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The AJ's Forgotten Spaces competition shows how neglected spaces can be revived thought the application of creativity and ingenuity, but those qualities are not alway in plentiful supply, and there are plenty of places that could be improved just with grass and trees and flower beds. Run down public housing estates are an example. 'Estate regeneration', in London at least, seems to start with consideration of the building stock, but often it is everything between the buildings that is really the problem.  Some publicly or RSL-owned post-war housing estates have appallingly neglected 'public' realm where every (generally undesigned) intervention that does take place, from the location of bins to the erection of barriers, seems to say to tenants 'you don't matter and we don't care'. But it's not easy for the landlords, even if well-intentioned - compared with more traditional layouts, such estates are full of too may acres of 'space left over ...

Environment Secretary Caroline Spelman, interviewed this morning on the Today programme about water shortages, used a phrase new to me: 'I before E', meaning Infrastructure before Expansion. A bit of googling reveals that this neat coinage dates from at least 2003, but it is surprising to hear it used approvingly by a cabinet minister, since it seems to imply more planning than is happening now, and not at a local level ('regions' and 'regional' are words banned in Government now, so the hunt must be on for a new term - how about 'arch-counties', which has a nice Anglo-Saxon, Little-England-friendly ring to it?). In fact, the Tories have over the years been better than Labour at getting on with big infrastructure projects, at least as far as transport is concerned.  They need to rediscover that bit of their heritage, particularly as the debate over High Speed 2 reveals all the predictable political tensions, made more problematic by the tenets of localis...

A recent piece in the Guardian suggested that - judging from re-run episodes of Top of the Pops - pop music reached its nadir in 1976.  Today, many would think the 1980s the equivalent for postwar architecture.  It was interesting to see Derwent, those canny refurbishers of postwar building stock, choosing to give the 1980s Angel building a complete reclad (by AHMM), erasing the perfectly respectable but undoubtedly dated and unfashionable granite and black glass cladding.... ....whereas in their earlier, equally clever makeover of Olivers Yard (by ORMS), the 1960s cladding was kept. There were probably all sorts of reasons for the respective decisions, but one imagines that fashion - in respect of kerb appeal to likely punters - was a factor.  Just as James Bond's suits in the 1960s films look a lot classier than in the 70s and 80s, and we look back more fondly on the Beatles and Kinks than on Mud and the Rubettes, so 1960s cladding seems more in tune with today's aesthe...

A draft of the new National Planning Policy Framework, written by CLG's advisers, has been released and can be found here . The section on design reads well.   The heritage section attempts to rewrite PPS5  in plain English and reduce it to three pages, again pretty successfully.  It introduces one or two interesting new ideas too, and the following caught my eye: 'When considering the designation of conservation areas , local planning authorities should ensure that an area justifies such status and that the concept of conservation areas is not devalued through the designation of areas that lack special interest'.  This is a reference to an aspect of conservation creep that is common (conservation creep is a syndrome and not, it should be made clear, a type of individual).  Conservation areas are meant (by law) to have special architectural or historic interest and are not meant (according to current guidance) to be designated just to stymie development, bu...