Imagine an old-fashioned British country town. Good citizens strolling down the high street to their friendly baker, grocer and butcher, relaxing in pubs and on cricket fields, their children walking to school, “old maids bicycling to holy communion through the morning mist” as John Major, quoting George Orwell, once put it. This, surely, is the sort of thing Conservatives like.
But no. According to Nick Fletcher, Tory MP for the South Yorkshire constituency of the Don Valley, this way of living is an “international socialist concept”. Specifically, he fears and loathes the idea of the “15-minute city” developed by the Colombian-born Sorbonne professor Carlos Moreno, which proposes that most of what you need or want – places of work, homes, shopping, education, sport, social life, pleasure – be within a 15-minute walk or cycle ride, as in a traditional town or city. This, says Fletcher, who seems to be drawing on some of the nuttier claims on the internet, “will take away personal freedoms”. It’s a case of lunacy on stilts as virtuoso as any in the world of conspiracy theories. It also highlights a central question of modern conservatism: do they actually want to conserve things?
Gazprom goes darker
Until Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, viewers of Champions League football had to endure ads for the majority state-owned Russian energy company Gazprom, as cliched as might be expected of a monopolistic business that didn’t have to try too hard to sell anything – a generic pianist and a generic ballet dancer performing Swan Lake, Gazprom boffins in their control room lighting up cities and stadia across a wintry Europe. Their clunky, would-be charm came with an unsubtle threat to viewers that the sponsors could turn off the energy that warmed their homes and powered their TV sets.
Now the mask has fallen to the floor: Gazprom is reportedly setting up a private military organisation, possibly along the lines of the murderous Wagner Group. As obnoxious as British energy companies are, with their infuriating call centres and forcible installation of prepayment meters, they haven’t got to that point yet.
Skip life
In housing crisis news, another eventful month. Residents of a new housing estate in Wellingborough, Northamptonshire, are fed up with a gigantic overground sewer – house-high in places, one metre in diameter – that loops through their neighbourhood like a Super Mario warp pipe. Housebuilders are fighting new rules that ask them to improve the biodiversity of their developments. An artist has started living in a modified skip in Bermondsey, south-east London. The Treasury has stopped the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities from spending £30m on improving substandard homes, like the one in Rochdale where a two-year-old boy died after exposure to mould. And Rachel Maclean MP became the sixth housing minister in a year and the 16th in the 13 years since the Conservatives came to power. Perhaps the lack of seriousness evident in the last news item helps to explain the proliferation of failure seen in the others.
New under the sun
King’s College Cambridge has won planning permission to add solar panels to the lead roof of its 15th-century chapel. As they will be invisible in most views, it’s a reasonable decision. Nor is it new to combine religion and usefulness: the ancient and beautiful Great Mosque of Kairouan, in an arid region of Tunisia, acts as a giant collector of such rainwater as falls on roofs and paving, which drains into a reservoir underneath. If this worked in north Africa in the first millennium, why not in East Anglia in the third?
• Rowan Moore is an Observer columnist
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