doing things
The Official Invitation 2026 Please join us on the River Cam on the afternoon of Sunday 16th August for this year’s Puntcon, running from Cambridge to Grantchester Meadows and back again. Please register via this form so we can book enough pre-paid punts. If you don’t register then you may need to hire your own [ ]
What would the proposed DevCo do differently if it expected people to want to come and live here after the devco ends in ~25 years? What if the devco was expected to be around for 800 years? What I said in the Cambridge Development Corporation consultation is below. Consultation questions are here – those who [ ]
A community loses many things when your Post Office closes. One major loss is the 4pm (or later) Royal Mail collection from the postbox that remains outside the row of shops that include the now-closed Post Office. Any business can pay for a Royal Mail collection at a time that suits them. Tesco installs postboxes [ ]
All innovation comes from people who give a damn also being able to do something about it. Cambridge isn’t lacking people who innovate; the unresolved challenge is where can they afford to sleep while doing it? The current answer is “somewhere else”. What a UK venture capitalist actually does is move money from limited partners [ ]
“National security” scale risks are the topic of the “AI Safety Summit”, which is the sort of thing you want governments to spend their time reducing. I’m glad there’s a summit on a potential catastrophe, as we should do more about all catastrophic risks… so how’s climate going? Some in civil society argue that catastrophic [ ]
Government is apparently thinking about encouraging innovation in Cambridge, again. All innovation in Cambridge stems from a choice 800 years ago, that the University remains very proud of, when a bunch of people left Oxford and chose to be in Cambridge instead. Their successors still want to be here. What is Cambridge for, beyond a [ ]
About half of projects that come back for discharge of planning conditions do it only once. The 98 different reference numbers linked to “7/0620/“ suggest a different and particular approach to planning approvals for Clay Farm in Trumpington – it’s big, but that’s double the next count, which is the biomedical campus site with 41 [ ]
A missing planning condition can lead to shortcuts being taken and loopholes used during building. Queen Edith’s Cllr Sam Davies explains how difficult it is to resolve problems where the process of building something isn’t what was expected when the planning permission was granted. Some things are just shit, but there are repeat systemic offenders [ ]
Update: the data and graphs in the linked spreadsheet are being updated each year, the static graphs on this page are as they were when published in 2023. == “Sustainable” housing prices for Cambridge would be a band D house costing around £150k in 2022. Some data on Cambridge house prices as they grew, compared [ ]
All new Governments want to do new things, but policy interactions are hard. Covid has allowed things to do at speed, because there was a singular strategic focus across Government and the NHS in the early stages of the pandemic when the initial response was being designed. That has not lasted. Covid entirely aside, this [ ]