Oh no! It is a great show - hope you can keep it going as a commercial podcast.

Isn’t that a bit daft? Whitewashing in hot climates, for instance, is longstanding practice and common sense.

There is already a statutory procedure for “local development orders” permitting development in particular areas and one for plans, it is just a case of synthesising these approaches and simplifying where possible.

What one wants is to incentivise rapid improvement of land in allocated areas. One might look at stamp duty, land value taxation, windfall tax on planning gain outside allocated areas, reductions on corporation tax for dvpmt profits within those areas.

Tax changes could realign incentives to prevent land in allocated areas being bought up to be held not redeveloped,whilst speculative unallocated sites are acquired cheaply and permission sought to gain a windfall from ‘planning gain’.

A relatively limited change to primary legislation could facilitate this. Local authorities will need to publish design codes and keep areas’ plans updated with enough developable land. It is failure to do the latter than often leads to “planning by appeal” on suboptimal sites.

It is straightforward to do some “zoning” without ripping up the planning system entirely. Designate areas in a local plan that get permission in principle /permitted development rights automatically within certain parameters. We do need planning, not sprawl/ ugly free-for-alls.

A region is a geographical area; a nation is a group of people identifying as having a shared culture and history.

In this case the sculptural friezes in Britain were taken down from where they had been erected, so it is not surprising that those against defacing statues are also against them having been removed.

Feels like short-termism that will leave the city without wholesale markets for perishable goods that will need to go somewhere if goods need to be inspected and compared by buyers.

Last time I checked the website, if we wanted to read all the opinion columns it was £52 per month.

The FT has priced out ordinary private news consumers to chase corporate subscribers. I’m sure it makes sense for the business, less so for the rest of us, alas.

I don’t think there is any technical reason why it couldn’t fill up with bot accounts, as X did, and there is no verification of accounts whatsoever by Blue Sky.

The best-laid plans…