New US Embassy in Nine Elms nears completion: but will it be blingy enough for Trump's lot?

Well, this is it - the shiny new US Embassy building in the Battersea-Nine Elms-Vauxhall property developers' sand-pit seems to be nearing completion.

Reports suggest the move from Grosvenor Square to the new site south of the river will happen in 2017 - and already you can imagine that the new president and his minions will be having mixed feelings about the shift, not to mention many of his London-based officials who are actually going to have to work south of the river.

Unsurprisingly they will not include ex-pres Obama's choice, Matthew Barzun, who resigned in January. The job of representing Trump's admin in the UK will fall to a new, much older face. The 45th president has named fellow billionaire Woody Johnson, the 69-year-old sports fanatic, owner of the New York Jets NFL team, and heir of the baby-powder and pharma products firm Johnson & Johnson as his man in London.

Of course, this very rich man will not actually live here - he will have the super posh Winfield House in Regent's Park for his private life and his parties, and no doubt he could buy somewhere even grander if this did not suit him. Winfield House, by the way, is named after the founder of Woolworth's. It was owned by Woolworth heiress Barbara Hutton in the 1930s, and she gave it to the US government.

But what about Nine Elms? Well, the Americans are getting a big, super-safe, new building surrounded by lots of other big and blingy buildings. But the postcode - oh my dear, SW8!

The photo above shows the semi-translucent cladding that is going to cloak three sides of the cuboid structure. At first sight it looks like the sort of cheap and cheerful tie-on decorative facades favoured by some of the downmarket shops on Oxford Street. It looks temporary, like a strong gust of wind could send it flying.

But according to the architects this stuff performs vital functions in keeping the building cool and shaded in the summer, and also in deflecting the downdrafts of wind that can make life for pedestrians so bad. And the translucency is also meant to symbolise a transparency of government - apparently!

The architects, KieranTimberlake of Philadelphia, also wanted to avoid the fortress-like designs of many other US embassies: not sure if the big watery moat-like pond at the front of the building does much for that ambition. In fact the old embassy in Grosvenor Square was a very smart 60s building - have you ever seen so many windows in one facade? ANd all those rising bollards and so on only went in after 9/11. The old Grosvenor Square made a convenient rallying place for demos: the bleak wasteland of Nine Elms Lane is a much less attractive prospect for all, whether lovers or haters of the new regime.

However, it is no longer the 60s: you imagine Trump might quite the break from this Kennedy-era extravagance. The new Embassy, inits value-for-money postcode,  is said to be one of the most environmentally-friendly embassies ever built. OK that's not the sort of claim that's going to impress the new boss, who doesn't care two hoots about the environment. He'll like the fact that it's cheap to run, but you wonder whether he wouldn't rather stay in Mayfair, protected by huge bollards and close to the gold-plated denizens of the Dorchester and the Hilton and the high-end nightclubs of Shepherd Market.

Well, the old embassy - a 1960 building designed by Finnish American architect Eero Saarinen – is going to be turned into a luxury hotel, so he could always hang out there anyway. Or he could just commandeer the Regent's Park house. There's room for two or three couples there, it seems.

Meanwhile, the staff of the new embassy will have plenty to explore in their lunch breaks and their after-work bonding sessions. There's the famously intense nightlife of Vauxhall itself, for example, plus some lovely (relatively) cheap eating places on Kennington Lane and Wandsworth Road. Maybe the secret gardens and lovely café of Bonnington Square will not be to every G-Man's taste - but of course it's about midway between the US Embassy and MI6, so they could arrange little meetings there.

In the summer a short walk or official car ride will take them to Battersea Park, one of south-west London's most beautiful open spaces. And already they have their very own Waitrose right on the doorstep.

But perhaps these dear Embassy folk will be discouraged from leaving their workplace, and will be kept happy in their sealed environment with Google HQ-style distractions. You know, non-stop free smoothies, a model railway to deliver authentic American burgers and/or sushimi to every work station, bean-bag-filled breakout areas, pool tables, Coke-fountains, wii screens, etc....and a pool of scooters on which to whizz around their new glassy home.

There's talk of a new pedestrian bridge, but where will that take them? Dolphin Square in Pimlico, approximately. Another place favoured by spies, apparently.

Talking of spies, if I had a high-powered telephoto lens I could spy on this new building all day and all night. Its massive bulk has blocked what used to be rather a pleasant distant view of Westminster's Victoria Tower from my bedroom window.

Dammit!

Something strange is happening on the Wandsworth Road

Trying but failing to hide itself behind the quirky 1900s facade, the boxy bulk of a new Premier Inn looms over the southern end of fast-changing Wandsworth Road.

Do you remember that scene in the original Alien when the vile creature burst out of John Hurt's chest? Pretty damned unpleasant. Now something very similar has happened at the Battersea end of the Wandsworth Road, where a strange old 1909 building seems to have been harbouring the sperm of a terrible 21st century parasite - and now it has erupted all over the skyline!

A couple of years ago I wrote about the beginning of the demolition of the old Rileys Snooker Hall, which was one of the strangest and most abused buildings down this (Queenstown Road) end of my local arterial route. A little research revealed that this was a historically significant building, completed in 1909  - one of 17 Temperance Billiard Halls built in South London  in the 1900-1910 period, all designed by the architect Norman Evans.

The idea, which began in the teetotal heartlands of England's non-conformist north-west, was to create big, attractive social centres that could lure working men away from the pubs and bars and gin palaces. Inside they got most of the entertainments of a pub, but without the alcohol. Ironic, looking at the building's subsequent history, but still.

Eventually they destroyed the entire, massive complex of old billiard halls, meeting rooms, a lounge bar and a later attachment of a pub/nightclub (anyone remember Inigo's? Often had some of the biggest bouncers I've ever seen, hanging around outside).

Over the course of the year, they destroyed the whole place - except for Norman Evans' distinctive ornate, mock-oriental facade, which was (as is the current way) kept up on a matrix of props and jacks and scaffolds. Then the building work began in earnest; the whole place was shrouded in green plastic netting, there was even more congestion at the always bad Queenstown Road junction, and a crane was erected.

It was widely rumoured that the budget hotel chain Premier Inn was building its latest branch right here on Wandsworth Road, but it seemed hard to believe. Why here? What's there to tempt tourists or even businessmen to this strange, forgotten bit of South west London that doesn't even know if it's Clapham, or Battersea, Nine Elms or what. It more or less straddles the border of the boroughs of Lambeth and Wandsworth, and is a good 15 minute walk to the nearest underground station (Clapham Common, or 10 minutes to an overground rail station (Wandsworth Road).

So we sort of forgot about it. Then one day  back in December, you look up and see this great bulky six-storey building looming over the old Temperance hall frontage, now tarted up of course. There are big hoardings up at street level still, but they are painted in those distinctive Premier Inn colours.

And, after Christmas, the final wrappers come off, and out pops - not a nasty, sharp-fanged space monster, but  a brand new Premier Inn. As you can see in the pic above, the clash of styles between the flamboyant, almost Disneyland look of the old Temperance Hall and the boxy industrial estate chic of the human storage facility behind it could not be greater.

And, on the Premier Inn website, you'll find an entry for their new hotel "opening soon" in Clapham: a "leafy green oasis in the heart of lively South London".

You can find out exactly how this bulky addition to poor old Wandsworth Road got planning permission here on the London Borough of Lambeth planning site. It's a long and interesting document; some of the objections to this plan are swiftly dismissed. Now we see the reality, we must wonder if our planners had a very clear view of what was being proposed.

Then again, compared with the glass, steel, concrete, gold, marble and bronze nightmare that is being acted out down the road at Nine Elms, you have to admit this is very small beer. It could have been so much worse.

You still have to wonder who will stay there.  I can't imagine the Clapham High Street weekend ravers will find it much use - a long stagger across the common in that state? Besides, they now have a night tube to get them back home.

Meanwhile, now that it has gone, more or less, it's great to read a good architectural history, and Historic England's account of the Temperance Hall movement is an excellent record.

It includes some great observations, eg: "The buildings often used the same decorative materials that pubs used, such as tiled facades and stained glass windows, to create the congenial atmosphere of a public house without the pitfalls of available alcohol. 

"The Temperance Billiard Company Ltd targeted the suburbs of south London, where many new pubs had been built in the late C19, as well as in the north-west of England where the firm originated. Thus, temperance billiard halls by the company are a distinctively south London and north-west England building type, although there are other temperance buildings elsewhere."

There are in fact several other Temperance Halls in this area - one on Battersea Rise, a smaller version of the same building, is now a pub (the Goat). And at Clapham High Street, there's a different, later design, but with the same distinctive tiles and turrets, now the offices of an architect.

Perhaps the best example is in Lewisham, and this building is covered in great detail here.

Meanwhile, poor old Wandsworth Road continues to carry its bus, car  and lorry loads into and out of the city centre, while the residents of the three big and many smaller council estates along its route continue to attempt to make ends meet in the shops, pubs, cafes, bookies, parks, gyms, colleges and charity shops of that long central swathe of the road that is still pretty much unchanged.

This road has long had a truly shabby charm all of its own. Over the past three decades, as surrounding areas gentirifed, it remained a bastion of the old, scruffy south London, with car breakers' yards, junk shops, scary boozers,

Now, at the Northern end it has been totally transformed by the Nine Elms development. Sainsburys, Tesco and now Premier Inn at the other end signal the beginnings of an inevitable change, which will surely accelerate as money from the Nine Elms development washes up this way.

Yes, look out, it's coming. They are nibbling away at both ends: watch out!

Bottom gear, Ep.2: How come these bloated SUVs don't get parking tickets?

Face to face: a 20th century car meets an enormous and very shiny van, also known as an SUV, in a street in Brixton. Note
how about a foot of the Audi oozes over the white lines of the parking bay. How come this is allowed?

Years ago I was mortified to find a yellow envelope stuck on the windscreen of my decrepit Renault, which I had left, a week earlier, in a residents' parking bay near my flat, one I paid £140 a year to use.

It turned out that the back wheels were more outside the white line than in it, an inexcusable bit of  sloppy parking. I paid up, and tried to forget it. But these days it seems cars can park with much more of their body mass outside the lines, with impunity.

If you drive or cycle, walk, run or even skate around London's inner suburban streets you'll have noticed that the bit between the parked cars on each side is getting narrower and narrower, as the cars themselves get wider.

It becomes a dreadful farce trying to drive or cycle down these streets. Lots of flashing of headlamps, a quick dash to the next space, letting or not letting the other driver through, wondering if that white van is really going to keep coming on at that speed. And whether there's a space enough for your narrow handlebars between the wing-mirrors of the SUVs and the sharp front end of the fast-approaching Porsche 911.

What I am really moaning about today, in this second episode of a long-term, lonely, hypocritical and very personal war against cars (see Episode 1 about hooters here), is the width of some of the things that are now sold as private conveyances, rather than HGVs.

If you are stupid enough (as I am) to live in a wealthy zone 2 suburb you will know that the majority of vehicles parked outside those humble £2.5million workers' cottages are whacking great wagons. They're called SUVs, and they are made by many different firms, but under their flashy skins they are all much the same.  The angry, aggressive styling which their buyers seem to crave often makes them look even bigger than they are: some resemble children's inflatable toys that have been pumped up to the point where they are in danger of bursting. Many look to be (perhaps reflecting their owners) morbidly obese.

These vehicles are indeed big -  most of them are over 2 metres wide - that is, nearly 25 per cent wider than a 1970s Renault 5.  That's 20cm wider than the national minimum width for parking bays. Why, you might ask, didn't the manufacturers check this out before selling these monsters in the UK? Surely it's easier and cheaper to slightly re-design a vehicle than to widen all of the nation's streets. You get the feeling such vehicles are designed for the US market where there are wider roads, wider bottoms and fewer pedestrians. Or for the Gulf States, where there are lots of sand dunes. Or of course for Clarksonshire or whatever they call the Cotswolds these days, where most of these elephantine carriages will be parked on a private crunchy gravel drive.

No-one would mind much if they were genuine utility vehicles, like ambulances or delivery vans. No, they are "sports" utility vehicles. It's the sporty bit that rankles, along with their flashy styling and often thuggish aspect. Plus the sad fact that their owners usually have nothing more than a few bags of Waitrose shopping in there. And they seem to think it's OK to just stop outside their houses, and not to attempt parking manoeuvres of any sort.

Disagree? Just look at some of these monsters:

One of the worst offenders. This BMW XL5 (named after one of the Thunderbirds) is about two feet over the line. It
was there in a Clapham street for days and didn't get a ticket!

Another BMW in another Clapham street. This is parked as well as it possibly can be and yet it is still over the white
line. Why doesn't the council charge extra for parking these behemoths?

Sometimes it's not just the width of the SUV, but the fact their sheer size makes them difficult to park accurately up against
the kerb. Or maybe the drivers are just as arrogant as their cars look.

Yes, the original SUV - Range Rover was the first, and is still the worst of this baleful species of suburban battle-wagons.

Fast and bulbous? Typical that Porsche should get onto this fat band-wagon, as though their sports cars were not annoying enough.

What is it about these vehicles, why are they so popular, and why do the authorities let them get away with it?

The huge popularity must come down to a few basic human weaknesses:

A) As humans get richer they eat more and get fatter, and so have wider bottoms. So they need wider seats to accommodate these bottoms.

B) As humans get richer, they also feel more threatened, so they need things that look like military APCs to protect themselves and their families. Hence the popularity of these tank-like vehicles.

C) As more humans get richer, fatter and more aggressive they need to express these qualities in ways that differentiate them from their rich, fat, angry, aggressive neighbours. So they compete to get the biggest, widest, loudest, angriest, most fuck-you car.

That's all obvious - but why doesn't our lovely council do something to rein in these very basic human failings?

The police stop people doing lots of things in public. Sadly there's not as yet a law to prevent these very rich people, albeit living in the what used to be the modest homes of 19th century clerical and working classes, from splurging their wealth in the faces and eyes and ears of the few remaining members of that older layer of resident.

Even when they're young and single and without wide-bottomed offspring in super-wide pavement-clogging buggies, these rich ones often acquire big fat sports cars which are just as wide and difficult to park in south London parking bays as SUVs.

God, we have no hope.

Parking bays are supposed to be at least 180cm wide from kerb to white line. But to my horror I hear that some councils are thinking of widening bays  just because the car industry has decided it can make more money by selling over-wide vehicles.

Just read this crazy article in AutoExpress. Oh so it's safety features that account for this shoulder-padded look is it? Safety for whom? Not for me as I try to squeeze my bike past your paddy-wagon with another one approaching fast with its quartz-halogen mainbeams and LED fairy-lights blazing and its super-loud horn inverting eardrums of all in the block.

And yet National Car Parks says it is willingly widening bays to help the drivers of these vehicles. At least half the people interviewed in this BBC news item seem to think that's a good thing - all the while people are complaining that our roads are too crowded.

A final straw? Yes. Now I understand those kids who go up and down the zone 2 streets with a sharp key in their hand.

Thought for 2017: Give us Gagarin rocket apartments and super-tall towers of crystal rather than squat lumps of blandness

OK so it is a RPBW impression, but you can see
how the now abondoned project for a Paddington
Skyscraper might have echoed the luminous
elegance of the Shard at London Bridge.
Photo: Piano

Of course as an old buffer I'd rather London looked and felt like it did in 1976: dirty, scruffy, smelly, semi-derelict, cheap.

But as that ain't going to happen, I'd rather all the new developments were as interesting and elegant as the recently-dropped proposal for another Renzo Piano tower, this one at Paddington Station.

The so called Paddington Pole was removed from planning consultation by the developers after a well orchestrated protest and a big public outcry. It would have been like a second Shard, in even more stark contrast to its surroundings, and therefore, to my eye, less offensive than what is likely to emerge as the compromise: a massive, but much shorter, "floating cube" that will still jut up into the skyline.

This seems to be  a continuation of the Prince Charles effect. Get enough posh and influential people to protest and you can batter the planning committees, etc, into submission.

Sadly, the result is usually something duller, less brave, and much blander than the original design - eg,  the bits around St Pauls, One Poultry, the Sainsbury Wing National Gallery extension (a truly ghastly place which makes visiting this once great gallery a dismal experience);  and Chelsea Barracks - where the Prince's view of architecture holds sway. There's a good piece in AJ explaining precisely this eventuality.

This is exactly what has emerged at Paddington. Instead of a crazy, slender, sparkling 800 foot pole, this bit of London will get a gigantic glass cube, which looks very much like a big version of everything else built in cities all round the planet in recent years, and actually reminds me of nothing more than the cheap looking new US Embassy in Nine Elms. This 14-storey cube is also designed by Renzo Piano, but as you can tell from the awful green and orange plastic-look slabs near St Giles, he's just as capable of turning out cheap and nasty stuff as the next architect.

Here's what we'll get instead: a 14-storey glass and steel cube that looks
like something designed for a business park somewhere down the M4...

Given the lumpen blandness of so much stuff going up now, don't you just long for some crazy, high quality but imaginative buildings, such as the proposed 'Soviet Space Rocket' aka Gagarin Square tower, in Southwark?

This was a really mad sci-fi look 30-storey building that would have changed Southwark Street completely, had it not already been ruined very thoroughly by all that stuff that's arrived next to Tate Modern, not to mention the Shard and co at the Eastern end. In fact this outlandish tower was ruled out in 2015, to be replaced by something much blander.

Personally, what is most offensive about all these buildings - tall, short, ugly, beautiful - is that they are being built for people with upwards of a million to spend on a flat they probably won't even live in. How odd that in the 60s and 70s the only people who lived - or even wanted to live - above 20 storeys in central London were council tenants. Now most of those great towers of Barbican and elsewhere, built with public money to give everyone a decent place to live,  have been privatised. Those are tall towers, so is Trellick. Trellick is near Paddington. Many who used to hate it now think it's a great experiment in vertical living. That Paddington Pole, with a visionary council behind it, could have been a continuation of that experiment.

Impression of the 30 storey Gagarin tower designed for
Southwark Street, but kicked out by planners last year. 

A lot of the best anti-tall towers stuff is coming from the Skyline Campaign, which seems to be a global pressure group pulling together lots of local protests. While much of its activity seems well justified, it also seems to forget that any new building - especially a large building like St Paul's or  the neo-gothic mass of St Pancras - ruins somebody else's view.

No point crying over London's ruined skyline - that milk was spilled many decades ago. Really, some dear rich people's view of St Paul's through a telescope from Richmond Park has been desecrated by a large residential tower in Stratford? Oh dear! Oh calumny. Those poor dear Richmond residents. What about the residents of the Patmore estate in Battersea who used to have a nice view across the river. Now all they see are the steel skeletons of yuppie towers, as their windows are shaken and their lungs filled with grit by the passing of hundreds of trucks bringing cement and steel to the site, every day for the past three years?

We're fighting the same battle but from totally different perspectives. You can like tall buildings, and want more of them, without being a capitalist baby-eating property developer.

Every time someone creates a good new viewing point, they destroy many other people's view.

The people who built the Shard have changed almost everyone's view of London. But they have also given us all something new and interesting to look at, a new landmark that we can claim a bit of. I've said it before, and I stick to it: the Shard is a better building than London deserves. It is a perfect new landmark for this dirty old city in the mud, and the way it shines out on a changeable day, visible from almost every zone 2 or 3 high street, gives everyone an immediate sense of location, like GPS only better.

Of course the Paddington conservation lobby are now protesting against the bulky cube, for which they are in part responsible. Of course they want to keep their nice bits of W2 just as they are. Which is just as bonkers as me wanting London to be as dirty and dangerous and cheap as it was in 1976.

We can't always get what we want, thank god.

The Battersea end of the Nine Elms nightmare: is there an uglier road in London?

Look what they've done to our road, ma! Look what they've done to Queenstown Road.  This long final strip of Queenstown Road, from Battersea Park roundabout up to Chelsea Bridge, was always a sort of runway or ramp, a diving board from which south London likely lads and lasses launched themselves into the monied worlds of the King's Road, Chelsea, Westminster and beyond.

Mods, rockers, boy racers used that half-mile of tarmac as their catwalk or drag strip. Bikers would meet at the tea hut on the south side of the bridge en route for their Friday night runs out to Heston Services and back.  That bridge, with its Christmas tree lighting,  was always a potent symbol of the gap between north and south London. Posh and arty on the north side, industrial and a bit rough on the other.

Now, it's getting bland on both sides.  The money-zombies have taken it for themselves. They've taken over the Queenstown bit, the whole length of the bit that faces dear sweet Battersea Park. And soon the road that continues on the north side will be overshadowed by the Chelsea Barracks re-development. The views into Battersea Park are still there, but that knockout close-up view of the great looming power station has gone completely.

Look at this photo - how on earth has this happened? People joked about how absurd the old
Observer/QVC building, Marco Polo House, was. This place - occupied briefly by the supposed rival for Sky TV, BSB (later BSkyB as Murdoch added its scalp to his knapsack) - was a veritable cathedral of restraint and good taste compared to what we see now.

Looking north towards the bridge from the Battersea Park roundabout, it seems that three or four bulky, mass-market holiday cruise liners have backed up against the road. Those horrible blunted curves. Wrap-around balconies in some dismal white stone-look material.

It seems they have used every available inch to shove their bulbous bodies as close as possible to each other and to the public realm, the street.

Are these the "affordable" bits of this monster development? Or are the people paying their £850,000 plus happy to stroll around their balconied decks, looking straight across at another block which is identically ugly to the one they live in?

Tell me, please, I really don't get it.

Soseki centenary passes unmarked as Clapham museum closes

Waste disposal trucks load up with the display cases from the Soseki in London Museum. Looks

 like Clapham has lost another of its already pitifully short list of interesting places to visit.

Last week - on Friday December 9 in fact - it was the hundredth anniversary of the death of one of Japan's most revered novelists, Natsume Soseki. Unsurprisingly, this date went  unmarked in the Clapham street where the famous writer lived during 1901-2.

In fact, it's sadder than that. Ironically, just a few weeks before the centenary date, the small museum dedicated to Soseki at 80b The Chase was apparently dismantled, and is now closed for good.

Earlier this year, the owners of the Soseki Museum in London announced they would be closing down in 2017 because of the increasing costs of keeping it open.

Then, on a cold bright afternoon early in November, a couple of bright yellow rubbish trucks parkked up outside the block. Soon, the workmen were bringing large glass-fronted display cabinets and huge sheets of plate glass out of number 80, and tossing them into the back of the trucks. You could hear the glass shattering.

Part of the Soseki museum's immaculately displayed collection
of the author's published works - now sadly dispersed.

The trucks sped away, and a "for sale" sign went up outside. At the same time a first-floor 2-bed flat in this block went on the market for well over half a million pounds: was it 80b?

Unsure whether this was actually the last gasp of the museum, I checked the doorbell. The notice bext to the buzzer giving opening times had gone. No answers from the buzzer. I rang the museum's phone number. The line was dead, gone.

Of course the museum always did close down for the winter. But all the evidence now suggests it has closed for the last time. All that is left in this street to commemorate the fact that great Japanese writer lived here is the English Heritage Blue Plaque on number 89, opposite the museum, where Soseki actually lodged.

Oh, and the Victorian pilar box which Soseki tourists always seem to find fascinating.

A few months back, I visited this obscure museum that shared the same building I've lived in for the past three decades (see: Catch it while you can: Clapham's Soseki museum). It displayed a small but fascinating collection of photos, books, documents and artefacts relating to  Soseki, and also sold some of his works in translation.  The curator was also a great source of info on Japanese literature in general.

I think the museum was purely private project, funded by a Japanese scholar and businessman long resident in London. All credit to him for opening this museum, and for keeping it going for so long. I can't imagine the £4 entry fee covered much of the costs.

The entrance area of the Museum included this display of photos of various
distinguished (mainly Japanese) visitors it had welcomed over the three
decades of its existence

Of course the museum was much better known in Tokyo than in London, and every summer there was a regular trickle of Soseki pilgrims from Japan crossing the Common and wandering down the street in search of the museum. Pointing it out to elderly Japanese tourists was a regular and pleasurable duty. Just another strange aspect of life in this borough that has now gone. Life is that little bit flatter as a result.

Despite his importance in the development of modern Japanese literature, and despite his creatively fertile if very miserable stay in London, Soseki is still hardly known in this country. A few years ago Penguin re-issued a few of his best-known titles in  their Classics series, but these are rarely stocked in any but the most specialist bookshops.

Clapham library held just one of his novels; typically, I found a better selection in Peckham Library, not even in the same borough! (Clapham is in Lambeth, Peckham in Southwark).

If anyone ever actually reads this entry, I imagine the reaction to it would be a simple"so what?" - and certainly the loss of a very small and eccentric museum is hardly a big deal in a world so full of tragedy, death and suffering. Personally I think Soseki has a lot to teach us about ourselves, and I think a much bigger audience could enjoy his work, if they knew about it and could access good translations.

Above all I think the closure is sadly symptomatic of what is happening across London and all of southern England. Realising the maximum value of property is paramount; god forbid that anything as airy-fairy as culture and memory should stand in it way.

'Tis the season to download some fine podcasts

The battered, dust-filled shoebox with the motley collection of Christmas decorations is once again dragged out of its hideaway above the hot water tank.

The remnants of five decades worth of tarnished tinsel, plastic baubles, one surviving glass bauble, papier maché angels, lights that no longer work. Add to this a 2009 Waitrose Xmas pudding with real cognac, a gift that has yet to be opened, and probably won't be - and you're ready to face the season.

For a decade or two my personal Advent treat was listening to John Peel's Festive 50 countdown. Then Peel died, the 50 was no more, and there was a big gap in that strange collection of repeated experiences that - for me - made Christmas Christmas.

But now that gap has been filled. Yep, I've acquired a new listening habit, the depleted stable of Christmas/New Year traditions has a new, very 21st century member. It's an Advent Calendar, but not the type that offers stale sickly chocolate behind cardboard shutters. It's Daniel Ruiz Tizon's Advent Calendar, a sequence of 24 daily podcasts recalling his past Christmases, and always asking the question: will it ever be possible to love Christmas again as much as we did in those distant times?

These bundles of memories, deeply autobiographical and rooted in a certain area of south London, but also deeply resonant for anyone who has grown up in the UK over the past few decades. Each 12 minute episode arrives like a little gift-wrapped memory bomb. I'm a lot older than Daniel but the references to life in the 80s and 90s are as powerful as any Proustian madeleine.

"When you live in Lambeth, you learn not to pick up the snow". Well, that was true in almost any urban area where dogs roamed the parks and pavements.

If you like your wine extra dry, your lemon very bitter, and your oil extra-virgin, this is the advent calendar for you. Catch it today: we're not even half way there yet. Listen, and like me get hooked. But don't cheat - one day at a time please. As with the chocolate variety, there was always one lirttle piggy who scoffed the whole lot on December 1, and suffered as a result.

Literature has Dickens' A Christmas Carol; TV has  The Snowman. Now podcasting has its own Christmas classic. Listen!