A Clockwork Orange estate fights ‘art washing’ redevelopment plans

Protesters staged a sit-in at a brutalist 1960s estate featured in Stanley Kubrick’s dystopic film, A Clockwork Orange, to highlight concerns about a development they say amounts to gentrification and art washing.The brief occupation on Saturday of the Lakeside Centre in Thamesmead, an arts centre in south-east London, is part of a wider battle by longstanding residents, who claim that the soul of the community, along with many socially rented homes, will be lost as part of a huge regeneration by the housing association Peabody.Thamesmead was conceived by a group of architects at the former Greater London Council in the 1960s and hailed as “the town of tomorrow”, providing alternative housing to replace dilapidated inner-city homes in London.Lesnes, one of the estates built in the area in the 1960s, was famously depicted in A Clockwork Orange.Sixty years on, improvements are urgently needed and Bexley, like other councils, does not have the cash to do this

‘Cat-sized’ rat found in Teesside town puts focus on pest control cuts

Cuts to council pest control services are being blamed for a town’s rodent problem, which includes the discovery of a supersize rat said to be 22in (56cm) from nose to tail.The giant rat, about the length of the carry-on luggage people might be wheeling on to a flight – or, if not on holiday, a desktop monitor – was found inside a person’s home in Normanby, Teesside.“I had to do a double take when I saw a picture of it,” said Stephen Martin, a Conservative councillor on Redcar and Cleveland council. “You can tell by the size of the bag that it’s not a normal size. It’s the size of a cat

UK pornography taskforce to propose banning ‘barely legal’ content after Channel 4 documentary airs

The new pornography taskforce will propose legislation this autumn aimed at banning a type of “barely legal” content produced by the porn star Bonnie Blue, the Guardian has learned.The proposed action by the independent pornography taskforce, launched last month by the Conservative peer Gabby Bertin, comes in response to the broadcast of the Channel 4 documentary 1000 Men and Me: The Bonnie Blue Story. The programme followed the performer for six months and included her claim to have had sex with 1,057 clients over the course of 12 hours.Visa and Smirnoff are among a number of businesses that have pulled online advertisements from streaming of the documentary, after reviewing the content. The film was condemned by the children’s commissioner for England, Dame Rachel de Souza, for “glamorising and normalising” extreme pornography

It’s not just about building houses – communities need infrastructure to grow | Letters

There is a very real danger that, in its bid to reform the planning system and build 1.5m homes across England at pace, the government will neglect the basic requirements of livable communities (‘No shops, no schools’: homes in England built without basic amenities, 27 July).As your article makes clear, already “thousands of homes across England are being built without urgently needed community infrastructure”. The planning system cannot allow such fundamental aspects of quality, sustainable placemaking to be neglected. It would do well to recognise the solution offered by a landscape-led approach to development

BMA rejects NHS claim that less than third of resident doctors went on strike

The doctors’ union has rejected NHS figures showing that less than a third of resident doctors joined strike action in England last week and 93% of planned operations and procedures went ahead.NHS England said it maintained care for an estimated 10,000 more patients during the latest doctors’ strike compared with last year’s, while the health secretary, Wes Streeting, seized on the figures and said it was time to “move past the cycle of disruption”.But the British Medical Association (BMA) rejected the figures, saying complex work schedules and doctors taking leave made it “almost impossible to know” how many had joined the action.The number that took part in the five-day strike was down by 7.5% on the previous round of industrial action, according to an early analysis of management information

Right to buy in England ‘fuelled housing crisis and cost taxpayers £200bn’

Margaret Thatcher’s right-to-buy scheme has cost UK taxpayers almost £200bn, according to a report into the policy’s contribution to Britain’s housing crisis.In its report into the sale of millions of council homes to their tenants at steep discounts since 1980, the Common Wealth thinktank said the policy had fuelled vast shortages in social housing and turbocharged inequality.Describing it as one of the “largest giveaways in UK history”, it said the sale of 1.9m council homes in England had contributed to a situation where one in six private tenants in England now rents a former local authority home.Local authority tenants have been able to buy their homes since 1936, but changes made under the first Thatcher government in 1980 triggered a boom in sales at steep discounts to market value