Signs of Life

There is below this now-customary round-up an actual blog post, unregurgitated, for the first time in a long time. It's on the hot topic of Simon Jenkins' favourite piece of Polish urbanism and why it is a great deal more complex and interesting than that might imply (or than he probably knows). I'm aware there's not much point in writing about anything now other than how they're all in it together, but here's a few things for light relief. A BD building study on the Unison building in Euston Rd is now up on the Urban Trawl blog; there's a review of Iain Sinclair's Ghost Milk for the Independent; I can be found procrastinating about Renzo Piano's Shard in Artforum; and the Red Pepper piece on why big modernist council estates are in fact a good thing is now online. There's also a nice review of Uncommon in the Morning Star, perhaps fittingly the only review as yet in print. Finally there are lots of new things on Flickr, largely as a means of stopping my hard drive from dying horribly.

Some interesting other things worth drawing your attention to: Meet the Leeds Libraries, a set of public facilities left in disrepair in that Capital of the North; Sunlit Uplands, a set of haunting photographs of Midlands suburbia; a machine that makes the motor vehicle look sensible; a co-operative village skyscraper in China; and an excellent website previously unknown to me on the gentrification of Southwark. And Jones the Planner makes it to insurgent Southampton, site of course of one of the greatest town planning fuck-ups of the last thirty years. And there's stiff competition.