Newlands redesign

The latest news about the Newlands development suggests that the homes will be designed to a pseudo neo-classic specification by an architect that has connections with the Prince of Wales. The Prince is famous for his Poundbury town. However it is extremely doubtful that the Newlands development will be anything like Poundbury. The Prince of Wales has done many good things and his views about agriculture are good, but he doesn't have a clue about architecture. Poundbury may have some context in Dorset, but it would be ridiculous to build anything like it next door to the existing buildings of Waterlooville.

One thing to consider is what will happen to the Georgian or Edwardian facade of the Newlands houses in the future, once they have exchanged hands a few times. These buildings will not be listed and will have the minimal protection from alterations like any other building in the borough. This basically means that the architects vision of nice neat homes will eventually be destroyed when people start building plastic porches at the front, stick a satellite dish on the roof and a plastic conservatory in the back garden.

Waterlooville is not an area that is now rich in Georgian, Victorian or Edwardian architecture. It was once, but that has all either been demolished or extensively re-adapted and extended for modern use.
Yes there are the remains of Victorian/Georgian homes and commercial buildings in Waterlooville town centre, but you have to look at the top floors of the shops to see the nature of the original buildings, at ground level they are modern shops.  The vast majority of homes were built between the 1930s and 1970s. That period is the 'traditional' architecture of the area.

So the real choices for architecture have to be of that period or something completely new, not some fantasy vision that dates back to the Napoleonic or Crimean wars.

There is of course an alternative, Newlands could become a theme park or a gated community like Celebration in the USA of which much amusement and many TV documentaries are made. Celebration has strict rules about what colours can be used on homes and the community has an unelected town manager. With such strict rules and corporate management, Newlands could be kept like the architect designed it to be.

What will Waterlooville get?

Most likely standard box houses with token features that suggest some historical context, the windows will probably be plastic framed and the sandstone cornices will probably be replaced with plastic or concrete equivalents.  Yes it will satisfy some today, but it will likely ruin Waterloovilles image for the next hundred years, just like Waterloovilles town centre was ruined in the 1950s and 1960s.
Maybe if the area hadn't been massively developed in 50s/60s into a suburbia and the old Victorian/Georgian village of Waterlooville still existed, then just maybe the Newlands redesign would work. The reality though is far from that ludicrous ideological vision.

What does Waterlooville need?

The area desperately needs property that is built for the context of climate change and environmental sustainability. To do this, modern understanding of low energy construction, natural convection and the use of natural solar heating/cooling have to be built into the design of a building, traditional design does not fulfil that criteria. Any environmentally sustainable property will probably look different to anything built in the past if this essential criteria is met.

In fact the Newlands properties may contribute to their own demise because current building standards are not stringent enough to sufficiently reduce carbon emissions.

Windmill Bread

Still using up the flour from the visit to Bursledon Windmill. This is the third go at making some bread.
First go used just wholemeal windmill flour, it was OK but didn't rise much. Second go used half strong white and half wholemeal windmill flour.

This one is the third go, cooked it in the bowl, instead of a tin!
Risen really well. Nice.

Note that no bread making machine was used. Just my gentle hands, nature and the oven.

Newlands Alert!

In July Grainger will be showing off their latest plans for the Newlands West of Waterlooville MDA housing development, they are asking for opinions from the public.

Times and Place:

Waterlooville Community Centre
Friday 9th July, 1.30pm - 7.30pm
Saturday 10th July, 10am - 3pm

The focus will be on Phase 1 and the details of the design of this phase.

A visit to Fort Nelson

Due to the excellent weather this month, I decided to cycle from Waterlooville to The Royal Armouries Museum on top of Portsdown Hill. The museum is in Fort Nelson one of a string of forts built in the 1860s to defend against a potential French invasion.

Interestingly the attack on Portsmouth was expected to come from inland so the main defences of all the forts was on the land side, in the case of Fort Nelson pointing towards the North. The weaker defences are on the South side of the forts and these are visible from Portsmouth.

The route I took wasn't exactly the most direct, but it was probably the easiest to do without much thinking. I simply took the London Road up to Widley then took the route along James Callaghan Drive and Portsdown Hill Road. Quite a lot of gentle uphill work there, but nearly all downhill back!
In fact on the way back from the Widley Junction to Purbrook you can pick up a lot of speed.

The cycle/bus lanes are great for cyclists, road traffic is kept well away from you. The round trip was about 12 miles.

Near the fort is the Nelson Monument. This was finished in 1808, three years after the battle of Trafalgar and the death of Nelson.

Of course the fort was named Fort Nelson because of proximity to the monument. Many people don't even know the monument exists and even if they had seen it, wouldn't know why it was there.

This is the view of the fort near the main entrance. Behind the redan wall would be the officers quarters. Note the lower floor has sash windows, whilst the upper floor has positions for guns.

Each gun would be flanked either side by riflemen who would fire at attackers whilst the main gun was being reloaded.

Also remember this is the weaker side of the defences and it wasn't expected that an attack would come from this direction.

This is one of the North facing defences, effectively the main defences. Attackers would have to come down the ramparts into the dry ditch and would be faced by a huge thick wall.

I took the photo standing on top of one of the caponiers, below would be gun positions ready to fire along the length of the wall. Every wall has similar guns trained along them so there would have been no where for an attacker to hide. Also the design was such that no defender could shoot their own men.

These are the defensive mortar positions They are well protected behind the walls under a lot of earthworks held up by the brickwork and arches seen here. The light in front of the mortars shows where the gap in the roof is and where they would fire out. Up on top brave officers would see where the enemy were and call out instructions to adjust the trajectories of the mortars.

The mortars would drop their balls or bombs onto the enemy in the fields beyond the fort ramparts.

This is above the mortars shown in the previous photo. The brick work in the grass is actually the gap out of which the mortars would fire out.

The position I took this photo is where officers would be monitoring the enemy positions and giving instructions to the mortar crews.

I like this photo because the mortar looks really tiny and the Nelson Monument can be seen in the distance. Because I took the photo near the ground and there are no people near by, the mortar looks quite close to the camera and about knee high.

The reality is the mortar is huge, each of the balls in that stack is waist high!  It's a bit like the Father Ted scene, 'These are very small, those are far away...'.

It is called Mallets Mortar and is located at the front of the museum.

There is a lot to see at the fort, if you are really interested in armaments then you'll need 3 to 5 hours to take it all in. I also recommend the guided tour, even if you do know your stuff.
I haven't shown here the galleries with every conceivable artillery piece you could imagine, I haven't shown the mock ups of the fort kitchen, and officers quarters, I haven't shown the tunnels and magazines and I haven't shown the 20th century weapons that are on display.

For more info visit the Museum site or the Palmerston Forts Society which also has a detailed photo tour of the fort.

Panorama of Portsmouth

I recently cycled to Fort Nelson on Portsdown Hill and will post about that later. Whilst on the hill I took a series of photos with my really cruddy digital camera with the idea of creating a panorama of Portsmouth. I came across some brilliant Open Source software called Hugin that managed to transform my cruddy photos into this amazing picture:

If you saw how bad the original series of photos were, you would realise how good Hugin is. I think I will be using it more in the future. It works on the basis of finding a number of control points in each picture, then manipulates the images to line up similar control points. It even compensates different exposures, colour etc.
There are also a lot of settings that can be changed to manipulate the type of view.
Click on the photo to see a bigger version.

Fishing tackle

For fans of fishing. Coopers Fishing Tackle shop has opened up in Mill Road, Waterlooville.

Waterlooville Poundland

I think it is obvious to everyone now that the old Woolworths premises will be used by Poundland.
The comments at The News sums up many peoples thoughts... 'Oh no, not another shop full of...'

But it made me think. How do they maintain prices at or below £1?

Here's my thoughts about how a 'pound' shop might keep £1 prices in 50 to 100 years from now:

1. Inflation goes up, prices go up, they sell progressively different products, always keeping them within £1. Eventually in 50 years or so, the only thing they can sell is single rubber bands, a single chewy sweet, a thimble full of shampoo etc for a £1 each.

2. They sell the same or similar products as today over the same timescale as scenario 1 and inflation in the UK goes up. They need to find progressively cheaper labour in foreign countries, exploit the cheapest resources etc. so eventually their suppliers set up factories in the middle of the Amazon Rain forest and employ the children from local tribes.

3. They manage to turn the UK into a communist dictatorship which sets £1 prices on all the products forever.

4. They manipulate the markets so that inflation remains stationary or we have deflation. Not much different to 3 really, since they would need enormous influence.