If you’re interested in Cowboys and Indians, 21st century style, captured on camera and disseminated to the world via the web, then take a look at what some of the kids from the estate have been getting up to during a bit of down time ….

Down at the Lower Mill Estate we actively encourage conservation, and we try to ensure that wildlife can thrive in every possible way.

This past weekend quite a few of the community - and particularly some of the younger members - got together, in a small marquee, next to the local shop, to assist the birdlife in and around the estate by creating a whole array of new nest-boxes of all shapes and sizes. It’s part of a partnership between Lower Mill Estate and the Cotswold Waterpark Society (CWS).

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I went to Norfolk last week for the first time in my life.  A friend invited to pop along for a barbecue at his 3rd generation holiday cabin in the dunes of Heacham beach.  Got my EUA’s and flew up there with Ruby.  What I saw wound my watch back to the Hamptons in the 60’s (well what I was told it may have been like). Miles of beach, huge sky, moody lighting and a community of about 40 cabins huddled together, none with more than 3 bedrooms and all about 1m apart.

I loved the fact that the kids wandered from beach house to beach house calling on their mates and the parents did the same – it was a bit like I remember a local on a Friday evening when I was a teenager, long before the age of the catalogue pub. These beach houses “never” come onto the open market.  Except for once apparently. A city fella bought it for about three quarters of a million. That’s all well and good except HE ERECTED A FENCE AROUND his new acquisition.

It’s a fascinating fence.  It’s cut the community in half. It’s suddenly transformed a vacation living settlement into suburbia. “Don’t fence me in” is the cry of vacation architecture and anyone who wants to create a community.

Monday night’s C4 documentary “Dispatches: Britain’s Bad Housing” was just like a nasty modern house: cheap, shabbily constructed, paper thin, and built on scant foundations.

This shambling investigative report was pieced together from a fragmented patchwork of half-stories, conspiracy theories and unsubstantiated speculation, stitched on to a threadbare lining of facts. “Dispatches: Britain’s Bad Housing” did nothing to advance an intelligent national debate, and everything to promote glib prejudice.

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Whatever it is, exactly, that the Green Paper on housebuilding says, we know that there’s a phenomenal target that needs to be met over the coming years. The bad news is three million homes can’t be delivered in a responsible way by current housebuilders who’re interested in realising the maximum possible margins out of development land. In crude parlance, the term is “return on dirt”.

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