No urban revival without stair reform. Great cities need middle housing -- ie MANY small multifamily buildings that allow many households to share expensive urban land. But those homes still have to be good enough that a wide range of households want to live in the. Not just twenty somethings. Current egress rules have made multifamily housing ESPECIALLY awful in the US because they push developers to double-loaded corridor layouts: long, hotel-like hallways with apartments lined up on both sides. These buildings are extremely expensive to build and not great at creating "life-cycle" housing. Families often want a home with a “front” and a “back”: one side connected to the street and the life of the neighborhood, and another quieter side facing a courtyard, garden, yard, or shared green space. They want cross-ventilation, daylight from more than one direction, a place for children to play, and some sense of threshold between public and private life. Double-loaded corridor buildings make that impossible, because units are facing either the back or the front. The more home-like form of multifamily is enabled by single-stair reform, sometimes called “smart stair” reform and closely related to the point-access block. instead of accessing units from a long corridor, apartments are arranged around a central stair. This allows smaller buildings, shallower floorplates, more dual-aspect units (they don't all need to be, but some of them should be), better light and air, and a much closer relationship between the home, the street, and the yard. Single-stair reform is a keystone reform for rebuilding family-friendly urban neighborhoods. It will make it significantly easier to build the fine-grained, middle housing neighborhoods that everyone wants but no one builds anymore (because we made it illegal)

“Don't swim' at 12 of 14 river bathing sites, as more locations announced.” Here’s something to wrap your head around. The only stretch of river graded as ‘Good’ is at Friars Meadow, Sudbury yet from 13th March to the 13th April Anglian Water dumped sewage into Friars Meadow nonstop 24 hours a day for 31 days straight. If you went swimming there during the Easter holidays you were probably swimming in human waste but none of it shows in the data because the EA don’t even bother testing until the middle of May. PS the EA don’t actually test any bathing site in the country for most of the year 7 and a half months in fact. You go swimming between 1st Oct one year and 15th May the next you’re on your own. bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cvgz…

I back the Prime Minster who was elected on a five year mandate to change, protect, defend, enrich our United Kingdom which suffered a pandemic hot on the heels of a divorce from our biggest trading partners. It’s wrong not to back the Leader. Just wrong. This is not the way to go about such matters. Keir needs supported by his team. Not have the knives turned on him.