The 135-year-old building has remained shrouded by plywood to protect passersby from the crumbling stone, which has formed a reddish beach on the shed below. The church's congregation dwindled to 12 members and had to fire its pastor to save money.
A new campaign is aiming to collect 50 objects that sum up Englishness in an effort to move the conversation away from reductive arguments over whether to hang a St George's flag or not. Supported by the Green party politician Caroline Lucas, the musician and campaigner Billy Bragg, and Kojo Koram, a law professor, the A Very English Chat campaign hopes to tackle England's growing social divisions and political polarisation.
Conservation area regulations aren't on the same level as those for Listed Buildings; however, they are still much stricter than in the average home. The most common legal consideration to make is understanding Article 4 Directions. Article 4 can essentially strip away your 'Permitted Development' rights, meaning you need full blown planning permission, even for minor changes, like front doors.
Doc Martin star Martin Clunes has lost his four-year planning dispute to prevent a permanent Travellers' site from being established adjacent to his Dorset home. The Wuthering Heights actor, alongside several neighbours in Beaminster, had vocally opposed the proposals put forward by Theo Langton and Ruth McGill.
The event was the following day: we had 250 tickets sold, we'd done so many rehearsals, and inside there were lighting rigs, performers' equipment, shop stock. It was truly heartbreaking. So many businesses lost so much money and time, and now the loss of the space itself is having a huge impact on the wider community.
Common Wealth cited the example of the Warmer Homes consortium, led by Portsmouth city council, which was allocated 22m among 31 authorities over three years. This breaks down to about 450-650 homes per year, or 15-20 homes per local authority per year.
The museum devoted to the alphabet soup of sexualities has had a revamp of its displays and turned a small museum into a cramped one. It's always been a small space, with one main room and a second, smaller temporary exhibition space, but they've added two more glass cases in the middle of the main room, turning a wide rectangle into a corridor.
The Exeter Road Pavilion is an adaptive reuse of a modest Victorian garden outbuilding in northwest London, redesigned for an art collector and amateur DJ who wanted a place equally suited to storing books, records, and artworks as to hosting garden gatherings, workouts, and the occasional ping-pong match. Our brief was twofold: create an interior cabinet for storage and an exterior canopy for shelter. From the outset, we saw these as a single architectural problem rather than two separate tasks.
Heritage sites constitute complex spatial archives in which architecture, history, and collective memory converge. They encompass a wide spectrum of contexts-from archaeological remains, ancient and historic townscapes, UNESCO-listed landscapes, to early modern civic structures and industrial infrastructures. Yet these environments confront challenges: climate change, urban transformation, disaster, shifting social needs, and the gradual erosion of material fabric. Revitalization and restoration projects respond to these conditions by positioning architectural and spatial practice as an active mediator between preservation and the contemporary topologies.
Garrington Property Finders' annual ranking is described as an impartial, objective ranking based on publicly available data across 18 categories, including proximity to open space, National Parks and Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty, the number of listed and period homes, air quality, and crime figures. A wide range of data sources is used, including those provided by the Office for National Statistics, the Department for Levelling Up, and Natural England.
Bringing such a culturally and historically significant building back into public use has been a huge privilege for everyone involved. This restoration has taken years of considered collaboration and care, guided by a shared commitment to do justice to the Town Hall's heritage while giving it a new lease of life and protecting it for future generations to enjoy.
From reproductive rights to climate change to Big Tech, The Independent is on the ground when the story is developing. Whether it's investigating the financials of Elon Musk's pro-Trump PAC or producing our latest documentary, 'The A Word', which shines a light on the American women fighting for reproductive rights, we know how important it is to parse out the facts from the messaging.
The road between Piccadilly Circus and St James's Park could be transformed into a massive public plaza and vehicles could be banned from Regent Street St James's, Waterloo Place and the south side of Piccadilly Circus. If the proposals are enacted, the pedestrianisation of certain roads would lead to more than 35,000 square metres of new public space, equivalent to more than five football pitches, created in the West End.
I met Carole Guscott, a retired former carer, on a clear winter's morning in the Somerset town of Minehead. She was walking her whippet, Gracie, on the way back to her new flat, past the local Premier Inn and on to a cul de sac called Rainbow Way. I knew as soon as I saw it, she told me. I just thought: I can make this place my home.'
Brick Lane is one of London's most beloved, and buzzing, areas. Home to the largest Bangladeshi community outside of Bangladesh, nowadays the cobbled street in the East End is known just as much for its curry houses and vintage shops as its ubiquity of fashionable young shoppers, TikTokkers and trendy coffee shops. At the centre of Brick Lane is the great Truman Brewery. Currently, the building that was once London's largest brewery is home to food and vintage markets, record stores, music venues and more.
You can feel it in the fishing fleet hauled up on the beach, still part of daily life, and then a short walk away in bold contemporary spaces showing work that speaks far beyond the town. It shows up in events that belong to the people who live there; Jack in the Green spilling through the streets; Pirate Day turning the whole place into a shared act of play;
Battersea Power Station is a former coal-fired power station located on the south bank of the River Thames in London, originally designed by architects J. Theo Halliday and Giles Gilbert Scott. Notable for its appearance on the cover of Pink Floyd's 1977 studio album Animals and in Alfred Hitchcock's 1936 film Sabotage, the station is one of the world's largest brick buildings and is known for its Art Deco interior fittings and décor.
For most of its life, the alley's main feature was the church of St Martin Orgar, possibly named after Ordgarus, a Dane who donated the church to the canons of St Paul's. Sadly, most of the church was destroyed during the Great Fire of London. The badly damaged remains were restored and used by French Protestants right up to 1820.
A bench in Bristol installed facing a brick wall has aroused local curiosity why put it there? BBC West commented that it joined other perversely placed seating: a bench in Shirehampton facing a derelict building and one in Wedmore facing a hedge. Bristol city council explained that when it plants a planned tree, the bench will provide a shady spot to rest on a steep hill, but promised to review the placement.
