News
2009 Built Environment Award Announced
Ms Deborah Saunt has been awarded the 2009/10 Research Fellowship in the Built Environment. This fellowship is for study on Urban Design: Ideas for part of the Commission’s Estate, and will focus on developing the public realm of the Commission’s legacy cultural estate in South Kensington, building on the work already under way to develop Exhibition Road. A qualified architect, Deborah is a founding director of architecture and urban design practice DSHA.
Major book published from Royal Commission Built Environment Fellowship
Built Environment Fellow, Paul Barker, has recently published “The Freedoms of Suburbia” as the culmination of his 1999 Fellowship from the 1851 Royal Commission. Walking through suburbia, others might see faded semis, but Paul Barker sees an amazing adaptability. Garages turned into storerooms, front gardens turned into garages, front doors personalised and giving out subtle social signals. The suburb is, in his words, the great national balancing act between privacy and price. In, The Freedoms of Suburbia, Paul Barker tries to understand the wider city (including its suburbs) and how it works. (Published by Frances Lincoln, ISBN: 9780711229785)
Work starts on Development of Exhibition Road
Led by the Royal Borough of Kensington & Chelsea, and strongly supported by the Exhibition Road Cultural Group, of which the Royal Commission is a founder member, work on the major project to develop Exhibition Road began in 2009 with the re-routing of traffic around South Kensington underground station. This provides improved pedestrian access to the bottom of Exhibition road and work has now started on the dramatic improvements to the surface of the road itself. This will provide a striking and more fitting portal to the cultural estate established by the Royal Commission with the profits of the Great Exhibition. Full details can be found on the RBKC website.
Chairman calls for return to sustainable balanced economy
At the Commission’s biennial Presidential Dinner on 31 March Sir Alan Rudge, Chairman of Commissioners, delivered a powerful speech highlighting the deteriorating balance of trade, the over dependence upon financial services and the essential role of manufacturing industry in closing the gap and restoring a sustainable balanced economy.
See President’s Dinner for full text of speech [pdf]
References for the Chairman’s speech were drawn from recent reports commissioned by the ERA Foundation. A summary of these reports can be obtained from the foundation via www.erafoundation.org
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