Battersea Power Station in London unveils the newly restored Control Room A

Compare to the more modern sterile industrial control rooms, windowless, cold, everything run on screens and keyboards, no sense of a connection with the massive machinery being operated.

Are they fake people? Are they living fake lives? Do they not live up to your standards of personhood?

I always wonder what’s the alternative to fancy shops. Is it the usual English high street with store signs made of rotten wood? Cheap minicab companies?

> I understand that there are places where redevelopment has been handled more sensitivity but this area in particular has needed an enormous outlay to convert it such a primate area.

There’s nothing to preserve in that area. It was an industrial wasteland surrounded by council flats and dodgy pubs.

> Hopefully within a few years it will start to gain its own identity and start again.

Hopefully not, hopefully it will develop a new and better identity.

Though, what people call gentrification is often just younger people moving into an area replacing older people. So maybe you could fight it by building senior housing and whatever it is old British people like. Model trains maybe.

As a result, no tenant is secure where they live. I would guess most people who do not own property have had to move several times with little notice, usually to another area of town because it's not that easy to find somewhere else nearby at short notice. This can be particularly rough on families because it means the children must change school, and on people with care needs because their (typically unpaid) carers who live nearby don't live nearby after the move. And it's just generally shitty to be unable to settle into a community long term anywhere.

The move to remove section 21 in its current form (set the bar higher for a landlord who wants to reclaim the property), is a tenants' rights move. It's disagreeing with the parent comment that a person (or a corporation such as a pension fund) who owns properties should be able to do "whatever they want, whenever they want" because that results in unacceptably bad living conditions for tenants, who almost universally have no choice about being tenants, and no alternative type of tenancy available to them.

One of the most obviously questionable aspects of section 21, which would be easy to change without harming reasonable landlords, is that a landlord can evict a long-term tenant for no reason just to replace them with a different tenant, just because they feel like it. There is no requirement that the landlord intends to use the property for something else.

In practice, because these evictions are easy and common, sometimes they occur because the property agent (intermediary between landlord and tenant) feels like it, because it nets the property agent some extra fees to start a new tenancy. Sound unlikely? It happened to me a few years ago where I am currently living. It's only because I accidently met a representative of the landlord that we realised the property agent had lied to both of us, and the landlord intervened to let me renew!

S12 invalidates half of your tenancy agreement, to be precise it allows your landlord to renege on all their obligations. A window breaks and you want it to be fixed it? Bad luck, here’s your S21 and may the next sucker come in. It may not be a problem for you, but if you are poor and especially if you have a family, you may have to decide between living with broken stuff (that your landlord is being paid to fix) or being homeless. This is not a hypothetical, this is how millions of people live here.

This is how renting works in Western Europe.

On a fixed lease, the landlord generally can't kick you out. But when a fixed-lease ends, unless it's explicitly renewed, it automatically becomes a month-to-month lease which can be ended by the tenant with one month's notice, or the landlord with two months notice. In my experience landlords prefer to renew as a fixed-term.

We invented machines to build large amounts of simple things cheaply, so we designed simpler things.

The Victorians saw engineering prowess as a statement of intent to the world, combine that with this https://benjaminstudebaker.com/2015/12/17/how-austerity-dest... (British empire from 1830 to 1880 accounted for half of global wealth and approx 25% of landmass) and you could do incredible things.

Lots of victorian infrastructure was built/over built so well we still use some of it now (London's sewer system is 2000 kilometers and brick built) - it was often seen as a legacy for the future as well.

Having said that, I've lived in Victorian houses in parts of the country that minimalist decorators haven't managed to get their paws on and even the small ones are more generous with ornamentation than a modern new build. I hate how modern houses might as well be glorified shipping containers they're so dull and functional, the Victorians knew the benefits of an arch and the odd bit of decorative carving.

You see, in the 1930s, electric power _was_ glamorous, even its generation. The idea of a municipal utility _serving the public_ was a big deal. All the modern miracles that enabled dense cities to grow upward, electric water pumps and elevators and inter-office telephones, were shiny and new and worth celebrating.

So, celebrate they did. Telephone central offices built in the 1920s and 30s are cathedrals to the tamed electron, with ornate Art-Deco carvings and stone arches and tile inlay adorning their entrances. I've had the privilege (yes!) of working in quite a number of them, and while the asbestos precautions are a hassle sometimes, there is a palpable feeling, even a century later, of showing up to work somewhere respectable. Proud. Exalted.