Head of Policy & Campaigns at @CreateStreetsFN 🏡 Views my own.
Skegness ➡️ London
Joined April 2021
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Allow me to introduce you to...
Paradise Regained: The conservative case for restoring English nature 🏴🌳
This new paper is the first step towards a distinctly conservative approach to restoring our green and pleasant land, rooted in our philosophical tradition.
🧵👇
Kitty Thompson🐿 retweeted
Introducing tiny.london
A massive isometric pixel map of London, based on amazing NYC demo by @_coenen from 9 months ago
My agent created the dataset, finetuned qwen image LoRA adapter, did a multiday inference run and built an efficient tile viewer!
I wanted to share something I built over the last few weeks: isometric.nyc is a massive isometric pixel art map of NYC, built with nano banana and coding agents.
I didn't write a single line of code.
Kitty Thompson🐿 retweeted
Let me get this straight. Work all your life building a business. Sell that business to a rando - charged at 24%. Try to pass it on to your family - charged at 45%. Genuinely insane telegraph.co.uk/politics/202…
Kitty Thompson🐿 retweeted
The plans to rebuild Parliament are indeed indefensible, outrageous, unnecessary. The most wasteful scope creep I have ever seen. Here’s what’s wrong with them, why and how to fix it: thecritic.co.uk/call-for-the…
Kitty Thompson🐿 retweeted
I want a housing system that delivers homes & public confidence. I’ve got four principles:
✅ Revive our towns first
✅ Bring everything a place needs into one plan
✅ Involve the public up front
✅ Beauty & nature for everyone
Read the plan here: ben4mayor.com/housing_manife…
Great to discuss it with @SirSimonClarke
Kitty Thompson🐿 retweeted
After ~70 years, cladding tends to be worn out. We then have a free choice over what the replacement curtain wall will look like. This example from Marylebone, executed 2022-23, shows the potential. The building is all the same, except for its outer skin.
Kitty Thompson🐿 retweeted
It’s so heartbreaking…
The sad west doorway of St Ignatius, Salford for #ADoorableThursday. By Darbyshire & Smith, 1900, closed and deconsecrated by the Diocese of Manchester at the start of this century. Conversion into a community resource was begun, but the building is now boarded up and decaying.
Kitty Thompson🐿 retweeted
Good news. Investment in infrastructure makes things better. Who knew? We should try it again one day.
Because the classic K2 and K6 red kiosks are beautiful and much loved, we keep them in use, finding creative new purposes for them: libraries, defibrillator stations, art galleries, museums and coffee shops and, yes, even as props for tourists to pose beside.
Yet planning restrictions remain a barrier to enabling listed phone boxes to receive a new lease of life. To those at @mhclg who want to do something about this, I recommend reading...
...the recommendations on page 41 of the @createstreets Box Blight report createstreets.com/wp-content…
Kitty Thompson🐿 retweeted
If you prefer the building on the right to the car park on the left, then you are guilty of the worst architectural crime: liking "pastiche".
Me in @CapX on how local councils waging war on "pastiche" developments is stopping things getting built at all👇
capx.co/the-war-on-pastiche-…
Kitty Thompson🐿 retweeted
Build beautiful
I went to go see a new build development a few weeks back- bit unfair to call it that, though, as there’s been a massive amount of (what I suppose is) landscaping and care ploughed into it.
This was one of the cheaper homes*, and the street it sat in.
We can genuinely just do things like this. It just takes care.
I’m going back in a week or two to meet the development team. I’ll report (somewhere) on why and how you can do high quality housing without needing to charge the earth.
*costs c10% less than a similar Taylor Wimpey home in a development 15 miles away.
Kitty Thompson🐿 retweeted
If you are interested in why housebuilding in London has collapsed then please, just read this article. Jesus wept.
propviews.co.uk/housing-deli…
Kitty Thompson🐿 retweeted
NEW: Chair of the London Assembly’s Planning and Regeneration Committee @JSmallEdwards calls for a pattern book to unlock upward extensions across London 🏘️📈
Upward extensions could have HUGE POTENTIAL 🏙️
@JSmallEdwards’ letter outlines that they could deliver from 140k-500k NEW HOMES in London alone.
Kitty Thompson🐿 retweeted
10. Tiny windows
Why are so many new homes being built with tiny windows?
The Building Regulations prioritise compliance over good design, with rules around guard heights making our windows smaller and more unattractive. Equally, rules around how much a window can open are penalising sash windows in particular.
🪟 We need to scrap the requirements on windows within Part O of the Building Regulations.
Read Banning Beauty to find out more 👇 createstreets.com/projects/b…
Kitty Thompson🐿 retweeted
Martin Lewis has asked the public for simple, inexpensive and broadly uncontroversial changes that could make Britain work a little better.
What better place to start than with putting an end to street scars?
We can hold utility companies to account for scarring our streets with just a few changes to legislation that will:
🚧Make them put pavements back exactly as they found them and increase the fines for failing to do so.
🚧Require them to pay the full cost of restoring damaged pavements to the original standard.
Find out more...
Please submit your small ideas for fixing Britain to the Small-Ideas.org website. It’s a new charitable initiative I’ve set up to try and make sure life’s potholes don’t get ignored. Working with two charities and a cross party panel to turn your ideas into policy then try and make it happen. Please share.
Kitty Thompson🐿 retweeted
What do street scars, small windows, potholes, Huddersfield train station and a helicopter on the roof of MHCLG have in common?
Kitty Thompson🐿 retweeted
Approved!
The Mayor of London has greenlit Shoreditch Works, delivering an important symbolic win for urban regeneration, jobs, beauty and new homes.
Huge credit to Linea Properties Ltd for pushing this forward and we dare to hope that we at Create Streets helped with our groundbreaking Visual Preference Survey. This proved that the public overwhelmingly backs beautiful, dense design. Our research with @DeltapollUK showed an undeniable 76% to 78% public approval rating—demonstrating that the public support architecture that is public-friendly.
From features in City A.M. to deep-dives in the Wall Street Journal, the press has highlighted this scheme as the blueprint for how British capital can grow while keeping the public firmly on its side. This is how we build a better London! 🚀🏙️
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