Buildings

Alfred Hitchcock’s penultimate (and most violent) movie, 1972’s Frenzy - captures a lost London. Set largely in Covent Garden, it shows the area – these days a tourist trap – as it had stood for the previous 300 years - a bustling flower and fruit market. At the time of…

Kieran Bradley is director of architecture at consultancy Pick Everard As a society, much is made of our ability to repurpose where possible. Buildings are no different, and in recent years we’ve come a long way in making our construction choices more net-zero ambitious. Now, Labour is pledging to build…

This year, the Labour Party’s annual conference played host to 29 fringe events containing the word “housing” in the title. A further seven mentioned the word “infrastructure”. In crowded rooms across the conference zone on Liverpool’s dockside, delegates crammed in to hear the new army of excited “generation rent” MPs…

Last month, the global construction community gathered at The Barbican Centre in London for the 2024 Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat (CTBUH) International Conference to address a key question – should we continue to build new buildings, or should we focus on renewing the ones we already have?…

Alister Grey is managing director of technology and manufacturing at Mace Construct When we think about the cloud, generative artificial intelligence or 5G, we think of abstract things in a digital world. We don’t think of the huge physical infrastructure required to support them. “The demand for data centres exceeded…

Retrofit might not be new, but it’s going through a purple patch due to net zero concerns. CN asks how contractors are mitigating the risks on cut-and-carve projects It’s a bright summer’s day and Bam Construction is busy installing period furniture at a striking 1960s central London modernist office block…

Liam Spencer is co-founder of Anomaly Architects Over the past few years, the retrofit movement has grown arms and legs. A term that was once reserved for a fairly niche group of design and project teams now spans wide across the industry and beyond to a public audience. We have…

A bit like buses, we’ve waited years for a big government announcement on planning and two come along in seven months. In December last year, then-communities secretary Michael Gove released a National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF) that made new-home targets advisory. It didn’t last long. The first set-piece act of…

Clive Feeney is group managing director of LHC Procurement Group Labour’s determination to build 1.5 million homes over the lifetime of this parliament has created a national debate and one crucial question: how? There are several obstacles. First, there’s the construction skills shortage: the Home Builders Federation warns that for…

Jonathan Parker is development director at framework provider Pagabo  The newly elected government’s long-needed planning reforms, with their focus on unlocking development and setting housing targets, have been met with widespread approval. But planning reform is just the start, and development needs to look beyond new homes to wider town…