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+--- Thread: Something to think about (/showthread.php?tid=1133)
Something to think about - Scythe13 - 19 February 2012
Okay, this might seem totally out of character with prepping, survivalism, and TEOTWAWKI, but I think there are 3 very interesting things to think about here.....other than the 4 storey fish tank.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2103193/The-Wembley-aquariums-Thierry-rebuilds-6m-home-make-va-va-room-storey-5-000-gallon-tank-300-fish.html
Terry Henry has a pantry, a 'biodiverse living roof', and a solar panel set up.
I didn't know he was a prepper?!
It could just be me stabbing in the dark, but he has a whole floor underground as well.
I think with the fishtank, biodiverse roof, underground space, pantry, and solar energy, that would be a pretty good BOL if it wasn't in Londonistan.
RE: Something to think about - NorthernRaider - 19 February 2012
Lots of wealthy people have heavily re-enforced safe rooms stocked up with over a months supplies of grub etc, Also there is the Iceberg house phenomina running parallel with the White Flight phenonima, IE folks spending crap loads of money tunneling and extended their London homes underground.
Heres and article from my files
Iceberg Houses and Basement Rage
Ok start thinking laterally about this fellow preppers, WHY are very rich city dwellers who could easily afford second homes in the countryside, or afford to move home to a bigger house etc, why are HUNDREDS possibly THOUSANDS of the rich and influential digging huge re-enforced basements and subterranean extensions to their homes in places like London. Indeed many of them are apparently building ( read between the lines) huge underground swimming pools, safe rooms, games rooms, Refrigerated larder rooms , spare bedrooms etc. Yes its certain that some are simply wanting to make their homes bigger by going underground thus avoiding clashes with planning officers, but tell me this why are so many of them fitting water filtration / purification systems for their pools that bring the water up to DRINKING quality.
More are putting in pools, insulated underground garages, back up gennies to "run the pool system" (yeah puleeeease)
Look, with White Flight becoming a white exodus, Walled and gated secure estates popping up all over, ramping immigration problems, rocketing fuel, food and energy prices, more civil unrest than ever, it does not take a genius to realise the rich and influential are starting to put up defences and pulling up the drawbridge from mainstream society.
What basement rage can tell us about London
Simon Jenkins
24 May 2011
Good news for the revolution: London's rich are fighting each other like rats in a sack. This time it's basement rage. One man's swimming pool makes him another's neighbour from hell. Celebrity is fighting celebrity, hedge-fund manager falling out with hedge-fund manager. Giant diggers are advancing along the stucco terraces of Westminster and Kensington like monsters in HG Well's War of the Worlds. London's guts are being ripped out. Its water table is subsiding into a gigantic marbled sump.
No one is doing a blind thing about it. As with skyscrapers, so with ground-scrapers, coherent planning in London has all but collapsed. So-called iceberg houses, more below than above, are the craze of the day.
Last October basement rage hit the headlines when Nigella Lawson and Charles Saatchi decided they had had enough of Eaton Square because of ceaseless excavation work. They could run, but where might they hide? Every street was being upheaved. The same month a skip fell into Chester Row revealing a huge cavity beneath it. Round the corner in Wilton Row a basement also collapsed, killing a builder inside it. This was just one corner of Belgravia, capital of London's novel form of Emmental architecture.
I should declare an interest. In front of my house the local council enforces a regime that would make Stalin blush. A uniformed official parades up and down all day, never out of sight. He is not interested in my safety or that of my property. I could mug an old lady or molest a child and he would not turn a hair. His sole concern is to check the documentation on every car, time every meter stay and photograph any tyre that might have strayed an inch over the council's sacred white lines. He is neurotic over-administration personified, calculated to bring local government into public contempt.
Meanwhile, at the rear of my house, pandemonium reigns. From morning to night the council has licensed a developer to excavate the tiny garden of a small terraced house to a depth of two storeys. With no street access, the subsoil has to leave through narrow alleys, and huge girders are brought in the same way. Noise has rendered neighbouring gardens uninhabitable. Dust is everywhere. The air is full of the noise of pile drivers, screeching saws, whirring drills and shouting workmen. This has gone on for over two years. There is not a note of apology and not a penny has been paid in compensation for this nuisance.
The council's former planning boss, Daniel Moylan, ominously a deputy to Boris Johnson, explains that "we don't let people go up or back, so people are going down", as if these people were gods he must obey. Moylan will charge me £400 to get my car back if I overstay my welcome on one of his beloved streets. But for the aural and visual horror he is unleashing across the royal borough he cares not at all. Some 40 basements are reportedly being excavated there right now.
Property developers will always find a way of exploiting London's most valued resource, land, and will badger, cajole, plead and bribe to be allowed to do what they want. That is why we have planning to regulate them. While most boroughs have caved in to Ken Livingstone and Boris Johnson and their craving for towers, the two western boroughs of Westminster and Kensington and Chelsea deserve credit for resisting, as yet. But they are relaxed about digging down.
Westminster's John Walker was quoted as dismissing complaints about basements on the grounds that "we see no need to deprive our residents of the opportunity of extending their properties". If he sees no "need", that spells the end not just of Westminster's peace and quiet, but of that most exquisite London delight, the urban garden? To the property market, and Mr Walker, a garden is a pool, gym or cinema waiting to happen.
The tycoon Chris Rokos is reported to have given Kensington council £500,000 for permission to build a staggering four storeys under Pembridge Square, to make way for the high-diving board of his swimming pool. Jon Hunt's three-storey bunker for his squash court and Ferrari museum under Kensington Palace Gardens may not harm anyone, since nobody seems to live there any more but for Frank Lampard to enrage his neighbours with a swimming pool under his modest Chelsea flat, or for Chester Row to be torn apart for an underground cinema and swimming pool is absurd. The modest terraced streets that dominate the character of west London are not fit for palace facilities - or for residents with a Maecenas complex.
I do not quarrel with planners who regard the outward appearance of a London street as the prime concern. But they seem to have a soft spot for JCBs and RSJs. Deep excavation must surely affect the stability of London's clay subsoil.
I am reliably informed that every London house rise and falls about two inches during the year, which is why minor cracks are what my surveyor calls "the house breathing". Basements stop this movement. They are tanked and rigid. We cannot tell what damage they do to their surrounding geology until they are built, when it is too late. The case for banning iceberg houses is surely overwhelming.
No less important is the harassment caused by basement building to neighbours. The Grosvenor estate in Belgravia claims to "stagger" basements to minimise street noise. This merely ensures that none of its streets is ever at peace. At the very least, planning permission for basements should require compensation payments to neighbours and to the council for the pollution and inconvenience they cause.
Already the city's roads have been dug to death for over a decade through a failure of civic government to regulate the market. Now the same diggers are running amok in back gardens. London has many urgent needs, but private swimming pools are not among them.