For a £2bn, 1.5m square foot development including more than a thousand apartments, plus offices and shops. Private equity giant Carlyle is behind the project, and according to this, they're using PLP Architects.
The Foxtons founder has his eyes on a parcel of land - currently a Texaco garage - which has been the subject of five previous failed planning applications in the last ten years. According to this, he's hired Rogers Stirk Harbour & Partners to draw up plans for a tower, which may potentially interfere with views from Peninsula Heights (home to Lord Archer's famous penthouse). More here.
Compare your neighbourhood as it develops between 1896, 1899, 1915, 1920, 1938, 1949 and 1954 here. Plus scanned maps dating back to the 16th Century. Fascinating stuff.
If you haven't seen it, head over to the BBC's news site for a closer look at what promises to be Europe's tallest building, when it's completed in 2012.
Residents of the Razor in Elephant & Castle have been getting overheated about the overheating. A building that wears its sustainability on its sleeve, it's already been criticised for its all-show, little-blow wind turbines. Now, aspersions are being cast on its ventilation. Londonist has the full story.
It's at the top of the Metro Central Heights buildings in Elephant & Castle, an Ernö Goldfinger production from the early 1960s originally built for offices, and the home of the Ministry of Health. It turned residential in 1997. This penthouse duplex was refurbished about six or seven years ago by Simon Allford.... three bedrooms, a walk-in dressing room, dining and living rooms, a very large terrace (with the kind of views you'd expect from the seventeenth floor). More importantly, if you share our love of 20th Century architecture, it's a little bit of history. It's with The Modern House, at £1.1m, particulars here.
Bills. For fire safety improvements. It's lease-owners in Perronet House, Marie Curie and Castlemead who are affected, 51 of them facing bills of £500,000 between them, their share of works to the blocks. More here.
The slightly clichéd assumption made by estate agents is that a weak market leads to a "flight to quality" as purchasers concentrate on "best in class" properties that are likely to retain their value. Conversations with investors and more market savvy purchasers at thee current time reveals [sic] that the market downturn is providing them with opportunities to buy into future growth areas.
Where?! Where?!
The document namechecks Fitzrovia (not just Fitzroy Square, but "more peripheral" locations), Bloomsbury (when Kings Cross eventually pulls its pants up), Paddington ("properties on a par with Notting Hill") and the South Bank.
According to the Times, it's the new Hoxton... a once-rundown area, chosen by young artists for its rents, trendified, gentrified, Cityfied, a little bit annoying but still a nice place to live. They've even found a genuine artist's studio for sale.
Adam Ball is selling this two-bedroom warehouse apartment, with classic loft-style exposed brickwork, high ceilings and big windows. It's had a price drop (from £695,000) to £655,000. Particulars here.
93 Albert Embankment, SE1. Three beds, three baths, on the ninth floor, with views over the Houses of Parliament and the Tate. With Fine & Country, guide price: £3.55m.
When I was a student, I lived in a room that got so cold in the winter the ice settled on the inside of the window. According to this in the Telegraph, students at London's universities - and particularly the richer, foreign students at Kings College and LSE - are about to get a luxury skyscraper, on Middlesex Street, near Spitalfields market. The plan's for a 33-storey building, housing 1,200 students, plus retails space, gym and commercial office space. Presumably, the motivation was commercial property (although - just a the moment - we can't think why), and the student bit is there to fulfill social responsibility criteria. How clever to target the rich kids and make a profit there too. The Telegraph has an artists impression here, and it looks glorious.
It's to be built on Doon Street, by the Coin Street Community Builders - a remarkable social enterprise group set up by local residents in the 1970s in order to buy much of the Coin Street district and save it from a planned blanket coverage by office space. The CSCB's mixed use happy ending now includes the Oxo Tower and Gabriel's Wharf. The new tower (designed by Lifschutz Davidson Sandilands) will rise 472 ft, and will - as well as office, educational space and possibly a new home for the Rambert Dance Company - include 329 residential apartments. It's not, however, without controversy. It's been criticised by English National Heritage for potentially ruining views from the St James' Park and Somerset House, and for looming over the South Bank arts buildings.
A 2/3 bedroom conversion in The Paragon - a Victorian school conversion on Searles Road, off the New Kent Road. This is a ground floor apartment, but with double-height ceilings and an unusual layout, plus distinctive design features. The Rat and Mouse reader who sent this in drew out attention to the oak staircase and glass banister. Well spotted. Looks like a cool home office at the top. It's with Urban Spaces, listed at £795,000, here.
Tomorrow... a sausage factory.
Nell Gwynn House, Hopton Street - once home, it's believed, to one of London's most celebrated actress-courtesans (and lover to King Charles II) - is listed with Hamptons with a guide price of £995,000. It's an extraordinary little gem, believed to be the oldest in the neighbourhood, and dating back further than implied in the listing. It comes with two bedrooms, a garden and allocated parking. You can download pdf particulars by clicking this.
It's with Savills, listed at £3.2m... a warehouse flat in Clink Wharf, SE1, overlooking the Thames, with three bedrooms, three bathrooms, one reception room and a balcony... and it was the setting for the Hugh Grant/Renee Zellweger big pants scene in Bridget Jones's Diary. Particulars, here.
Broadcaster Jonathan Meades is fleeing London. But first he has to sell his very lovely London Bridge penthouse. You can read Meades' own story of the apartment here, and then head over here for the particulars, and press this for a virtual tour.
According to a Hamptons survey, 80% of Bermondsey property is selling within one month. Agents explain it as a kind of overspill or creep from the trendy and expensive Shad Thames developments nearby. More here.
... for (big) Baby Shard. Planning permission has been granted for the Renzo Piano-designed shorter (but still 600,000 square feet) neighbour to the Shard. It will replace a 20-storey tower block between Borough High Street and London Bridge Station.
Today's Independentreports on ground being broken in SE1 by residents of the Jam Factory development, who have created an extremely well functioning virtual community, a website, with forum, blog and intranet, called MyJamFactory. What makes MyJamFactory so special is that it's good. Very nicely designed. Very smoothly functioning. Very useful. And treated with respect by the end users - who have harnessed the power of the internet to promote and enable neighbourliness:
The intranet has myriad uses. People might use it to find a cleaner or to arrange piano lessons, says Bond. "When I e-mailed to say: 'I'm going to pick up some wine in France, does anybody want some?' I had 10 orders from people. Someone might say: 'I've had my bike stolen, does anyone know a good lock?' And when someone was mugged recently, people rallied round, sending messages of support."
And now there is another wonderfully ludicrous new project proposed for the stretch of river between Waterloo and Blackfriars Bridges. The proposed design has been created by the Metropolitan Workshop and consists of a mad web of cables, along which run champagne-bubble cars to a suspended bar. So picture yourself in a bar on the river, with tangerine trees and marmalade skies... (sorry!) Sounds pretty far-fetched, huh, but then again who would have predicted a giant bicycle wheel in the middle of the Big Smoke?
Also lost in yesterday's news... property group Liberty International were given the green light to redevelop Stamford Street's King's Reach, on the south bank of the Thames in Southwark. The Milroy Walk arcade will come down, and be replaced by new shops, offices, cafes... in fact, according to the press release, a veritable office village. IPC (who publish everything that EMAP doesn't, including Country Life and Nuts) will leave the King's Reach Tower. The Tower, however, will remain, and gain an extra four floors and some external cladding which we hope won't look anything like the illustration.
Today's Independent 
The Milroy Walk arcade will come down, and be replaced by new shops, offices, cafes... in fact, according to the press release, a veritable office village. IPC (who publish everything that EMAP doesn't, including 