Same on South Ox. 4 new major developments around our village. No benefit to us apart from extra traffic. No new infrastructure either.
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And The Vale, although they and South Oxon pretty much share their back office of course.
This estate’s nearly finished and the developers have moved on to the next two now, but there’s no profit in infrastructure so who knows when or if they’ll get a GP. At least the Ents have got as far as deciding that one would be a good idea:
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Same story everywhere sadly.
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And has been for a long time.
Do market economists understand why this is ? The local detail seems to be that the district councils are coerced by central government to build xxx thousand houses a year (fail and your funding is threatened) and the developers have the whip hand. The councils need to get them on board and the developers won’t go ahead unless they can make an obscene profit. They achieve this by some combination of resisting all the public goods (infrastructure, affordability, high design standards e.g. energy efficiency, sometimes high construction standards) and limiting the availability of houses so as to keep the price high.
There seem to be multiple developers though. So why has competition not worked to squeeze them into doing what the ‘customers’ (home owners and local authorities) want ? Are they running a cabal ?
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Local to here, part of the problem is that the Borough council who agreed the terms of the development with Bovis or whoever, simply doesn’t have the funds to threaten a large national building company with legal action. I imagine similar happens elsewhere.
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And the same here in East Sussex.
Build it,and they will come (just don’t expect anything else)
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You’d expect the council to share that experience though and for the next council to tie Bovis, or whoever, down more tightly next time. If the agreement was clear enough, so Bovis would be near certain to lose in court, wouldn’t the council be pretty sure of getting their costs awarded ?
ISTR that when the sewers proved inadequate on the abovementioned doctor-less estate the residents who were already living there petitioned the council to refuse permission for even one more house to be occupied. The implication was that the council had the power to do this, although in the event they didn’t use it.
This is a direct result of Building Control privatisation.
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I remember when Building Control were part of the council and my experience with them then was very good. In the end though I guess it came down to the individual inspector and the one I dealt with was great - very experienced, helpful, a good listener as well as a talker. Unfortunately ‘very experienced’ meant he was also close to retirement and when I next came across them, just briefly, his replacement was a lot less helpful.
In the case of the sewers on Great Western Park the root cause of the problem was that the estate, which slopes gently downhill to the London-Bristol-South Wales main line, had to get its foul waste across said railway to the treatment plant on the other side. Boring a new large pipe under the trains was going to be expensive and the developers were locked in a dispute with Thames Water over who was going to pay for it. The existing small pipe was inadequate hence the unpleasant back-ups at busy times (manhole covers popping up and unspeakable stuff flooding the roads, often during the morning rush-hour/school run. Lovely.). It didn’t stop them selling the houses though.
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Nutters!!
Scroll down to 12.32pm “Highlights of the first race” and watch bloke in red at about 10 seconds.
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Calling Our Radiation Chums: scrolling thru random railwayana in order to avoid having to do or think anything just now, I happened upon this box of LMS gas mantles (ca 1923-48), and was taken by the damage to their enclosing boxes:
I seem to recall that gas mantles were originally Thoriated - does anyone recall if this is so, and if whatever form the Thorium takes in this usage is ‘hot’ enough to cause the ‘burning’, or is it some other kind of chemical reaction, e.g. acidic?
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I don’t actually know tbh never had one. But you buy them and I can test them for you 
The boxes could be from radiation, I always loved old watches that had been in a draw or box for decades without the hands moving. You turn the hands and see the brown stain from the hands ‘burning’ the dial.
I have seen the same effect on pocket watch plastic glasses and a cardboard box that a NOS radium hand and dialed Omega was in for 70 years before it was opened.
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I’d be more inclined to believe it was chemical. Wiki says that the metal nitrates which were the precursors to the luminous oxides were so acidic that you couldn’t store the mantles for long because the acid destroyed the structural cotton lattice. As time went on the chemistry was improved, but you’ve still got quite corrosive substances present.
Mantles definitely were, once upon a time, thoriated and there were radioactivity issues (again, see Wiki).
The thorium decay channel produces 4MeV alpha particles. If these were doing the burning then I’d expect the damage to the cardboard to be much more uniform - not the irregular relatively sharp-edged blotches visible in the picture. They look much more like stains from chemicals, perhaps caused by the mantles being boxed before they were completely dried out ? (The chemicals themselves could plausibly be invisible for the first few years, so the packaging wouldn’t be visibly damaged while the mantles were still on the shop shelves.)
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Thanks - suspect you’re right. From the same image source:
…different batch or maker but implicitly the same vintage: no apparent damage.
I guess damp storage could have played a part, too.
The range of alphas in solid materials is so very small (perhaps tens of microns in something of the density of cardboard) that all of the energy would be deposited in a very thin surface layer. This leads to a high energy density which might well explain the surface staining that @dom has seen. But the short range is not consistent with damage visible on the outside of the packaging, let alone with the stains on the outside of the much bigger box surrounding all the individual ones. That looks like chemicals seeping through. (I suppose it’s not impossible that those chemicals could have been produced on the inside of the packaging by the radiation and then have started seeping. But, well, Occam’s razor …)
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Interesting stuff.
These are some google images as I don’t have any of the effect in watches.
I did use to have boxes of period replacement luminous watch hands which were always kept in folded paper. The really hot ones would blacken and darken the paper in the shape of the painted radium.
Sadly I have no photos although those hands are probably still in the metal box in the garage at that workshop. If I ever remember when I next pop my head in I will get a photo.
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For a watch, I quite like the first picture
Wow !
Those are much more like the burns patterns I’d expect from radiation though - fading smoothly from darkest in the middle to palest and then gone, without any sharp edges. The Longines dial shows clear correlation between the degree of burning and the amount of paint, from the figure 1 which has the least of both to the figure 10 which has the most.
Love this guys videos, it’s the ultimate garage/shed science always taken to 11.
Recently enjoyed his video on filming welding in high detail. Think his most famous videos are his electron microscope film of a record playing with the needle in the groove and his homemade edm machine
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