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In Spring 2015 The Francis Crick Institute building will be completed and scientists developing treatments for major diseases like cancer, heart disease and stroke will move into Brill Place.
Previously called the UK Centre for Medical Research and Innovation (UKCMRI), the Institute isn’t without controversy. As there are plenty of places on the internet to discuss the animal rights issues raised by the lab, including CamdenDangerLab we won’t take discussion on those issues here.
Given that construction is well underway, what impact will the Crick have on our community? It’s a very large site starting immediately behind the British Library and stretching to Brill Place, and from Ossulston Street in the west to the Midland Road side of St Pancras station. Plans include a pedestrian, and possibly cycle, path to run east/west through the site, a healthy living centre on Ossulston Street whose actual content will be decided on in collaboration with community groups and a huge auditorium available to outside bodies.
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And what will really happen inside? Who are these faceless scientists working away behind closed doors? Interestingly the labs will face outwards onto the surrounding streets and walkways and large glass windows will enable us to peer inside to see what they are doing. The scientists themselves are keen to discuss the work they’ll be doing and the impact they hope it will have:
Pop into the Crick’s visitors centre and you’ll see scale models of the building, pick up the Crick’s ‘Community’ magazine and put some names and faces to those scientists and view the explanatory exhibition.
In this spirit of transparency, King’s Cross Community Projects asked Katie Matthews (community engagement manager at the Crick) if the Crick would be interested in chatting to the community online. KCCP wondered if the designers, builders and scientists would want to openly talk with a wide cross-section of us using this community website – live and online. They are very, very interested. So we’d like to arrange a webchat with the Crick. What do you think? Would you have questions about the building and/or the work that will be done there? How do you see it fitting into our community? How is this huge Institute supporting our community, if at all, and how will that continue?
On Thursday 26th July at 8.00am the Olympic Torch Relay comes through Caledonian Road. The Torch Relay marks the opening of the Olympic Celebration.
Ace&Lion has been invited to create an art piece to mark this historic occasion by Team Cally.
We would like to make something with photographs that capture the moment the torch passes through our neighbourhood.
To do this we would like to use photographs taken by you on a camera or mobile phone of the torch passing your home, shop or position on Caledonian Road that morning.
We will collect the photographs after the torch passes and make a collage from a selection of them. Please e-mail photographs to info@aceandlion.org with your name and contact details.
Anyone who contributes a photograph will be invited to an Open Day at Ace&Lion’s project space later this year where the piece will be exhibited. The piece will also be shown in other places.
Ace&Lion is a group of artists based on Caledonian Road.
Ferdinand Povel and Essi Salonen, rubbish artists at Central St Martin’s 😉
On the day that responsibility for taking care of our waterways was handed over from British waterways to the Canal River Trust two local St Martin’s College students prepared to launch the RubbishDuck – made out of 2000 plastic bottles all found in the Regent’s Canal. The YouTube short below explains why they’ve done it. The canal is such a valuable bit of rare open space in King’s Cross, thankyou St Martin’s students for highlighting such an important global and local issue!
Update from Ferdinand & Essi: “The Duck is now floating in front of the filling station where it will stay for the rest of the month, before it is going to be moved to the Pleasure Gardens for August. We have and will keep Rubbish Duck updated with new pictures on Facebook .”
Technology fans will be interested to know you can now see many blog posts from this local web site in augmented reality. We’ve been geo-tagging posts for a while (clicking on a map to insert the latitude and longitude into the HTML) and now you can see them on a map and in augmented reality (AR).
AR means that when you hold your phone up, the camera turns on and you can see blobs floating on the screen that represent blog posts about the place over which they are floating. The phone knows where it is, knows where the blog posts are and does the maths to put the blob in the camera display.
To see this download the Layar app on an iphone or android smart phone. Turn it on and go to ‘new layers’ and look for ‘hypARlocal apollo‘ – the working title of the project. You will need to be in the general Kings Cross/Holborn area to see London content. There have been some problems with Layar – if you get ‘no content available’ try again a few minutes later.
For the deeply tech-y Talk About Local are experimenting with AR technologies. They have built a web service which takes RSS feeds containing geo-tags (GEO-RSS feeds) and publishes them in Layar’s AR environment. The feeds then auto-update into the AR environment, providing a copy, paste, forget service to site owners. Posts in the AR world all click through to the original source page and provide a ‘take me there’ map feature. This makes it much, much easier to get stuff into a mobile AR environment. Read the kick off post for the project and see the project updates.
Doors will open at 6.30pm with introduction at 6.45pm. Refreshments will be available. Following the film we’ll have a couple of guest speakers sharing what we can do to help bees.
Good post by Paul Convery over on the Cally Councillors blog about investigation and enforcement action against the Cally Road landlord who featured in the recent BBC documentary. It seems that the landlord concerns owns far more than even came out in the documentary. Including possibly the Pleasure Garden ‘massage parlour’ and the notorious Pappeos Nightclub that caused havoc with local people. It’s also worth looking at the comments on the Cally Cows protest.
I did my best to help with enforcement action on Pappeos last year by monitoring social media for upcoming promotions and tipping the council licensing team off when events appeared in Facebook and Twitter, including the one that finally shut it down. Paul lists a load of enforcement measures and goes on to say:
Cally Councillors have drawn-up a set of further actions that Council officials have agreed to pursue over the next 2 weeks to fully identify all properties owned by Mr Panayi and to check for compliance with planning permissions, building regulations and residential environmental health requirements.
At the heart of this is an information problem. If we don’t know what local businesses are up to we don’t stand a chance of working as a community to get the best result for everyone. Few regular readers of this site subscribe to a passive citizen world view where we expect the council to get on with everything and be omniscient. We can’t help the council if we don’t know what’s happening. The council’s databases of planning, alcohol, entertainment and other licensing etc is opaque to citizens who try to use it online and in need of renewal. For instance i can’t subscribe to a feed or email service for all licences issued in Caledonian Ward.
Last year I asked super-coder Anna to do the basic work for a feed last year, but we couldn’t take it further. It would be a great time for the council to look at providing open access to their databases and modern web feeds of the information that they present so that citizens can play more of a role in local monitoring and enforcement and play a more informed role in local decisions.
So urge the conservation committees for King’s Cross and Bloomsbury and the Friends of Argyle Square. They have launched a campaign to protect the area of Euston Road facing the stations from becoming a home for tall buildings. It comes as the Shard opened last night to sci-fi fanfare. The skyscraper has been dubbed by some “a little bit of Qatar in SE1” – can you picture a bit of Qatar in WC1?
The campaigners say:
The stations are national treasures and their setting must be protected. We are asking Camden to produce a “Heritage Stations Context – Master Plan” which would, amongst other things, stop tower blocks being built in this sensitive location.
These station buildings were intended to tower majestically over London. They were built to reflect the optimism and confidence of the Victorian period. In front of them lay Georgian terraced housing, perfectly proportioned but domestic in scale, in contrast to the deliberately grandiose buildings opposite.
They resonate power and prosperity in their own right, and their character would be greatly diminished by the construction of tower blocks in front of them. To make these 19th-century buildings subservient to 21st-century speculation would be a crude act of vandalism.
The town hall annexe has been under threat of redevelopment as a tower block for some time. Recently 1–11 Euston Road (opposite King’s Cross) came under threat. This terrace is now, we believe, temporarily relatively safe. But recently we met with a representative of the new owners of the Access Storage building (Belgrove House) and learnt they are in negotiations with Crossrail 2, clearly with the intention of building a tall tower on this site.
We are now asking for positive action from the Council to ensure that these Grade I-listed buildings are given the protection they deserve, not just the buildings themselves (which are being well looked after) but the context in which they are seen. This context is the entire streetscape from the town hall to the Lighthouse Building. No new building in this stretch of Euston Road should be planned without a proper, holistic, assessment of this specific “place” – to use a council buzzword.
The Council seems oblivious to the concept of this street scene forming a nationally important “place” which must be managed as a whole, not piecemeal. Their recently created “King’s Cross Place Plan” utterly ignores the existence of this area. If place-shaping is a meaningful activity, surely it must apply at this world-renowned location?
Are you between 14 and 25 and want to learn about photography this summer?
Kings Cross Environment 