Wednesday, December 17, 2014

Frog Island needs regenerating – but sensitively

The Leicester Mercury picked up on my recent 'open letter' to Councillor Kitterick (sent to him in his capacity as Chair of Leicester City Council's Planning and Development Control Committee) and published it as a reader letter, complete with 'historic' Frog Island photo and link to the Ash Sakula presentation, which I referred to in my letter and the associated Leicester Civic Society blog post.

Monday, December 15, 2014

Remembering Phil Michaels

Deeply saddened to read about the death of environmental lawyer Phil Michaels in issue 105 of Friends of the Earth's Change Your World magazine.


We first met Phil at an environmental justice event at the FoE offices in London (probably in 2004), where he talked passionately about the Aarhus Convention.

Subsequently we met Phil again at FoE's Power Up! weekend in August 2005 (held at the noteworthy Wentworth Castle near Barnsley), at the 2007 Road Block Conference in Birmingham, and at an Environmental Law Foundation conference in London.

Obituaries can be found on the FoE website and on the Independent website under the heading:

Tuesday, December 09, 2014

Eine Kirche erzählt ihre Geschichte

Meine Mutter weist hin und wieder auf interessante Artikel aus der Rhein-Neckar-Zeitung hin. Ein gutes Beispiel war der Artikel under dem Titel "Eine Kirche erzählt ihre Geschichte" vom 9. 10.






Der gesamte Artikel steht in PDF-Format hier zur Verfügung.

Tuesday, December 02, 2014

What happened to the Leicester Waterside vision?

With reference to a recent Leicester Mercury article under the heading "A50 branded worst entrance into city as Vaughan Way shopping and flats complex approved", it is clear that the whole Frog Island area is in desperate need of regeneration.


However, one would hope that any further regeneration would occur in a more sensitive manner that respects Leicester's heritage. This is where the Leicester Waterside vision could come in, which unfortunately seems to have fallen by the wayside and could do with resurrecting.


For background information see here.

As it happens, I attended the Leicester Waterside launch event in August 2011, wearing my Leicester Civic Society, Inland Waterways Association and Friends of the Earth hats – see here. A 39-page presentation (with a rather large file size of 68 MB) is available from here. In case you are not aware, "AshSakula" are architects Cany Ash and Robert Sakula.

Update 5 January 2015:
The announcement: "More than £26 million to be ploughed into regenerating Leicester's run-down waterside area" is very timely! The project is exciting and offers plenty of scope for genuinely sustainable development, but we must remain vigilant and ensure that the sustainability aspect is not watered down.