Dutch general elections are two weeks away and great fun for UK election nerds as it's basically the inverse of how the UK does it. These ad boards are up across the country listing all the parties running. Over a dozen of these could get seats. There are always new ones or ones I've not heard of.

Fun afternoon yesterday at the Groen Doeners Fesitvaal at Oase in Rotterdam. Nature isn't in some farmers field, it's in the cracks between us all

On Friday I saw Transmutation at AFFR, 50 minutes of limestone mining, quarrying and processing. It was essentially a @machinepix.bsky.social super cut which was perfect after a long week's work youtu.be/gV2O81SHJMU

Just last week, in Milan...

the phrase the Boris Wave has been going around a bit but I only just realised what it meant. I had thought it was boriswave and I was imagining clips of a mop haired Johnson overlaid with a VHS filter and dreamy music, nostalgic for 2019

Brits got a pretty easy ride in NL to get permanent residency post brexit, and it was still proper hard work to get it. The idea that ILR could be taken away from people who have made such a huge commitment to the UK is simply insulting.

My first memory of capital A Architecture is Grimshaw's RAC tower at the M5/M4 junction near Bristol. Seen from the back seat of a car it felt like the future. My appreciation for that building and all of Grimshaw's work has only grown over the years. Truly he was one of Britain's best architects.

Handig dat de oude Blokker waterkoker kapot gaat net nadat Blokker terug is

new business idea, dick and dom in da bungalow escape room

Exactly 10 years ago I moved to the Netherlands, I was not expecting to be here a whole decade later with a partner, a dog, and a whole life. It is freaking my nut!

I'm (finally) reading City of Quartz, and I'm not sure I could find a more suitable spot in the Netherlands to read it if I tried

Genoeg = genoeg.

This great FT piece correctly identifies the lack of stewardship in designing new settlements. We probably do need development corporations for new towns, but a more active planning later would already help a lot. I made this thread about it a couple of months back www.ft.com/content/e5d0...

The consequence of temporarily super abundant energy is really interesting. As the share of renewable electricity increases, finding a use for huge excesses of electricity at irregular times will likely become very important

Amsterdam has decided to take a much more industrial approach when it comes to My Fair Lady

UK political parties are missing out on abbreviated phrases for names, I mean come on, who doesn't want to be called PvdA/GL?

18m² is the legal minimum size of a dwelling in NL, it's hard to visualise. Mitchell van Eijk photographed a series of 18m² units in Eindhoven. I can say from experience it works, but only just, you need to have your life out of the home mitchellvaneijk.nl/Portfolio/Willemstraat28

Bizarre reading this from a euro house building perspective. Here the maximum developable house size is about 200m² (≈2k sq ft), above that they become unsaleable. Even 1.5k sq feet is considered a large family home

You see a lot of interesting bikes here in NL, this is my first refrigerated cargo bike though!

This week, the City of Rotterdam began a car-free pilot along a section of Meent—the busy shopping and nightlife street—which will be closed to all motorised traffic for the rest of the summer. Only emergency services, cyclists, mopeds, delivery vehicles before 10:30, and pedestrians can access it.🧵

While a nice street I've generally avoided the Meent for exactly this reason. I haven't seen the changes yet but I'm looking forward to spending more time there now!

A minor annoyance I am noticing more and more is architecture firms' websites displaying each project either as a black and white picture or even worse just a monochrome icon. It's almost impossible to get an idea of an office's body of work like this.

One rural Dutch municipality I know of will only provide care if you live in specific settlements. You want care, you move to where it's efficiently provided. Not sure if it's a model to copy but at least it gets beyond even more expensive care vs. more migrants to do shit jobs

Missed a few weeks at the allotment due to being busy and then not wanting heatstroke, the change is so huge it's like these plants wait to sneak up on you

I finally went to see Duiker's Zonnestraal sanatorium recently, it is, of course, fantastic. I would have gone years ago if someone had told me I would also get to watch GLIDERS the whole time I was there too!

Going down a water slide in front of Kim Jong Un sounds like the most terrifying job. You know what happens if you displease the leader, but how do you please him? Did the slider spend all last week checking the splash zone and dialing in his 'delight' scream?

It's an Apaches flying over the office kinda day

Also, one of my favourite things about NL is how every product has its own unique webshop, run by some tiny businesses in a village somewhere. Need a gigantic tank? Head to tankgigant.nl of course

There is an enormous water tank that's been sitting for months on a pavement in my neighborhood. The proposed use is a mystery (rainwater collection?). Its basically a local landmark now. I should apply for it to get city monument status

Dutch allotment problems, you send the family group chat a photo of all the weeds you dug up today and fail to notice the neighbours cannabis plant growing in the background

I was sent this and now I'm worried Mr Sleepy Man will be stuck in my head forever youtu.be/9RmMhWiXdV8

I really don't understand why cars can continue to drive after any incident. Sure they should remain moveable but only in a basic sense

It's the opening weekend of Rotterdams museum of migration and despite my usual cynicism about starchitecture this building is an undeniable sensation, a real exceeding of my expectations

I've been thinking about this for a couple of days, in particular the ability to create good design via regulation. Design decisions are reactions to the context of that decision. Policy is being used to force these decisions regardless of context but I don't see deregulation helping design either

6 votes in it at the Runcorn by-election. That was always my nightmare as a random party volunteer. 200 votes is someone else's fault. 6 votes is everyone and anyone's fault. Just one more canvassing session, staying out for a couple of extra streets, maybe that would have made the difference

A mate at GWR told me inner city commuter rail is only 1 train/hour towards avonmouth because ticket machines cost a couple hundred grand each so it's not worth the upgrade. Meanwhile up towards Gloucester you could build a new station just north of Stonehouse and connect all Stroud district...

The future is here and it's... blue?

Dutch kingsday (Koningsdag) should be this Sunday, but they changed it to Saturday out of respect for the church. Now it's the Pope's funeral and there is panic about millions of orange clad Dutch street partiers celebrating the birthday of their Protestant king

Seeing Rotterdam Centraal after a couple of trains to Brussels have been cancelled, we really need to work out what to do with a thousand stuck tourists if we want to get people off planes. Stations have so little space compared to airports, and much higher passenger throughput

Is there anything better than a business with reviews like this, bonus points if the owner replies to the 1* comments. Ruthless efficiency guaranteed

Love some shared mobility and all but the whole weekend i could hear the sound of e-bike alarms as the kids rode them round the neighbourhood. Lime made the alarm loud enough to annoy inside the flat and quiet enough that it's just a badge of honour for those riding it

The trouble with district heating is that unless you live in the far north the efficiency gains don't outweigh the infrastructure costs. They are too complex to run and you are better off renovating buildings to use far less energy in the first place www.theguardian.com/environment/...

This week in what I can take to my new allotment by bike

At an old job we ran a public consultation for new street names around kings cross. Loads of suggestions came in for an Amy Winehouse street as a local figure, but when Britney fans got wind there were suddenly online campaigns for every female solo act. We decided no names unless a century dead

Amazing what you can carry by bike

In the waiting room and they are building an extension out the back. My smart brain knows I can hear a hammer drill and falling masonry, my ape brain is asking what the hell they are doing to the poor guy who went in in front of me

Got chatting to a designer of subsea electric interconnecters yesterday. Apparently sabotage is annoying but not that big a deal right now, the cables are designed expecting they only work 80% of the time. The real pain is GPS spoofing as you don't even know your gps is wrong...

Adult life just becomes really wanting to have a sit down at a certain point doesn't it

As I got onto the metro yesterday evening, the doors opened and a pigeon stepped out the train in front of me, like any regular underground commuter

Following the 3rd runway announcement BBC producers of huge infrastructure project documentaries must be breathing a sigh of relief. Now Crossrail and the Thames supersewer are completed, and Hinckley C well underway, a shortage was looming