The Wellington City Council must have known it was going to be picking a hard road to go down when it proposed Variation 11, and sure enough, the District Plan change is due to go to appeal at the Environment Court. Most of our readers will know about it: it’s a variation to permit buildings of a certain size to be constructed on the waterfront, without having to go through the publicly-notified Resource Consent stage. At present, of course, there’s a much more public-friendly situation in place: that every building higher than ground level will require to be notified –…
read the full entryWatching an episode of Grand Designs recently, while on holiday, made me thankful that we don’t have such a high and idiotic level of bureaucracy as they do in England: but then again, nor do we have an architectural presenter with the charisma and sardonic tongue of Kevin McCloud.
In this programme, an architect called Francis Shaw was attempting to restore a castle in Skipton, in Yorkshire. His object of decrepid fascination was known as Peel Castle – more of a large country house really, but it did have a castellated top (or did, once it was “restored”).
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