree afternoon like this, it was impossible to view ‘the great wall’ as anything other than an imposing manifestation of the gig promoter’s greed, erected in order to deny any non-payers from scavenging a stolen glimpse of the glorious events inside. Meanwhile, outside the gates, touts were gleefully relieving unsuspecting mugs of anything between forty and fifty pounds, depending on how desperate, stupid, or rich they looked.

I was confident that Timmy would be somewhere high, probably in both senses of the word. If any man in Leeds could find a way to dodge the ticket fee, it would undoubtedly be Timothy Taco, and, as I mingled through the crowds of punks, rude boys, and other less fashionable has-beens, my suspicions were confirmed as I heard my name being called from somewhere up above me. This could only mean one of two things; either that I had finally passed over the brink of sanity, and now, like so many other lunatics, God had chosen to speak to me, or alternatively, that Timmy had secured a vantage point for us suitable for wasting away the rest of the afternoon.

Thankfully the voice was that of Mr Taco, who was perched on a high stone wall next to the steps of Leeds Museum, which not only over looked the square, but also over the promoter’s ‘great wall of greed’, enabling us to sit and drink tins of cider and watch the events inside the arena unfold, for free, like a pair of homeless vultures in a tree.

At some point during that sweaty, drunken afternoon, we were joined by one of Timmy’s friends who was introduced to me as ‘Ketty Dave’. In my experience, anybody who has gained a drug as a prefix to their name, is a madman. If I need to prove this point, picture for a moment what a person by the name of ‘LSD Pete’, ‘Cocaine Steve’, or ‘Heroin Jack’ might look like. Is there a sane character amongst this grizzly identity parade? No, of course there isn’t, and Ketty Dave was no exception.

Built like a silverback gorilla, wearing only a vest and shorts, Ketty Dave joined us on our perch to absorb the heat of the day. As we watched the support bands, I would occasionally be distracted from the musicians by the loud, bullish snort of Ketty Dave living up to his name. A ring of white powder was crusted around his left nostril and every now and then he would twitch violently, or sway dangerously towards the edge of the wall.

Before we realised it, the innocence and optimism of the early afternoon had given way to a foreboding and brooding evening with a side order of impending madness. With every minute that passed by, it became increasingly apparent that the evening was not going to have an uneventful conclusion.

I had the option to leave. At any moment I could have freely descended from the wall, gone back to the train station, hopped on the next train from Platform 4 and headed for my bed. Having given this option a split second of deliberation, the cider told me that I couldn’t take “the coward’s way out”, and I buckled my seatbelt in anticipation of whatever the night had in store for us. “What the hell” I thought, “At least this will be a night to remember”.

At some point during The Special’s set, a hairy looking group of guys decided to climb up onto the roof of a burger van which formed part of ‘the great wall’. I watched intently as two passing police officers demanded that they descend from their vantage point, but my staring was cut short by loud cursing from right next to me. “Will you fucking stop it you little prick”. I glanced round to see that Ketty Dave had vanished from next to me and the large section of wall space which he had vacated was now occupied by a middle-age couple, the male of which was glaring menacingly at Timmy.

Timmy had been using his position standing on the wall to shout loudly over, what transpired to be, the middle-aged man’s favourite Specials song. Presumably it was this, coupled the wild and gyrating dance which Timmy had been performing, which compelled the man to request that Timmy stop what he was doing. We were in no mood, or state, for conflict and a quick glance at Timmy confirmed that we should get out of there. Having both been too distracted to notice that Ketty Dave had vanished, we decided to take this opportunity to abandon the wall and go and find him.

Timmy lead the way as he barged through the crowd towards the hairy revellers on top of the burger van. As we got closer I could hear the dispute between them and the police officers was turning sour. They had a perfect view of the band, and were clearly trying to prolong their stay just long enough to watch the end of the set, meanwhile, the police officers were feeling less and less authoritative as their demands fell on deaf ears.

Now, if you’ve ever been to Millennium Square in Leeds, you will know that it there is a bar which overlooks it on one side, and it was someone in this very bar who threw a bottle cap from the balcony onto one of the irate policemen. I know this because I watched it happen. Unfortunately however, neither of the policemen saw it happen, and within a second they were screaming at the hairy procrastinators on the roof of the van. “DID YOU THROW THAT?!”…there was no reply though because the bushmen were too busy enjoying the show.

That was the final straw. The policeman began to bellow down his radio, barely coherent with rage. “BACKUP REQUIRED AT MILLENNIUM SQUARE! BACKUP REQUIRED! THINGS ARE STARTING TO GET UGLY… THEY’RE THROWING BOTTLES”. Whether it was intentional or not, what the policeman had now done, was to imply to the rest of Leeds City Police Force that there was a full-scale, bottle-throwing riot was breaking out which was endangering their fellow officers. Meanwhile, back in reality, the officer had been struck by a bottle cap which he wrongly suspected to have been thrown by a bunch of hippies who were standing on a burger van – a slightly different scenario.

The police’s response was instant, almost as if they had been waiting for such a spark. Sirens wailed from all around the city, as police cars and vans screamed through the streets to reach the ‘riot’. Leaping from their cars and sprinting towards the burger van, the police were met by a large crowd who had witnessed all of the misconstrued bottle cap events unfold – a crowd which, unfortunately for the officers, was made up primarily of punks who were so anti-establishment, that they hadn’t bothered to pay in to the gig either, and were now steaming drunk from the day of hanging about outside the venue.

Within about 30 seconds Timmy and I had barged our way back through the mob of angry punks and glancing backwards I saw mohawks and helmets clashing together as the punks engulfed the policemen that had arrived so far. Back at the wall, Ketty Dave was staggering around just below where we had spent the afternoon. In the half-light of the evening, the untrained eye may have mistaken him for a zombie gorilla, stumbling in circles with his eyes open but glazed. Timmy shook him for a while until his brain caught up with his body, and the ketamine gave him enough breathing space to issue a series of loud grunts, implying that it was time to head back to Timmy’s.

As we left the scene, the riot was in full swing. Sirens and shouting swept across the square, and if you listened very closely, somewhere in the distance, you could hear ‘A Message to You Rudy’ drifting across that violent summer night.

Stop your messing around,
Better think of your future,
Time you straighten right out,
Creating problems in town.

Rudy,
A message to you, Rudy,
A message to you.

Stop your fooling around,
Time you straighten right out,
Better think of your future,
Else youll wind up in jail.

Brick Lane, London (On a Good Day)

On the other side of it’s head however, rages a primary school football match. A charging, heaving, relentless mob which infects and disfigures the beast in an ever changing manner. Within the mob, everybody has the same aspirations of glory, but the rules are strictly every man for himself.

Should you decide to partake in the game, it will become instantly clear that the majority of the players will stop at nothing to get just a touch of the ball, and so as a result, right there in the back of your mind, is the fearsome knowledge that at any given moment you may be barged mercilessly to the floor – and trampled to death.

As with a juvenile football match, the goal is always in sight; just as your wildest dreams are always around the next corner. Unfortunately though, the odds of it being you who navigates the ball between the sweatshirt goalposts are very much slim to none, and most of the time you may well feel like you are the bookies’ favourite for a face full of dirt. You are at the mercy of the players around you, and just a few hours in London will teach you that most of those players would gladly foul their own grandmother for the chance of scoring a goal.

The thing about London though, is that it is not a question of loving it or hating it, regardless of which side of it’s head you are looking at. Instead it is entirely possible to simultaneously love and hate the city at the exact same moment in time.

On a bad day London will chew you up and spit you out, yet on a good day, the thrill of the game combined with the the constant proximity to prosperity is what makes this thriving urban playground such an exhilarating city to discover. Whatever the outcome, the two-faced fiend lumbers triumphantly on.

A sophisticated, snarling monster with Buckingham Palace crowning it’s head, this city is not merely England’s capital city – but also one hell of an exciting place to visit.

Below is a sample of the press releases which I produced:

Great Homes and a Good Cause

Having grown from a small show of just twenty-five stands the annual Home & Garden Exhibition at Tatton Park in Cheshire will this year celebrate its 10^th anniversary. The event is the only one of its kind outside London and this year is promising to be the largest and most inspirational event to date. The show, which takes place between Saturday 3^rd and Monday 5^th of May, will play host to over two hundred stands and many new areas such as The Luxury Travel Room, which is sponsored by Luxe et al and the worlds most glamorous hotels.

The 2008 show will also see the reintroduction of the Property Awards by northern-based magazine Design et al, who are keen to promote the property market in the north. The awards will be held in aid of Cancer Research UK, and will celebrate the very best in northern design. The awards for domestic homes over £1million are being sponsored by Coutts, while leading stone showroom Lapicida will this year be sponsoring the awards for homes between £500,000 to £1million. The awards will be presented at the Design Awards Evening at the mansion in Tatton Park on the 4^th May, with a black tie and diamonds dress code.

In addition to the awards raising important funds for charity, the show itself provides a regular and vital boost to Cheshire’s local economy. Last years show saw over 20,000 visitors descend upon the area, bringing with them valuable custom for local shops, taxi services, hotels and restaurants.

The show’s 10^th anniversary will also host the Garden Design Awards 2008, with visitors to the show over the first two days having the opportunity to determine this year’s winner. Complimentary consultations with garden designers are also available by appointment.

The Luxury Travel Room, sponsored by Luxe et al, will allow visitors to take a break and relax with a glass of champagne, while carefully selected leading luxury travel companies will be on hand to help create the perfect getaway.

The Cheshire Life Culinary Room provides visitors with everything they could wish to know concerning the kitchen. From expert advice by leading chefs, to fine wines, and from speciality foods, to leading kitchen accessories, visitors can find all this information and much more readily available to them in the Culinary Room.

The Design Weekend Home & Garden Exhibition’s 10 year anniversary will undoubtedly be an event not to be missed, and will serve as an invaluable source of information on everything from homes and gardens, to luxury travel, as well as, of course, being a thoroughly enjoyable weekend.

————-

And the winners of the Property Awards 2008 are…

This years Tatton Park Design Weekend hosted the prestigious Property Award Ceremony. The ceremony was held in the Tatton mansion on 4^th May and had a black tie and diamonds dress code.

Visitors to the Design Weekend during the first two days were able to vote for their favourite interior and garden design. Verdi Bathroom Solutions, experts in innovative bathroom design, won the Interior Design Award. The Garden Design Award was won by Space 2 Place, who provide high quality, bespoke garden designs with a focus on sustainability.

Northern Homes and Interiors sponsored the Property Award for homes between £350,000 and £750,000, while Lapicida sponsored the award for homes worth over £750,000 to £1million. Coutts sponsored the award for homes valued at over £1million.

Judges, Joanne Beedles, organiser of Tatton Park Design Weekend, and architect Ken Bruce assessed the homes upon location, value for money, interior layout, technical build specification, eco-friendliness, surroundings, and interior design (including all fittings).

The award for homes worth £350,000 to £750,000 went to the Warmingham Grange development by Alcamay Homes. The development lies in the grounds of a grade two listed manor house, and maintains a suitably rural exterior appearance. On the inside however, the 3 story homes are both visually and functionally stunning, maximising space to maintain a clean-cut and contemporary feel throughout.

August Blake won the award for homes from £750,000 to £1million, for their development ‘The Residence’. Situated in Hale, Cheshire, The Residence provides the perfect commuter-friendly suburban home. Each home within the development features a completely unique layout, and is surrounded by impressively maintained gardens. The kitchens feature Gaggenau appliances, and Sub Zero fittings, which combined, create a kitchen which is incredibly practical without sacrificing style.

The award for homes worth over £1million was won by Hillcrest Homes. The house is situated on a hilltop at the edge of Prestbury golf course. This location provides stunning views of the surrounding areas, and is the perfect setting for a home of this kind. Contemporary outside and in, this house maintains the balance between modern and eco-friendly. The exquisite gardens, for example, are watered via a sprinkler system that reuses rainwater drained from the house roof, while the garage and swimming pool buildings are timber framed to minimise environmental damage sustained by using synthetic building materials. The lighting and heating systems also fully embrace environmentally friendly technology.

The entire house layout is unique from floor to roof, and tackles many new design challenges. The home comes with a two-year care package to ensure that help is always on hand to assist with the many groundbreaking technical systems within the house.

The awards were once again an incredible success and will return again next year, pushing the benchmark for northern home and garden design further than ever.

Every cloud has a silver lining

We all love a good story, and nobody loves one more than the British press. It is therefore unsurprising that sometimes they get a little bit carried away.

For example, just five years ago the papers, in their quest for the most sensational story, grimly declared that the disease ‘SARs’ was about to wipe us all off the face of the planet. In reality only four (yes, four) cases were ever recorded in the UK, and none of these cases proved fatal. However, as a result of the frenzy of media hype, the World Health Organisation was able to put containment strategies into action, ensuring that if a genuine threat ever arises they are more than ready to deal with it.

So what impending disaster will supposedly ruin your life this year? Well, the 2008 media song-and-dance is all about something that occurs on a regular basis and puts everybody on edge, yes, it’s PMS (just to clarify, that’s a Property Market Slump, not Pre-Menstrual Stress), and, just by glancing at today’s headlines, it will no doubt have you sleeping in the street and selling your children on eBay in order to survive.

At this point, one thing that you might be noticing is that here at Design Et Al we’re a bit more realistic about things. So before you lose your head, please take a moment to read the facts on exactly how changes in the property market affect you, or, more crucially, how they don’t affect you.

According to government figures, the average borrower has an outstanding mortgage of 44% of their properties’ value, and in order to put the average mortgage borrower into negative equity, house prices would have to fall by 56%.

So where do we stand right now? Figures taken from the Land Registry of England and Wales state that house prices in the north of England have only fallen a regional average of 4.3% so far this quarter.

Many economists predict that the national house price is only likely to fall by 20% nationally, and while all this talk of falling property value may sound worrying to you as a home owner, there are some important factors that must be considered before being anything more than mildly concerned.

If economists’ predictions are correct, and house prices fall by 20% this would only affect borrowers if their mortgage were over 80% the value of their house. One in 20 (around half a million) people in England are in this position, and of those 500,000 the only people that would actually be directly affected would be the ones that were forced to move home due to sickness, job change, or divorce.

So, if the predictions made by many economists come to fruition, the property market in the north would have to slump a further 15.7% and even then would only affect 5% of the entire population, who could quite easily just stay-put and wait the slump out.

It’s also important to point out that many of the 5% affected are in negative equity through their own choice by opting to take out mortgages worth 100% or more of their home’s value, and even then they are not necessarily trapped, as many lenders allow such borrowers to transfer their existing mortgage to a smaller property. See, it’s not so bad after all is it?

Now that you’re reassured that the change in property prices doesn’t harm you, you would presumably like to know what can you do while the market picks up again? Well, if you’re considering moving to a bigger home, then there is no better time than now. It is important to take into account that wealth is not all about what you have but instead is in many cases, what you can buy with it.

When you are selling your home you are not simply a seller, you are also a buyer. If you are buying a bigger home, you will get a better deal during a property slump as your savings and wages remain equal, the price of the property you are buying falls, and the price drop of the house you are selling is relative to the price drop of the home which you’re buying. This ultimately gives you much better value for money when up scaling.

Also worth considering is the fact that it becomes increasingly difficult to sell large houses during a property market slump, so the price will almost certainly be even lower than it should be. It’s a case of ‘the bigger they are, the harder they fall’, so that larger home you’ve always dreamed about could be much more attainable in the coming months.

If you are not considering moving, then for the time being you can stop thinking about your house as an instant investment, and start concentrating on what it really is; your home.

Property market slumps are the ideal time to improve the home that you already live in. As a homeowner the best thing you could do right now is start planning ahead. Setting yourself achievable targets on a realistic timescale would enable you to quickly and easily construct an action plan to nurture your home so that it can flourish into the place that you always intended it to be. While many people panic unnecessarily, this ‘slump’ should be the time to focus. Now is definitely the time for you get to grips with the house that you live in, and transform it room by room.

Whether it’s getting that new kitchen and bathroom that you’ve been thinking about, or simply redecorating the spare bedroom, 2008 is definitely the time to take action. You will not only gain the satisfaction of maximising your home’s potential, but you will also improve the value of your house, so that when property prices inevitably recover, you will be able to reap the rewards of your home being worth even more than before.

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Much ado about nothing?

Flick through any newspaper this month and you will be confronted by headlines such as “House sales lowest since 1970s” (Daily Mail), eagerly proclaiming the ominous decline of the British property market. However, things may not be as gloomy as they seem.

In this age of media sensationalism, where the paper with the most outrageous headline sells the most copies, could it be possible that the press have over hyped the ‘property problem’? We think yes, it could have.

While this may be a bold statement to make, it’s not without justification. May 4^th saw the annual Property Awards take place at Tatton Park, Knutsford. There were three categories, ‘Homes between £350,000 and £750,000’, ‘Homes between £750,000 and £1million’, and ‘Homes worth £1million and over’. While the press were busy nay saying, we sat down and looked at some statistics from the show.

Any guesses which category at the show was the most strongly contested? That’s right, the ‘£1million and over’ category. With the economy apparently on its knees, you would have thought that that new houses worth £1million were few and far between, but it gets even more surprising than that. The average house price for this category stands at a staggering £3.4million. Shocking? Well how about the fact that all properties entered in the category were already sold, and that the developers are all now working on properties worth between four and six million pounds? We’re starting to get the picture that the overzealous press may well have a lot to answer for.

The other categories at the show were equally as unaffected by the supposed slump. Northern Homes and Interiors sponsored the Property Award for homes between £350,000 and £750,000, while Lapicida sponsored the award for homes worth over £750,000 to £1million. Coutts sponsored the award for homes valued at over £1million.

Joanne Beedles, organiser of Tatton Park Design Weekend, and architect Ken Bruce judged the homes that were entered upon; location, value for money, eco-friendliness, technical build specification, interior layout, surroundings, and interior design (including all fittings).

The award for homes worth £350,000 to £750,000 went to the Warmingham Grange development. The development lies in the grounds of a grade two listed manor house, and maintains a suitably rural exterior appearance. On the inside however, the 3 story homes are both visually and functionally stunning, maximising space to maintain a clean-cut and contemporary feel throughout.

August Blake won the award for homes from £750,000 to £1million, for their development ‘The Residence’. Situated in Hale, Cheshire, The Residence provides the perfect commuter-friendly suburban home. Each home within the development features a completely unique layout, and is surrounded by impressively maintained gardens. The kitchens feature Gaggenau appliances, and Sub Zero fittings, which combined, create a kitchen which is incredibly practical without sacrificing style.

The award for homes worth over £1million was won by Hillcrest Homes. The house is situated on a hilltop at the edge of Prestbury golf course. This location provides stunning views of the surrounding areas, and is the perfect setting for a home of this kind. Contemporary outside and in, this house maintains the balance between modern and eco-friendly. The exquisite gardens, for example, are watered via a sprinkler system that reuses rainwater drained from the house roof, while the garage and swimming pool buildings are timber framed to minimise environmental damage sustained by using synthetic building materials. The lighting and heating systems also fully embrace environmentally friendly technology.

The entire house layout is unique from floor to roof, and tackles many new design challenges. The home comes with a two-year care package to ensure that help is always on hand to assist with the many groundbreaking technical systems within the house.

Visitors to the Tatton Park Design Weekend were able to vote for their favourite interior and garden design. Verdi Bathroom Solutions, experts in innovative bathroom design, won the Interior Design Award. The Garden Design Award was won by Space 2 Place, who provide high quality, bespoke garden designs with a focus on sustainability.

The awards were once again an incredible success, not only pushing the benchmark for northern property design to new heights, but also raising a number of very poignant questions about whether the country’s press has its finger on the pulse of society, or just has its head in the clouds.

Joanne Beedles who judges the contest each year said, “Given the current climate we were surprised that we have received most entries from homes in the top category. The standard of entry has been fantastic with many homes valued in excess of £3.5million. It would seem that we are still buying and building domestic properties in the north, which has got to be good news. In the ten years that I have worked on this event, we have never received so much interest from the top of the market”.

So, whether the property market is ‘crashing and burning’ remains to be seen, but next time you read the wild claims made by the paper it may well be worth considering the time that the Millennium Bug caused planes to come ‘crashing and burning’ from the sky… Oh wait, that was all just sensationalist hype.

Outside Tescos, Chester

At first glance it appears to be something straight out of Orwell’s ‘1984′, in fact I only found out what it was all about when I returned home and checked the Police Pledge website which explains:

“The Policing Pledge is a set of promises to local residents that not only gives more information about who their local neighbourhood policing team is, but also ensures that communities will have a stronger voice in telling the police what they think is most important and what they are most worried about.”

As a member of the community, I would say that one of my biggest concerns is that the wheels are in motion for Britain to be converted gradually into a police state, through intrusive use of CCTV monitoring systems, dangerous proposals to record all internet and mobile phone use, and extensive databases logging travel details of innocent citizens (amongst many other liberty threatening schemes).

All these ’solutions’ come under the convenient guise of saving the world from terrorism, yet at the expense of the civil liberties of me, you, and future generations who may never know what it means to be able to go about your everyday business without being constantly monitored and recorded.

With all this in mind, placing posters such as the one above in public places do not give me much faith in the police’s ability to judge what the community want. Here’s a clue though:

I do not want to be put under police caution by a billboard as I enter Costa Coffee.

Is that too much to ask? Maybe try a more sensible/less sensationalist approach next time?

See also:

direct.gov.uk/policingpledge/

boingboing.hexten.net

A Caveman With Something to Smile About

As a man I am a natural hunter-gatherer. For 2 million years it was my male ancestor’s duty to head out of their caves, with a spear in one hand and a shopping basket in the other, skewering anything that so much as blinked in order to provide their families with the food they needed to survive.

It is therefore in my blood to be a provider of food and I know this to be true not just because it says so in the history books, but also because one of the fondest memories from my childhood was chasing wild rabbits around a field with a garden hoe because, instinctively, it seemed like the right thing to do (I must mention that no animals were injured as, unfortunately, I wasn’t quick enough). And thinking about it, maybe the reasoning behind me doing this was less because ‘it seemed like the right thing to do’ and more because I am not quite right…

So anyway, with this urge to gather food engraved in my DNA, why is it that the thought of heading to the supermarket once a week instantly fills me with a powerful sense of dread? I think it’s because the fun has been taken out of being the provider.

Long gone are the days when having meat for tea involved shish-kebabing a deer to death, and this, especially for the deer’s sake, is not necessarily a bad thing. But compared to that, modern day shopping is boring. Trailing around the labyrinth of aisles at your local Tescos for example, is a horrendous and mind numbing process, so much so that at some point in recent history the powers-at-be had to place the word ’super’ in front of the word ‘market’ to attempt to make it sound vaguely exhilarating.

My experience of food shopping is generally something along these lines:

Arrive at the store and spend first quarter of an hour trying to find a parking space. Eventually park up and head into the store, only to find that the automatic door won’t open as I’m trying to get into the designated ‘exit’. I am a customer. Therefore I am allegedly always right, yes? No. God forbid I try to enter the store to give them my money using the wrong door. Attempts to enter the exit are met with trapped limbs and funny looks from the nearest security guard. Already, I am not exactly having fun.

Once inside I head to claim a trolley, before quickly realising that I don’t have the necessary £1 coin to hand in order to rent this awkward and unwieldy cousin of the wheelbarrow. Basket it is then. Having passed through the obligatory entrance area consisting of magazines, and cigarettes, I then find myself in children’s clothing (I mean the section, not literally ‘in children’s clothing’). Do I really need to be here? No, but the crayon-wielding ape who designs shop floor layout insists that this is the first section I am guided through on my food shopping experience/ordeal.

I continue my Pacman-like negotiation of the aisles, when almost instantly find myself in household goods and electronics. Do I want an all-in-one remote control that will simultaneously control everything from my DVD player to my smoke alarm? No. Do I want a scientific calculator? No. How about a 52″ plasma TV? Yes, but if I had the money to buy one, it wouldn’t be from somewhere that also sells raw fish and something called ‘Mr Brain’s Pork Faggots’ in the very next aisle.

I have already been in the shop for 10 minutes and I am yet to encounter anything which could even be mistaken for food. It is at this point where I begin to lose hope. My eyes glaze over and I begin to lose any initial optimism about my shopping trip. I feel demoralised and confused, and this, I believe, is how Tescos want me to feel as I lose all hope and succumb to the urge to just pile my basket high with whatever comes to hand, regardless of the price, and quickly head to the nearest checkout.

So in an almost hypnotised state, I fill my basket with the nearest products to hand and it is at this exact moment that I develop an entirely new method of walking. Under the weight of my basket, and as if possessed by one of the supermarket’s own wonky-wheeled trolleys, I begin to travel in the style of a drunken chess bishop, staggering wildly in diagonal lines. Hope is in sight however, I can see the checkout, and I have a full basket. I career diagonally up to the checkout with the shortest queue, greeted warmly with the phrase “sorry love, this checkout’s closed”. Christ.

Narrowly avoiding joining a queue behind a woman paying for £58 worth of shopping in vouchers. I spot a sign that says ’self service checkouts’. Perfect. Just one short diagonal journey and i arrive at ’self service’ encountering no queue whatsoever.

I eagerly begin swiping my food across the bar code scanner. Wow. I feel like I’m living in the future when suddenly the machine begins engaging me in a bizarre one-way dialogue reminiscent of something out of Kubrick’s ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’. The robot begins shouting. “MISSING ITEM IN BAGGING AREA”. Oh Jesus.

What now? Is it going to summon a Dalek like robo-colleague to exterminate me? No. It simply continues bellowing at me until a woman who’s name badge says ‘Maureen’, and is seemingly the supermarket equivalent of tech-support, administers the robo-checkout with a swipe card which seems to hit it like a shot of morphine to the jugular. It rapidly returns to it’s former passive self, a subservient slave to it’s human masters.

Now, I am easily distracted at the best of times, so having encountered the self-service checkout my mind begins to ponder many questions. Is this the beginning of the end? Will I soon be using these things in every shop? What if the machine refuses to sell me my food? Will I be forced into hunger by a cruel robot master-race?

And what about the checkout folk who will be put out of a job by these futuristic contraptions? Are we on the brink of a second industrial revolution with Luddite-esque Tesco employees taking a hammer to these things? I don’t know, but while I have been glazed over considering the future of humanity, Maureen has finished scanning and bagging my purchases… not so self-service after all.

I pay for my goods, and as I dart out of the door marked ‘No Exit’ I am almost crushed by the automatic doors. Is this a coincidence, or is the robo-checkout’s last effort at revenge for getting it in trouble with Maureen? Who knows. All I care about is getting home.

I begin walking to the car park, shopping bags in hand, looking like a contestant in World’s Strongest Man, about to blow a blood vessel during the ‘Car Carry’ event. A man with a clipboard asks me if I can “spare a few moments”? I eagerly reply “Yes. Of course”. I explain to him that if he would like to hold my shopping bags while I stand here, I would love nothing more than to answer his inane questions about my gas supplier. The conversation ends there and I am permitted to make my way back to the car.

I load my shopping in my boot and head for the exit, where I realise that I didn’t get my car parking ticket scanned at the checkout and I am eventually forced to tail-gate another car out through the barrier in order to avoid leaving my car impounded in the supermarket car park for the rest of eternity.

Finally I arrive home filled with resentment, and baring a renewed hatred of the food shopping experience. I unpack my shopping only to find that during my semi-unconscious supermarket stupor, I have just purchased two bags filled exclusively with Mr Brain’s Pork Faggots.

Shit.

Give me a spear and a cave any day.

BONUS THOUGHT: Why not combine Tescos Online with Xbox Live and allow me to literally hunt my food down in a shoot-em-up computer game, the spoils of which can then be delivered to my door the next day.