Kester Brewin

Tag: Urban

  • Into Great Silence ¦ Sound Pollution

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    KB

    I enjoy most things about city life, but one of the perennial frustrations is noise. Light pollution, on the micro scale at least, is fairly easy to manage. We can shut our curtains or buy special blinds, and shut our eyes if need be. And, while some objects are foul to look at, we only…

  • The Long Road | Restorative Theatre

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    KB

    I went to see The Long Road at the Soho Theatre on Tuesday night. It’s a new play by Shelagh Stephenson based on her experience of working with Synergy Theatre and The Forgiveness Project in some of the UK’s toughest gaols. It’s been directed by Synergy founder (and brother of Jonny) Esther Baker, and follows…

  • Don’t Piss About London: Vote Ken Or The Monkey Gets It.

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    KB
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    London goes to the polls this week. While the rest of the country has local council elections, London votes for its Mayor. It’s the biggest directly-elected budget-holding post in the UK: £13 billion annually to spend, employing 103,000 people and a £39billion transport investment programme over the next 10 years.. And there are some massively…

  • Jaime Lerner ¦ Stealth and the City ¦ The City is Not the Self

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    KB

    Thanks to Helen of Urban Practitioners for sending me this article in The Guardian a couple of weeks back about Jaime Lerner and his radical environmental policies that have transformed the Brazilian city of Curitiba. I say environmental in the truest sense: he is an architect by trade, and is concerned with the built environment,…

  • Flocking to the Cities

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    KB
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    Sorry been a bit quiet here. Kids’ birthdays, other writing projects… stuff. Anyway, a piece on the news caught my ear yesterday. Apparently a long-term study of the hunting habits of peregrine falcons has found that they have evolved their methods and are now increasingly hunting in cities at night. The thinking is that they…

  • “cos, you know, you can treat them like shit”

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    KB

    On the train to this little drinks thing for an education weekly I write some stuff for, just a couple of stops. Three guys sitting in seats across the aisle: “So, we go from the pub to the match, and then from there onto another pub, and I’m so wasted by now, and then we…