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Expert Directory
Our experts compose a knowledge network that allows us to master the important focus areas established by Icloby, LOBBYING, CORPORATE SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY, SOCIAL INNOVATION AND HEALTH.
Listado de embajadores (por orden alfabético):
Lawyer and Biologist, The George Washington University Law School, Washington, DC, US, Marshall University, Huntington, WV, US. Partner with Bowles Rice LLP, Charleston, WV, US. Represented clients in state and federal tribunals and before administrative agencies such as the US Department of Labor and the Internal Revenue Service, in litigation related to contractual business disputes and legal compliance. Biologist at the Army Corps of Engineers, Huntington, WV, US, responsible for the investigation and preparation of environmental impact statements in compliance with federal laws. Graduated cum laude and honored by the Faculty of the Biology Department of Marshall University.
Volunteer. Board of Directors of the Lawyer Disciplinary Board of the State of West Virginia, US.
Volunteer and member of the Board of Directors of the Young Women's Christian Association (YWCA) of Charleston, WV, US.
IESE Business School – University of Navarra, Doctor in the society of information and knowledge. Innovation. Applied economics.
Chief of Human Resources at Eurecat – Technology Centre of Catalonia. Collaborating profesor at UOC.
Joan Fontrodona Felip is a Professor and Director of the Department of Business Ethics, and academic director of the IESE Center for Business in Society. He holds a PhD in Philosophy from the University of Navarra and an MBA from IESE.
The Center for Business Ethics (Bentley College), the Harvard Business School and the Francisco Marroquín University (Guatemala) have all hosted Prof. Fontrodona as a visiting professor. He is president of Ethics, Economics and Management (the Spanish section of the European Business Ethics Network), and member of the executive committee of the Association of Spanish Entities adhering to the United Nations Global Compact (ASEPAM). He participates in the Academic Committee of the European Academy of Business in Society (EABIS). He is a member of Forética, as well as an Associate Researcher at the Enterprise and Humanism Institute of the Universidad de Navarra. In addition, he is part of the Social Responsibility Committee of the Board of the Association of Chartered Accountants of Catalonia.
PhD from the Universitat Rovira i Virgili, with mention of European Doctorate. Expert in gender policies in both the private company and public administration consultancy. From his own consultancy, Atena Gender Consulting collaborates in research projects, postgraduate studies and studies at the Rovira i Virgili University, the Open University of Catalonia and the Autonomous University of Barcelona.
Bachelor's Degree in Sociology from the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile and Master's in Corporate Social Responsibility, Accounting and Social Auditing from the Universitat de Barcelona.
He has several publications in the Universidad Católica del Norte, Seminar on Social Responsibility in Mining, ALAS Congress, etc.
Víctor Gédez is president of CERSE (Consultancy in Ethics and Corporate Social Responsibility) and Vice President of the Club of Rome (Venezuela Chapter).
He is also a professor in the Master of Corporate Social Responsibility at the University of Barcelona (Spain), as well as a professor in the Specialization in Corporate Social Responsibility at the Metropolitan University, and a professor of the Diploma of Corporate Social Responsibility at the Simón Bolívar University. He is also an academic consultant for the Network of Universities for Corporate Social Responsibility of the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) and as an external director of the Commercial Communications Liability Committee of Empresas Polar, as well as a member of the Board of Directors. Bigott Foundation.
Marc is Flemish-Belgian, holds a SLOAN MSc in Leadership and Strategy from London Business School and a Master's Degree in Engineering from KIH De Nayer in Belgium. He lives in Luxembourg since 20 years and is a member of his local town council.
During his career, Marc held several senior international executive positions such as General Manager, Managing Director and VP Sales & Marketing.
Marc is passionate about entrepreneurship and about leveraging cultural expertise to improve business performance as well as social cohesion.
He is founder and owner of Imajine Sàrl, a consultancy company specialised in Intercultural Management as well as Organisational Culture and Strategy and licensee of Hofstede Insights, a global consultancy.
Marc is co-author of the book: Negotiate like a local, 7 mindsets to increase your success rate in international business. The book was endorsed by Prof David Arnold from LBS and by Prof Gertjan Hofstede. Translations in Spanish, Russian, Mandarin and German are underway.
He is co-founder of 'La Maison pour le Développement des Compétences Interculturelles' or 'MDCI', a non-profit organisation supporting integration of refugees in the Luxembourg society by working with leaders as well as trainers to build bridges across the cultural divide and also serves as president of the 'commission d'intégration' in his local commune.
Marc is co-founder and chairman of Molecular Plasma Group, a Luxembourg-based start-up in the high-tech industrial space and also serves on several other boards.
Agronomist, and Master in Business Administration and Management
Business Management and Administration by the Instituto de Empresa
Specialized consultant in corporate responsibility and excellence, Head of the Corporate Responsibility and Excellence Department and Professor and student at the University of Barcelona, Master in Corporate Social Responsibility and social audit.
Economist specialist in healthcare. BSc in Economics. Master's in Health Economics and Health Care Management. Master's in Economic and Finance Management, Quality Management in Primary Health Care, Doctorate in Business Organization.
Direct experience for more than 10 years in managing health care organizations in different positions (finance, human resources and IT). With a clear project management orientation, I have been involved in consulting at a national and international scope, working as international healthcare consultant in projects for the European Commission or World Health Organisation.
Currently working as Technical Assistant for the Fundació TicSalut (Mataró, Spain) and Chief Financial and Innovation Officer of CASAP (Castelldefels, Spain). Business administration and finance management of primary care and emergency care organization.
Specialties: Health economics, Healthcare management, Finance management, Human resources and professional development, Information systems, International alliances, International trading
Innovation Manager, Fundación TicSalut.
With a degree in Medicine and Surgery from UAB.
Master's degree in Health Institutions UAB, Executive Master's in Health Organization Management ESADE, PDG IESE, among others. Advanced Leadership Health Forum Member Berkeley University of California.
Expert Consultant of companies and institutions, in clinical management, health process management, private management of public resources, in different cultures, Latin America, Europe and Asia, Professor and experienced speaker.
He is an expert in clinical management, the treatment of chronic patients, health quality, process management, comprehensive care and related technologies. He has an Executive Master's in Healthcare Organization Management. He has been a consultant to companies throughout the value chain in areas related to healthcare and new technologies. He currently runs the Innovation Department at the TicSalut Foundation.
He studied Communications and History and has various other qualifications, including Crisis Management, Business Administration and Marketing. Founder and President of the first Public Relation agency in Portugal – Omniconsul.
He has worked for over 30 years as specialist in crisis management and lobbying/public affairs and has provided consultancy services and coordinated seminars in these fields in Portugal and abroad.
Autor of various reference books in the communication sector. He is renowned at the European level as a specialist in Lobbying being accedited as a lobbyist at the European Parlamient.
Doctor in economics. PDG IESE Business School. Master in Corporate Social Responsibility, social audit. Post graduate in Finance and Marketing from the Universidad Politécnica de Catalunya, Post graduate in Multivariate Analysis and Analysis of time series by the Universidad Politécnica de Catalunya. Professor at the Universitat de Girona and the Universidad Internacional de Catalunya. Specialist with more than 20 years in management of commercial teams and as a consultant in various business projects.
Doctor (Ph.D) in Economics & Business Administration, Master's in Administrative Management, Business Administration and Management (ADE), Laws and Economics Degree from the University Abat Oliba – CEU, Spain. Business Administration, University of Barcelona (UB), Spain. Postgraduate in Legal Practice from the ICAB. Senior Management Program (PLD) & HBS Finance Excellence Program at Harvard Business School (Executive Education) Boston – USA. Tax specialist from Institute of Public Economics, Cooperative and Financial Law at the UB.
He began his professional career in the field of consultancy, audit and consulting, later specializing in Management Control and Economic Financial Management in the Environmental and Industrial Machinery (2007 -2011) and Pharmaceutical industry (1993 -2006).
In this latter sector he has held the position of Financial Controller, Controller Manager (BPA) and Chief Financial Officer (CFO) at different Pharmaceutical and Biotechnology companies.
He is a university professor in the Department of Economics and Business at the University Abat Oliba – CEU.
Specialized in Corporate Governance, he is involved in the Board of Directors and the Audit and Compliance Committee of the Company (MedCap) listed on the Spanish Continuous Market (Stock Exchanges of Madrid, Barcelona, Bilbao and Valencia). He is business consultant in strategy and valuation of companies, and Judicial Economic Expert, member of the Col·legi d'Economistes de Catalunya and enrolled in that professional association in the lists of the Justice Administration of forensic actions and contradictory expert appraisals.
Twice awarded, by Actualidad Económica magazine, in collaboration with KPMG, with the award to one of the 100 Best Financial Directors of Spain, and recognised as one of the 25 Most Innovative Financial Directors.
Carme Riera i Prunera holds a Degree in Economics and Business Administration from the Pompeu Fabra University in 1997. She is a teacher in Economics from the London School of Economics in 1998. In 2001, she earned a doctorate degree in Economy by the University of Barcelona with the thesis "Essays on Fiscal Policy, Human Capital, Inequality and Growth". The 2007-2008 academic year completed the Vicens Vives Program for Leadership and Civic Commitment at ESADE for young executives.
The 2000-2001 course went to the University of Washington (WA) as a doctorate. Subsequently, the 2002-2003 course was a visiting professor at the University of Washington (WA) teaching the subject Economic Development. Currently, and since 2003, She has been a full professor at the Faculty of Economics and Business of the University of Barcelona, in the Department of Econometrics, Statistics and Applied Economics. Since 2004 She has been a tutor in Economics and Business Studies at the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC) and since 2018, consultant for the subject of Statistical Foundations. She is part of the consolidated group of Regional Quantitative Analysis (AQR) and the IREA-UB research institute, of which she is his scientific secretary.
Her lines of research focus on economic growth, economic policy, electronic governance and educational analysis and human capital, with special attention to the insertion of graduates into the labor market. In recent years, she has participated in various projects related to economic policies and government spending, as well as educational research, the competencies of graduates and the relationship between the university and the company.
PhD Economics. Co-founder & CEO of Jobui, an app that connects students with professionals for a one-hour job-shadowing experience. Co-founder of Puddle, an online platform based in San Francisco where you can borrow money easily from a community of like-minded people. Puddle was invested in by Google Ventures and Andreesen Horowitz. I also founded ACAF, an organisation implementing Puddles offline in more than 10 countries. I am an Ashoka fellow and was selected Best Creative Entrepreneur of the World in 2008. I hold a PhD in Microfinance.
Gumersindo Ruiz is currently Honorary professor of Economics at the University of Málaga (previously at Alicante and Barcelona universities, where he got his PhD in Economics), teaching at the Accounting and Finance degree, and the Master of Finance and Insurance. Recently he has been the director of a doctoral thesis on the transmission mechanism of the ECB monetary policy, an empirical research on credit distribution through the EU.
He is also the Senior Advisor, with a small team, to the President of UnicajaBanco, a leader and profitable former regional saving bank.
In 1991 he was the President of Caja de Ahorros de Antequera, merging then with another four saving banks to create Unicaja. In the new Unicaja he founded Unicorp, a financial holding; Unigest, a society for investment funds management; Ahorroandaluz, for pension funds management; Unicorp Mediación, an insurance broker; Unicorp Patrimonio, an asset management society; and Unicorp Vida, a life insurance company . In 1992 Unicorp was also a founding member of Titulización de Activos, leader in the securitization business in Spain. He was the President or CEO in each society till 2007.
Recent publications by Gumersindo Ruiz include: contributor to "The First Great Recession of the 21st Century", Edward Elgar Publishers, 2011; contributor to "The First Crisis in a Global Economy", Thomson Reuters, 2011; "Mortgage Foreclosure Process in Securitization Funds", Revista de Economistas Forenses, 2011; "Debt Securitization in the Spanish Electrical Sector", Cuadernos de Economía, 2011. "Why the rate of interest will be at very low levels for years", Arethuse, 2014; "Forecasting the price of housing in Spain: An econometric model", Jornadas Internacionales de Política Económica, 2017; "Rate of interest and Taylor´s Rule", Arethuse, 2017. Two e-books on the subject of securitization by Gumersindo Ruiz et al have been published by the Instituto de Estudios Inmobiliarios (Instai).
For more than thirteen years he has been a weekly columnist for Grupo Joly, a group of nine regional newspapers.
He is also the President of the Instituto de Análisis Inmobiliario, a center for research on real estate and appraisal; the Presidente of the "Economy and Finance Commission" at the Málaga Chamber of Commerce; Senior Advisor to AIS-International, artificial intelligence; and a Senior Advisor to the program for high level golf players studying at Málaga University.
In the seventies he was a Fulbright student in the United States, a Fundación March scholar, and visitor professor in the University of California, Berkeley.
In the last few years he has been actively involved in research and teaching on Governance, Corporate Social Responsibility and Compliance, with presentations at the University of Malaga, European Parliament Program: "GRSCC in the European Union" (May 2018); and University of La Laguna: "Governance post-crisis in the EU: the vision of the firm" (September 2018)
Bachelor's degree in Pharmacy. Master General Management Program (GMP).Master in Sales and Marketing
Management. Master in Advanced Human Resources Management.
Business manager of more than 200 million euros in sales, with consolidated
experience in the pharma sector. Leader of Marketing, Sales, Medical Affairs,
Training and Commercial Planning& Innovation teams. Able to define and
implement strategic plans that provide sustainability in the short and medium
term. She promotes effective and competitive organizations, create social responsibility projects and innovate
clients services and commercial management processes.
DR. Jason A. Scorza is Professor of Political Science and Philosophy at Fairleigh Dickinson University where he teaches and lectures on the history of political and social thought and the ethics of public and international affairs.
Dr.Scorza earned his Ph.D. in Politics at Princeton University and is author of a book, Strong Liberalism: Habits of Mind for Democratic Citizenship (Tufts University Press, 2007), as well as more than forty papers and articles, including those appearing in journals such as Political Theory, The Review of Politics, Theory and Research in Education, and the International Journal of Politics and Ethics. He also is editor of Higher Education as a Bridge to the Future (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2015).
Dr. Scorza also serves as Vice Provost for International Affairs at Fairleigh Dickinson University in New Jersey (USA). In the latter capacity he oversees global learning programs, study abroad programs, global partnerships, international initiatives, and FDU's University Core Curriculum. Under Scorza's leadership, FDU became the first university in the world to be granted Special Consultative Status by the United Nations Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC).
William "Pat" Schuber served as The County Executive of Bergen County for 12 years, 9 years as a member of the New Jersey State Assembly and Mayor of the Borough of Bogota for 4 years.
He is an Senior Lecturer in the School of Administrative Science, Petrocelli College, Fairleigh Dickinson University. He is a faculty member in the Master of Administrative Science (MAS), Master of Science in Cyber and Homeland Security (MSCHSA), Master of Sports Administration (MSA) and Bachelor of Arts in Individualized Studies (BAIS). His courses include Leadership, Government, Homeland Security, Law, Ethics and Communication. Pat is also the Co-Director of the Diplomacy and International Relations Program. He is a past Adjunct Professor in Business Law at Montclair University and Seton Hall University. He is an Instructor in the Certified Public Manager Course of Studies (CPM) and the Police Executive Leadership Course sponsored by the New Jersey State Association of Chiefs of Police and the New Jersey State Police (NJSP). He is also an honorary member of the New Jersey State Association of Chiefs of Police.
Pat has conducted Leadership Staff Ride Seminars at the Battlefields of Gettysburg, Antietam, Trenton, Princeton, Monmouth Courthouse, Brandywine and Normandy, France. He lectures frequently on military history, historical leadership, homeland security, ethics, communication and conflict resolution to numerous civic groups.
Pat is the Seminar Director for the Bergen Leads Program sponsored by the Volunteer Center of Bergen County. This program trains future leaders in business, non-profit and government.
He has written several scholarly articles and co-authored books on topics of History, Leadership and Homeland Security.
He served as a Captain in the US Army Reserve (Retired).
He has been appointed a Commissioner of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey.
Pat is a graduate of Fordham University with a BA and received his JD at Fordham University School of Law. He is currently serving Of Counsel to the law firm of DeCotiis, Fitzpatrick & Cole, LLP in Teaneck, New Jersey.
Doctor in Medicine and Surgery, with Cum laude honors, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona.
Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology. Faculties of Medicine, UB and UAB.
Specialist in Clinical Analysis.
Specialist in Clinical Biochemistry.
Coordinator for Research, Development and Innovation (RDI), European Union. Col·legi Oficial de Metges de Barcelona.
– Appointed by the Cabinet of the Departament d'Innovació, Universitats i Empresa (DIUE), as the responsible point of contact in the field of health for Catalonia and accepted by the "European Office of the Ministry of Science and Innovation" (MICINN), for the 7th Framework Program.
– Active member of the Institutional Human Resources Strategy Group (Charter and Code for Recruitment of European Researchers, C & C, USA)
– President of the Advisory Counsel of Clinical Laboratories of Catalonia, Department of Health, Generalitat de Catalunya.
210 articles published in scientific journals; 30 chapters in books, 215 lectures and/or international presentations and 615 national presentations; awarded grants for 21 national research projects awarded as the principal investigator, plus 4 projects awarded by the European Union; 4 European projects as scientific adviser and 11 national; 1 invention patent "(Ref. 9701157) Amino acid formulas for the elderly and procedure for calculations of the same" 16 NATIONAL AND INTERNATIONAL HONORS, INCLUDING- Creu de Sant Jordi, granted by the Government of the Generalitat de Catalunya – Creu de d'Institut Català de la Salut (ICS), in recognition of his dedication to Public Health throughout different positions (1966-2010) – Medal of the Research Foundation, Hospital Universitari Vall d'Hebron- "Aparicio Garrido, Asociación Española de Biopatología Médica (AEBM)" – "Abraham García-Almansa, Spanish Society of Basic and Applied Nutrition (SENBA)"- "Paul Harris" Medal, Rotary International Foundation. – BioMerieux, "Spanish Society of Clinical Chemistry (SEQC)
At CIBBIM-Nanomedicine cooperation has always endured. We have several collaborations with Biotech and Pharma companies centered on the identification of new cancer biomarkers for diagnosis and therapeutic targets using high throughput screening strategies. The success of some of these projects can be already sustained by new patented cancer biomarkers.
We have a fully-developed Research Program based on Nanotechnology for Biomedical applications and in particular in targeted and non-targeted drug delivery systems, diagnosis and new imaging tools in oncology and rare diseases. In this context, we are involved in several studies, some of them within Industrial Consortiums, in which animal models are used for addressing validation and toxicity analysis of some nanotechnology approaches directed towards specific tumor targets.
One of our aims is to provide the Industry and other research groups with an optimal in vivo validation platform for preclinical studies of new nanotechnology biomedical developments.
Development of appropriate nanotechnology devices is crucial to achieve substantial improvements on cancer drug delivery, and diagnostics. To achieve higher standards and better technological approaches in this field is of the utmost importance to ensure research collaborations among research groups with different biomedical, clinical and technological areas of expertise, and also to provide a good interactive environment and transnational cooperative working with adequate industrial, technological and clinical partnerships. These should ensure an optimal improvement of the actual diagnostic tools and treatment protocols of the cancer patients and will provide better survival, lower health costs and furthermore, a considerable improvement on their overall quality of life.
Josep Tàpies holds the Family-Owned Business Chair at IESE and is a Professor in the Department of Strategic Management. He holds a PhD in Industrial Engineering from the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC) and has an MBA from ESADE.
His areas of expertise include strategic management, corporate governance, and family-owned businesses, their development and governance structures. He currently teaches in the MBA program and in other training programs for managers at IESE. He also designs programs focused on topics specifically related to the family-owned business, where he teaches General Management, Government and Strategy in the Family-Owned Business.
Professor Tàpies has been a professor of General Management at different business schools in Europe and Latin America: AESE in Portugal, IDE in Ecuador, PAD-Universidad de Piura in Peru, ISE in Brazil, IAE in Argentina, ESE in Chile and INALDE in Colombia. He has also been a member of the academic board of IPADE in Mexico and the ESE of Santiago, Chile.
For many years, he has worked as an advisor in several companies, many of them family-owned, as well as in Spanish and international banking institutions. He is a member of the Board of Directors of several Spanish companies, Fellow of the International Family Enterprise Research Academy (IFERA), member of the board of directors of the Spanish Association of Family-Owned Business Consultants and Academicians (CAEF). He is also a member of the International Academy of Management.
Professor Tàpies is the author of numerous book chapters and books such as: "100 Familias que cambiaron el mundo: Las empresas familiares y la industrialización", "Sí quiero: el compromiso de la familia empresaria", "Management Buy Out", "Plan de vuelo", "Empresa familiar, ni tan pequeña ni tan joven","Family values and value creation" (junto con el profesor John L. Ward), "Familia empresaria" and "Génesis del consejo". He has also written a wide variety of academic and journalistic articles on family-owned businesses.
More information on the blog
Full Professor of Entrepreneurship, Vice Dean of Entrepreneurship and Internationalization, and PhD Program Director (International Doctorate in Entrepreneurship and Management, iDEM) at the School of Economics and Business, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB). I received a PhD (European Doctoral Programme in Entrepreneurship and Small Business Management, UAB / Växjö University – Sweden), a MA in Applied Research in Social and Cultural Anthropology (UAB) and a BA in Economics and Business (UAB). I also regularly visit Haas School of Business (University of California BerkeIey). My research focuses on the analysis of factors affecting entrepreneurship in different contexts, using the institutional approach as a theoretical framework, and combining quantitative and qualitative methodologies. I have published several studies in international academic journals (including Entrepreneurship and Regional Development, International Small Business Journal, Journal of Small Business Management, Journal of Technology Transfer, Research Policy, Small Business Economics, Technological Forecasting and Social Change, etc.) and I participate in Spanish and international research projects (GEM, PSED, GUESSS). Currently, I run the Minor in Entrepreneurship and Social Innovation and teach entrepreneurship courses at undergraduate (Department of Business –School of Economics and Business-), master (Master in Applied Research in Economics and Business -MAREB-) and doctoral level (International Doctorate in Entrepreneurship and Management, iDEM) at the UAB and at other international universities. Also, I work as a consultant in entrepreneurship, innovation and SMEs in many projects of the Catalan and Spanish government, European Union, OCDE and the private sector. I am co-founder and director of Centre for University Entrepreneurship -CIEU- (UAB Emprèn).
PhD in Engineering applied to projects: quality, environment, safety and health and food safety by the Polytechnic University of Catalonia.
Bachelor in Science in Environmental Science by Fairleigh Dickinson University, New Jersey, USA.
Degree in Environmental Sciences from the Spanish Ministry of Education
Master in Business Administration and Management MBA by CEPADE.
Master in Quality Management by the School of Industrial Organization of Madrid.
Master in Prevention of Occupational Risks in the 3 specialties by the Polytechnic University of Catalonia.
He has developed his career in the world of environmental management, quality, environment, risk prevention and corporate social responsibility for 20 years in different companies from different business sectors. She is currently Co-founder and Manager of Corporate Social Responsibility and Marketing at IVANOVICH GAMES SL (a technology company that designs, develops and publishes video games on different platforms worldwide).
She has been and is a speaker for different universities such as UB, UPC, IUSC, EAE Business School, etc.)
Fundación Palacio de Villalón. (Responsible for the Registry of works of art since 2013. Legal advice and technical secretariat of the Board of Trustees of the Foundation)
Law degree from the Complutense University of Madrid, Master in Taxation from the Centro de Estudios Garrigues.
He has taught courses at FGUMA and UNIA.
Degree in Geography and History June 1997. University of Navarra
Degree in Artistic Studies September 1997. University
Cooperation Project Manager having participated in the preparation, monitoring and justification of more than 160 projects in the following countries: Democratic Republic of the Congo, Nigeria, Ivory Coast, Kenya, Guatemala, El Salvador, Peru, Lebanon, Bolivia and India since 1992 to the present.
Training Consultant 2017- Associate Professor of the University of Navarra. Law School. Degree of International Relations. Subject: Development Cooperation and Humanitarian Assistance of the EU.
International Cooperation Consultant: Project Management, Identification, Formulation, Monitoring, Justification, External Evaluations, Strategic Plans and Communication Plans. International Volunteering Management.
Subjects taught: Project formulation according to Logical Framework, Fundraising, Volunteering and Awareness.
Dr. Luján Comas: Bachelor of Medicine and Surgery, specializing in Anesthesiology and Resuscitation, worked as an adjunct physician at Vall d'Hebron Hospital for 32 years. Of these 18 as an anesthesiologist in cardiac surgery. He was in the pioneer bipulmonary transplant team in Spain and in the first lung transplant in Catalonia. Participate for more than 20 years in the courses "Consciousness in Life" in Merrylife. He has participated in conferences and various forums and conferences, national and international, especially in the specialties of Cardiac Surgery, Rheumatic Diseases, Anesthesia resuscitation and therapeutic pain. He has also published research, scientific articles, interviews and several books.
Co-founder of the Merry Human Life Society (Merrylife), Vice President of the Metta Hospice Foundation, Founding Partner of the Neural Therapy Research Foundation and Honorary Partner of the Scientific Psychological Research Society.
Doctor in Sociology from the University of Barcelona. She is a social analyst who has combined academic research and applied sociology. Her teaching and research activity is carried out at the ESADE Institute for Social Innovation, addressing issues related to digital transformation and social impact. The last report she has led is "My Data, My Rules. From data extractivism to digital empowerment".
She is also an active disseminator and regularly participates in conferences and conferences. She writes regularly in different newspapers (El Periódico, ARA, El Diari de l'Educació) and also collaborates in radio and TV programs. She has just published his first essay about the digital experience of young people, entitled "You are not your self. 9 digital secrets that everyone lives but nobody explains."
Industrial Engineer from the University of Navarra, PhD Engineer from the Technische Universität Berlin, Black Belt from the Polytechnic University of Catalonia, Laura, began her professional career at the Volkswagen Quality Chair.
He has published four books and more than twenty articles in international scientific journals related to quality management. He has attended international congress numbers and actively participates with different universities. In the field of teaching, she is a collaborating professor at the UIC (International University of Catalonia), collaborating professor of the Master in Supply Chain Management at the UPC, collaborating professor at the ICIL and a visiting professor at the master in Project Management at the University of Piura in Peru .
Professional experience: She has developed her career as Quality Director of different MEM companies, (Automotive, Daimler Group Company), TSB (Transport, Barcelona, 1000 employees) among others, creating the quality department. EFQM, ISO 9001: 2015, SQAS. Internal audits. Outsourcing. Supplier Evaluation. Read Management Process improvement. Continuous improvement teams, among other functions.
Jordi Mas holds a PhD in Microbiology from the University of Barcelona and an MBA from ESADE Business School, Barcelona, Spain. He started his professional career as a scientific researcher in the fields of microbial ecology and biotechnology and has taught at several universities in the Barcelona area.
He also worked in the R&D division of a chemical company located in Barcelona. Since 1996, he has specialized in R&D management. In this capacity, his responsibilities have ranged from project manager to Director of the Catalan Foundation for Research and Innovation (FCRI), Coordinator of International Relations at the Secretariat for Universities and Research (SUR) of the Catalan Government, and Executive Director of the Agency for Management of University and Research Grants (AGAUR). Currently he is the Program Officer of the Spanish Supercomputing Network (RES) at the Barcelona Supercomputer Center (BSC).
He has also taught strategy, innovation and entrepreneurship at different universities. He has also served as Council Member of the city of Sitges, responsible for finance, city planning, public health and environmental issues.
Currently he serves as Associate Professor of Microbiology at the Autonomous University of Barcelona (Faculty of Biosciences, UAB) and at the International University of Catalonia (Faculty of Odontology, UIC).


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Selecting a Digital Workflow26 Oct 2015
Disclaimer: workflows are rather infinitely customizable to fit project goals, intellectual patterns, and individual quirks. I am writing mine up because it has been useful for me to see how others are solving such problems. I invite you to take what is useful, discard what is not, and share what you have found.
Writing a dissertation is, among many things, a exercise in data management. Primary materials and their accompanying notes must be organized. Secondary materials and their notes must be organized. Ones own writing must be organized. And, when doing computational analysis, the code, processes, and results must be organized. This, I can attest, can be a daunting mountain of things to organize (and I like to organize).
There are many available solutions for wrangling this data, some of which cost money, some of which are free, and all of which cater to different workflows. For myself, I have found that my reliance on computational methods and my goal of HTML as the final output make many of the solutions my colleagues use with great success (such as Scrivener and Evernote) just not work well for me. In addition, my own restlessness with interfaces has made interoperability a high priority - I need to be able to use many tools on the same document without having to worry about exporting to different formats in-between. This has lead to my first constraint: my work needs to be done in a plain text format that, eventually, will easily convert to HTML.
The second problem is version control. On a number of projects in the past, written in Word or Pages, I have created many different named versions along the way. When getting feedback, new versions were created and results had to be reincorporated back into the authoritative version. This is all, well, very inefficient. And, while many of these sins can be overcome when writing text for humans, the universe is less forgiving when working with code. And so, constraint number two: my work needs to be under version control and duplication should be limited.
The third problem is one of reproducibility and computational methods. The experiments that I run on my data need to be clearly documented and reproducible. While this is generally good practice, it is especially important for computational research. Reproducible and clearly documented work is important for the consistency of my own work over time, and to enable my scholarship to be interrogated and used by others. And so, the third constraint: my work needs to be done in such a way that my methods are transparent, consistent, and reproducible.
My solution to the first constraint is Markdown. All of my writing is being done in markdown — including this blogpost! Markdown enables me to designate the information hierarchies and easily convert to HTML, but also to work on files in multiple interfaces. Currently, I am writing in Ulysses, but I also have used Notebooks, IA Writer, and Sublime text editor. What I love about Ulysses is that I can have one writing interface, but draw from multiple folders, most of which are tied to git repositories and/or dropbox. Ulysses has a handy file browser window, so it is easy to move between files and see them all as part of the larger project. But regardless of the application being used, it is the same file that I am working with across multiple platforms, applications, and devices.
My solution to the second constraint is Github and the Github Student Developer Pack. Git and Github enable version control, and multiple branches, and all sorts of powerful ways to keep my computational work organized. In addition, Github's student pack comes with 5 private repos (private while you are a student), along with a number of other cool perks. While I am a fan of working in the open and plan to open up my work over time, I have also come to value being able to make mistakes in the quiet of my own digital world. Dissertations are hard, and intimidating, and there is something nice about not having to get it right from the very beginning while still being able to share with advisors and select colleagues.
But, Github hasn't proved the best for the writing side of things. The default wiki is limited in its functionality, especially in terms of enabling commenting, and repos are not really made for reading. My current version control solution for the writing side of the project is Penflip, billed as "Github for Writing". Writing with Penflip can be done through the web interface, or by cloning down the files (which are in markdown) and working locally. As such, the platform conforms to the markdown and the "one version" requirements. The platform is free if your writing is public, and $10/month for private repos, which is what I am trying out. I am using PenFlip a bit like a wiki, with general pages for notes on different primary documents and overarching pages that describe lines of inquiry and link the associated note and code files together.1 This is the central core of my workflow - the place that ties together notes, code, and analysis and lays the ground work for the final product. So far it is working well for the writing, though using it for distribution commenting has been a little bumpy as the interface needs a little more refining.
And the code. The code was actually the first of these problems I solved. Of the programming languages to learn, I have found Python to be the most comfortable to work in. It has great libraries for text analysis, and comes with the benefit of Jupyter Notebooks (previously IPython Notebooks). Working in IPython Notebooks allows me to integrate descriptive text in markdown with code and the resulting visualizations. The resulting document is plain text, can be versioned, and displays in HTML for sharing. The platform conforms to my first two requirements — markdown and version controlled — while also making my methods transparent and reproducible. I run the Jupyter server locally, and am sharing pieces that have been successfully executed via nbviewer - for example, I recently released the code I used to create my pilot sample of one of my primary corpuses. I am also abstracting code that is run more than once into a local library of functions. Having these functions enables me to reliably follow the same processes over time, thus creating results that are reproducible and comparable.
And that is my current tooling for organizing and writing both my digital experiments and my surrounding explanations and narrative.
I somehow missed the "research wiki" bus a while back, but thanks to a recent comment made by Abby Mullen, I am a happy convert to the whole concept. ↩

subset: commoncrawl


text:
We've been fans of Instagram for a while, so we were keen to see what would happen when its developers opened Instagram's API to others. While there have been a few toe-in-the-water experiments, the first really interesting idea we've seen is Postagram. The service allows you to turn any Instagram image into a 300 dpi postcard for just US$0.99, posted to anywhere in the world. It'll be delivered within 2-5 days in the USA and will take a bit longer to get elsewhere. Sounds like a bargain.
Download the app now and give it a try if you already have Instagram installed. Postagram has a special launch offer that gives you your first postcard for free. Perfect for sending real postcards to your parents and anyone who isn't quite up there with you on the cutting edge of e-postcard delivery this summer.


text:
Lets face it. I hate filing cabinets. They are unavoidable. I try to keep my project files brief, and store as much as I can in my project files on the computer. But some projects just generate more paper than others. And the truth is for some businesses there is no getting away from paper trails. So when it comes to filing cabinets I love Meridian. Meridian is the filing cabinet brand owned by Herman Miller, and what makes their filing cabinets unique is that they are completely modular. Each cabinet consists of a base, storage units be they drawers or cabinets or flipper doors or shelves, and a top. You can stack them high, or stack them low, and if you need to move you can re-arrange them and change their height.
The upshot of this is that you can adapt them to your workplace. Instead of file cabinets as a liability for your space - where are we going to put this foreboding wall of drawers... Now they can play a positive role in the way you define space in your office. A low partition, a high privacy wall, a display niche, you decide.


text:
As part of our Voices of Spring Choral Month, we've asked prominent voices in the Minnesota choral community to tell us their top 10 choral pieces so we could share them with you!
Dr. Erik Christiansen is the grandson of the great F. Melius Christiansen and one of several Christiansen family choral figures responsible for the deep choral tradition we have here in Minnesota. However, his influence is far greater than we might immediately grasp.
We know about our wonderful choirs from the many great collegiate institutions, and our professional/semi-professional ensembles such as VocalEssence, Cantus, The Singers, National Lutheran Choir, etc. But where does this talent come from? Who cultivates the choral sound, the voice, and technique?
The truth is, high schools, middle schools, community children's choirs, and church choirs are instrumental in training these young voices long before colleges or professional choirs get a hold of the singers. Dr. Christiansen is a crucial part of this process, and has been responsible for developing the voices of countless young students.
Dr. Christiansen attended Concordia College, Moorhead and went on to receive his DMA at Arizona State University. He has taught at Southeastern Louisiana University, Capital University, and his alma mater, Concordia College. He has been teaching at the Stillwater Area Schools since 1974 and has been instrumental in making Sillwater one of the top choral districts in the state, and arguably the country.
I personally have many friends from Stillwater who are continuing to make great choral music, due in part to the work of Dr. Christiansen. Thank you "Doc" (as his students like to call him)!
In no particular order...
1. Knut Nystedt: O Crux
2. Alberto Ginastera: Lamentations of Jeremiah
3. Johannes Brahms: German Requiem, Op. 45
4. Johannes Brahms: O Savior, Throw the Heavens Wide, Op. 74, no. 2
5. Randall Thompson: Peaceable Kingdom
6. Krzysztof Penderecki: Stabat Mater
7. Johann Sebastian Bach: Singet dem Hern, BWV 225
8. Johann Sebastian Bach: Komm Susser Tod, BWV 478
9. Arnold Schoenberg: De Profundis
10. Frances Poulenc: Any and all of his motets!


text:
The spirit of Hackney Wick.Posted: December 14, 2015 Filed under: Bohemian London, Class, Dereliction, Graffiti, Lettering, London Types | Tags: graffiti, Hackney Wick, Hipster London, Lea Tavern, new East End 3 Comments
Katy Evans Bush:
Hackney Wick – that seedy, industrial, inaccessible part of Hackney down by the river that languished forgotten for decades – is still holding onto its wasteland aesthetic. There are desolate streets, decrepit warehouses, and graffiti all over every available surface as far as they eye can see. But these days, this appearance is a choice – it's an aesthetic – and Hackney Wick costs money. Forget what you've heard about Dalston, or Peckham – they've gone, tipped over the edge. The real hipster epicentre is Hackney Wick.
The warehouses now house bars, the vans sell veggieburgers and pastries, the air carries an aroma of artisan beer and the graffiti covering all those brick walls is just as likely to be 'street'-style advertising as actual tagging. But it's apparently not quite as simple as that: there's a war being fought for the spirit of Hackney Wick, and the battleground is its brick walls. Two Sunday afternoon trips a couple of weeks apart revealed the speed with which one covers the other, and is covered again.
Even the graffiti brings with it the subtle but unmistakeable whiff of money. The burgers aren't cheap. The warehouses house galleries. The labels on the single-hop beer look very similar to the pictures on the walls outside. Last weekend there was a Christmas tree seller in the middle of Queen's Yard (apparently the epicentre of the epicentre), with trees selling for anywhere £35 to £75.
Surprisingly, or unsurprisingly, alongside the intensely calm beardy cyclist fellows, the main demographic you see is the well-dressed bourgeoisie. Walking about. Being given the tour by their offspring. Eating artisanal food. Taking photographs. Like the tall, slim, puffa-clad French family we saw the other week, heading for their Range Rover, looking round and all exclaiming at once. Your correspondents felt a pang of kinship for one person: an older, scruffier man with a toddler on his shoulders, stopped between a narrow boat that is a prosecco bar and a warehouse pizza place that offers craft beers and walnut-&-stilton pizzas, conferring with his friend and looking slightly flummoxed.
The area is ringed – that is, more or less defined – by large 'upmarket residential developments', smooth-faced expanses mostly with big locked gates at the street entrance. Some have well-lit interiors, personal touches visible in their plate-glass windows, and balcony gardens; others are barren. Along the prime real estate River Lea they look across at the remnants of the Olympic Park, and down over a hotch-potch of narrow boats, whose riverine 'broken-chairs-tarpaulins-&-cables' aesthetic evocatively offsets the penthouses. In front of one block – its retail premises empty on the ground floor – is an old industrial chimney, standing all alone, with a plaque on it.
Near this, across from the entrance to Queen's Yard, is a vacant lot where once stood the Lea Tavern, demolished in 2008 for reasons which are opaque; the site is overgrown with buddleia. Along the top of its hoarding (a battleground of the graffiti war) is an ambiguous and badly punctuated sign:
It is as well to remind oneself that the great thing about London – the truly great thing – used to be the way that people of all sorts shared a neighbourhood: council blocks jostled with mansions, terraces of 2-up-2-downs gave onto parks and mansion blocks onto motorways. The narrow boats have suffered over recent years with increasingly punitive rules about mooring, but they do even now offer – if you can stick the lifestyle – relatively cheap housing. And in this neighbourhood, even the tattiest canal boat has sculptures in front of it.
This is, in a way, still real life. Tags and posters, hipster street art and the retro, angry, non-ironic article, fight for space and fight each other (as per the re-written speech bubble emerging from the mouth of this dazed stereotype).
This wraith, not far from a set of 'Sweet Toof's ubiquitous teeth, might be shaking his fist at a sign listing property prices.
The battle lines are clearly drawn.
Hackney Wick station looks a bit sinister by night, but it is probably getting more traffic than ever before. The studiedly 'urban' look of the area gives the lie to the sanitised gloss of the recent 'Spirit of 2012′ (though it feels fair to suppose that this look owes as much to Jean-Michel Basquiat and the iconographised dirt of eighties New York than to anything more organic); but the biggest surprise in Hackney Wick is its proximity to Stratford Westfield Shopping Centre.
Stratford, of course, was the local station for the Games, and the town centre had a massive do-over for the tourists. Facing east, looking past the couples strolling along the waterside like animated architects' mock-ups, past the Olympic park and Anish Kapoor's Brobdingnagian toy town tower, the backdrop for all this is a familiar, and surprising, sight. The beacon of the middle class. An unflashy, but insistent, glowing sign: JOHN LEWIS.
Neighbourhoods are mortal. Change is constant. The really important thing to remember is that the really big developers are already moving in. The second Battle for Hackney Wick has probably already been lost; the artists, pizzateers and canal-dwellers will be shunted to the provinces, the cute little prosecco boat will give way to a big slick floating bar where you have to book, and we will rue the day when we thought these little concrete galleries with bike racks were the actual problem, not just the symptom. And the real old London will be that little bit more lost.
© Katy Evans Bush. All pictures © David Secombe.
Katy's new collection of essays Forgive the Language is published by Penned in the Margins.
See also: On the Natural History of Gentrification; Before the Blue Wall; Traffic on the Lea.
Blind Chivvy.Posted: August 6, 2015 Filed under: Architectural, Artistic London, Bohemian London, Churches, Eating places, Entertainment, Food, Graffiti, Housing, Literary London, London Music, Performers, Vanishings | Tags: 12 Bar Club, 1890s London, Arthur Machen, Brydges Place, Corpus Christi Maiden Lane, Denmark St., Dennis Nilsen, Ernest Dowson, Larry Parnes, Mariachi at E.N.O., Rules Restaurant, Save Tin Pan Alley, The Port House Strand, The Salisbury 6 Comments
Brydges Place, looking towards St Martin's Lane. © David Secombe 2015.
From A London Phantom by R. Thurston Hopkins:
I spent many evenings with Dowson in the Bun House. Though the name of this rendezvous has a doughy sound, it never at any time offered buns to its customers. It is just a London tavern, but it was part of the literary and newspaper life of the eighteen-nineties. It was there that I saw Lionel Johnson, the poet, John Evelyn Barlas, poet and anarchist who tried to 'shoot up' the House of Commons, Edgar Wallace, just out of a private soldier's uniform, Arthur Machen in a caped 'Inverness' coat which he told me had been his regular friend for twenty years. …
After I had met Dowson a few times at the Bun House we would sometimes rove forlornly about the foggy London streets, initiated bohemians, tasting each other's enthusiasms. … As we wandered about London at night we often played a sort of game which we called Blind Chivvy. The idea was to find short cuts or round-about-routes from one busy part of London to another by way of slinking alleys and byways which then were not well known to the average London man.
D.S.: We at The London Column like to think of ourselves as being in the vanguard of the Ernest Dowson Revival, but we can't deny that our Ern remains something of a niche interest. My friend CJ – one half of the award-winning (really) wine blog, Sediment – is unconvinced by my claims for the poet who wrote the quintessential 'decadent' poem of the 1890s, Cynara. That said, CJ liked the sound of 'Blind Chivvy' and agreed to join me for an afternoon in a bid to play it. Admittedly, we were doing it on a bright July day rather than a murky November evening, and a few things have changed since Dowson's time, but the promise of some light lunchtime drinking rendered CJ putty in my hands. We met at The Port House on the Strand, an Iberian sherry bar located in the building that was once The Bun House. In the candle-lit gloom, CJ and I munched tapas, drank white wine and attempted to visualise the interior peopled with the bohemian talent of decadent London. We failed. The ambience in the Port House is that of a bodega in Madrid, and there was no way we were going to conjure up the shades of Dowson, Johnson, Machen or anyone else. But it was a start.
Ernest Dowson has left the building … The Port House, Strand. © David Secombe 2015.
Emerging from the Port House, I led a dubious CJ into a narrow entrance next door. Exchange Court is one of those ancient pathways off the Strand that bears witness to a lost London landscape. Halfway up this remnant of 17th century town planning there is a courtyard behind a new (early 1990s) bar called The Porterhouse. Before the construction of this establishment, it was possible to come here – a spot no-one had any reason to visit – and discover a genuine fragment of the 'Great Wen': a desolate cul-de-sac that Dickens would have recognised. When I visited in 1984, you could still see the original box office window of the Adelphi theatre, complete with Victorian London prices, bricked up in an alcove. Then they built the pub and the alcove disappeared. Now they store barrels here and the court seems almost cheerful.
We followed Exchange Court to the end and emerged in Maiden Lane, CJ looking around him like a lost Japanese tourist. 'Where are we now?' Doing my best Peter Ackroyd, I replied that Maiden Lane was one of the oldest thoroughfares in the West End – and, in the same mode, indicated a plaque above the Adelphi's stage door commemorating the murder of William Terriss. 'Who? What?' On cue, the shutter of a loading bay was yanked open and for a moment we had a glimpse of the business end of a working theatre. The sight of the vast maw of an empty auditorium brought back memories of other West End venues, not to mention Proustian associations of childhood visits backstage. Me: 'What's playing here now?' CJ: 'Kinky Boots'. We moved on.
Your correspondents reflected in the doorway of Rules. © David Secombe 2015.
We crossed the road to look in the window of Rules, 'the oldest restaurant in London' (est. 1788). To celebrate the august history of its dining rooms, Rules's website features a poignantly misjudged piece of copywriting which is worth reproducing here:
As well as being frequented by great literary talents – including Charles Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray, John Galsworthy and H G Wells – Rules has also appeared in novels by Rosamond Lehmann, Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene, John Le Carré, Dick Francis, Penelope Lively and Claire Rayner.
Whilst studying the menu I asked CJ if a publisher had ever taken him to Rules and he looked at me beadily, suggesting that I might be confusing him with someone else; Ian McEwan, maybe. Or Marian Keyes, perhaps.
Bull Inn Court. © David Secombe 2015.
Rules faces Bull Inn Court, another alley where Dowson might have gone to find company ('absinthe makes the tart grow fonder' is his line); in July 2015 it is a spot where office workers go to juggle cigarettes and smart phones. But a couple of doors further along, the tone is abruptly elevated by the ecclesiastical majesty of Corpus Christi. Mirroring the promise of the Adelphi, its doors were invitingly open, affording views of 'the grey twilight of gothic things' (or the 1870s repro version) in WC2. Dowson converted to Catholicism in the last years of his short life, so it's at least possible that he took communion in Corpus Christi. In any case, we yielded to the lure of its gilded interior and behaved like a pair of sightseers, taking photographs and lighting candles (25 pence a go).
Corpus Christi. © David Secombe 2015.
We backtracked west along Maiden Lane, down Chandos Place and thence into Brydges Place. We have featured Brydges Place on The London Column before, so I won't dilate on this atmospheric passageway here – except to note that there were more homeless pitches since my last visit and the stink of piss was overwhelming. Brydges Place debouches into St Martin's Lane next to E.N.O., where we emerged to see a Mariachi band posing on the steps of the Coliseum. Mexican dance music seemed like a bit of a departure for English National Opera, but the band looked fun and an obliging gaucho performed some impressive lasso moves for the cameras. Diverting as it was, this wasn't the woozy, drink-soaked metropolis we were looking for, so we repaired to The Salisbury to re-group. The Salisbury was once a well-known gay pub, extensively referenced in the Dirk Bogarde film Victim, and where the serial killer Dennis Nilsen cruised in the 1970s and 80s – but any flickers of the city of dreadful night were banished by the holiday crowd ramming the bar. The Salisbury's ghosts were as lost to us as those at The Bun House. We sat behind an etched glass window, drank London Pride and swapped stories of career disappointment. The phantom of Thurston Hopkins's essay, who they fear is haunting them on their nocturnal rambles through London, is a man Dowson described as having 'a face like a wizened bladder of lard' – but in the noisy saloon of the Salisbury, CJ and I were merely haunting each other.
Mariachi at English National Opera. © David Secombe 2015.
Opposite The Salisbury is an entrance to another 17th century survival, a passageway called Goodwins Court. Needless to say, Goodwins Court was a surprise to CJ, who remarked upon the beautiful bowed shop-fronts (18th century, I am told, although they are no longer shops, and it is hard to tell exactly what they front now). When I was a boy my parents took me to a show-business party in the house at the end, the one that abuts Bedfordbury. The host was the late Tony Sympson, an actor whose family were instrumental in preserving Goodwin's Court against destruction. I remember a jewel-box of a house composed of implausibly large rooms, their Regency elegance constituting an act of defiance: as late as 1978, the threat of wholesale demolition still loomed over Covent Garden. The house is still someone's home; perhaps the most desirable place to live in all the West End. Next door is Giovanni's, a discreet Italian restaurant popular with old-school actors and producers. I have purple memories of this place too: a lunch with an actor friend which deteriorated into an afternoon lurid enough for me to give up drinking for months afterwards. After mistily reminiscing on all of the above, CJ pointed out, not unreasonably, that those anecdotes are specific to me, and that the state of my liver was of little interest to him.
Bedfordbury, looking into Goodwin's Court. © David Secombe 2015.
Taking the hint, and with time against us – CJ's dinner beginning to call, in far distant Mortlake – the rest of our dèrive went at something of a galop. By this stage, I had a destination in mind, a spot with more recent associations than the 1890s. We walked swiftly up Garrick Street, crossed Long Acre towards Seven Dials, cut up West Street (past The Ivy and those strangely conjoined twins of tourist theatre-land, The Mousetrap and Stomp), crossed Shaftesbury Avenue, continued north on Stacey Street – alongside the vast bulk of the Covent Garden Odeon and beyond the fragile greensward of Phoenix Garden – and finally arrived in crumbling, doomed Denmark Street.
In the 1950s Denmark Street ('London's own Tin Pan Alley!') was London's music business quarter, an Expresso Bongo world of post-Suez Britain. Then, the street was the domain of the impresario Larry Parnes, (much-mocked svengali of improbably-named singers like Vince Eager, Dickie Pride, Johnny Gentle, and some others who actually made it), songwriter Lionel Bart ('King of Denmark Street'), the jingle writer Johnny Johnston (Softness is a thing called Comfort, Beanz Meanz Heinz, and 5000 others), and all the other personalities of the pre-Beatles universe. In the 1960s The Stones, The Who, The Kinks, Donovan, Bowie, Hendrix all came here to record, in studios carved out of 17th-century basements. Ten years later it was the turn of the phlegm-flecked protégés of Malcolm McLaren (the '70s version of Larry Parnes) The Sex Pistols, who rehearsed and lived here for a while. And, whilst he is unlikely to get a blue plaque, Dennis Nilsen – abovementioned, hanging around the Salisbury – spent the early '80s working in a jobcentre that used to be on the corner with the Charing Cross Road. This jobcentre's speciality was the catering industry, and for one Christmas staff party Nilsen made his colleagues punch in a large cooking pot he brought from his home, the same pan he used for boiling his victims' heads.
Hanks, Denmark St.; Centre Point behind. © David Secombe 2015.
There are still music shops to be found on Denmark Street, but the redevelopment of St Giles has been the cause of much anguish amongst London's music lovers, as first the Astoria and then the 12 Bar Club have been laid waste in favour of Crossrail and a looming corporate/retail zone. Around 1900, the year Dowson died, the great loss London suffered was the destruction of Wych St. and environs to create 'new' Aldwych and Kingsway (the subject of one of our previous walks). That particular act of civic philistinism didn't just obliterate some of the prettiest streets in the capital, it cauterized life on the streets – which is exactly what it was intended to do, removing 'unwholesome' theatres and booksellers and erasing one of London's cultural centres. The destruction of the area around Denmark Street is the 21st Century equivalent. How do we characterise it? London dans le style Boris, perhaps, London après Cameron, London sans coeur, etc. Chalked graffiti on the hoarding in front of the remains of the 12 Bar was eloquence itself …
Hoarding where the 12 Bar Club used to be. © David Secombe 2015.
By now CJ and I were starting to feel generally chivvied out. The day-glo office blocks opposite St.Giles in the Fields measured the gulf between the city of our imaginings and the one we are actually stuck with. Calling it a day, Charles headed for Waterloo and his train to Mortlake, and I boarded a quasi-Routemaster 38 to Hackney. Sitting on the top deck, in an interior as retro as the Orla Kiely catalogue, I considered the dilemma: if Soho is dead, if the West End is dead, if Chelsea is dead, if Shoreditch is dead (no cheering please), what is left? A Bright New World safe for out-of-town consumers to play in – but not somewhere you would want to live, even if you could afford to. Hence London becomes the new Dubai, and Margate the new Peckham. Good for Margate, perhaps, but London as a place of invention and creativity becomes no more than a historical footnote. Don't look for culture here, mate, only ad agencies can afford the rent. Live music? Try the relocated 12 Bar Club – it's on the Holloway Road (if you can find it). No call for it round here, pal. The revolution will not be televised – but you can download it as a podcast.
Denmark Place. © David Secombe 2015.
(I have just noticed that this post is the 250th on The London Column. I was going to apologise for the fogeyish tone, but then thought 'why should I?')
See also: In Search of Old Wych, The Riverine Strand.
And so it begins again …Posted: January 2, 2015 Filed under: Amusements, Graffiti 1 Comment
Portugal Street, WC2. © David Secombe 2014.
2nd of January and we are just waking up … Here's to 2015. DS
On the natural history of gentrification.Posted: October 7, 2014 Filed under: Class, Housing, London Types, Markets, Monumental, Public Art, Wildlife | Tags: animal art, Broadway Market, ha, Hackney Road rabbit, Hipster London, Irony and Boe, Poplar chihuahua, Roa, Southbank art Comments Off on On the natural history of gentrification.
Chihuahua by Irony and Boe, Chrisp St., Poplar. © David Secombe 2014.
A London street artist writes:
I remember living in Hackney Wick around six years ago, just as it was being transformed from a barren industrial area into a 'funky' neighbourhood full of vegan coffee shops and 'warehouse raves' that had guest lists and cocktails, interspersed with re-purposed plant hire buildings that had been turned into artists' studio spaces.
I had been a graffiti writer for about four or five years before moving there, and at that point in time I was spending a lot of time utilising the easy access to train tracks from Hackney Wick station to go painting at night. The thing was, Hackney Wick was full of 'street artists', yet I never saw any of them on my nightly overground rail missions. The reason for this was that they were mostly drinking chai tea in their studios, plastering canvases with stencilled pop-culture icons or images connoting cunning political/social commentary… But it was still 'street art'. All the courtyards of the shared warehouse living spaces were covered in pieces, yet the streets surrounding them were bare.
Rabbit by 'Roa', Hackney Road. © David Secombe 2014.
This was the crest of the wave of socially acceptable, tongue-in-cheek street art. It was naughty, but only when it was allowed to be. It was rarely painted illegally, and rarely in places where lots of people could see it; inside the living room of a sandal-clad nut-loaf artisan, or on a peaceful stretch of canal. While the original breed of London graffiti writers tried to paint busy train lines and rooftops, these 'street artists' prefer to hit up Tumblr, Flickr and Twitter with photos of their work. 'Getting up' has been integral to graffiti culture since the beginning – it is the pure manifestation of the territorial roots of the art form, except now the art form is becoming gentrified, intellectualised and critiqued by Guardian columnists, and 'getting up' has turned into social media marketing. While all this is happening, grass-roots graffiti writers are still being locked up with criminal damage charges, sitting in police cells around the corner from a perspex-enclosed stencil that may or may not have been painted by Banksy.
Bird by Irony and Boe, Broadway Market, Hackney. © David Secombe 2014.
Two street artists, Boe and Irony, recently painted a four story chihuahua on the side of a tower block. They suggest in an interview to have pulled this off without alerting anyone as to their activity. I mean, granted, the piece is nice. It's a definite improvement over the old, plain brick wall, However, as someone who has spent their fair share of time crawling around on rooftops and side streets with buckets of paint, I don't buy it. All credit to them if they actually managed to walk around the streets with their faces covered from the cameras, holding a fuck off ladder and the 20+ cans of spray paint they would have needed, set up shop on a residential building for 4+ hours and paint an entire face of said building without anyone even knowing they were there. That would be fucking impressive. There are writers who have been painting in this city for decades, who know all the dark secrets of how to get into train yards undetected and have hit up at least one rooftop in every borough in the city, who wouldn't attempt a stunt like that.
Southbank Centre. © David Secombe 2014.
Street art has always had its own lines of communication. Taggers, know each other by tag and reputation and possibly on the tracks. It's territorial. Now, the territory is worldwide. The territory is in the bank. The artists get cash, the local authorities who pay them get kudos, and global gentrification accelerates week by week. 'Street art' is becoming just another kind of civic prettification – even the Southbank Centre has commissioned some to make itself appear more relevant. Individual neighbourhoods may get brightened up, but the work is mainly for the portfolio and the commercial opportunity.
Bird of prey by 'Roa', off Rye Lane, Peckham. © David Secombe 2014.
The big street animals are unobjectionable. Even the Daily Mail likes them. People didn't want Hackney Council to paint over the rabbit in Hackney Road a few years back – it's inoffensive and it got a reprieve (and no-one likes Hackney Council). But now you get big animals wherever business is moving in on an 'up and coming' area. I see a giant bird or squirrel or fox and all I see is money.
… for The London Column.
See also: Sugary Fun, On the South Bank, A Clockwork London, Sweet Toof.
Balfron remembered.Posted: September 19, 2014 Filed under: Architectural, Class, Dereliction, Graffiti, Housing, Interiors, Lettering, London Labour, Monumental, Vanishings | Tags: Balfron Tower, gentrification, James Wakefield, Michael Mulcahy, Mike Seaborne, Peter Luck, Trellick Tower Comments Off on Balfron remembered.
Balfron Tower. © Michael Mulcahy
Katy Evans-Bush:
Balfron Tower. I love it. It anchors Poplar, it looms over the A12 just by the Blackwall Tunnel approach, and it seems to defend that whole end of Tower Hamlets. In the evenings, when the sun reaches a certain point, it glows golden. You couldn't help but find it beautiful, its slightly Escher-esque planes and shapes and perspectives changing with the weather and the light, its strange humanity, its arrow-slit windows. Just as the now-demolished gasometers in Stepney did, it casts its grandeur over everything around.
Poor Balfron suffers the slings and arrows of public disgust towards its whole genre. People think 'the New Brutalism' is called that just because it's brutal, but in fact, it's a play on the French term 'béton brut', for raw concrete. It's easy to forget now that when this architecture went up, it was intended to make life better for people. Goldfinger referred to its corridors as 'streets in the sky', and the plan included incredibly optimistic landscaping: Balfron has private yards for the bottom flats, mature trees and shrubberies shielding it from the A12, and light coming at it from all directions. Its flats meander up and down levels, and have balconies and stupendous views.
A website by a Trellick Tower resident, Chris Paulsen, gives the flavour of its aspirations towards good living:
The flats themselves are large by tower-block standards, & packed with space-saving devices. … Doors of wood & glass slide rather than open out, & can be used to partition certain parts of each flat. Glass is plentiful in order to let in as much natural light as possible… Adjoining the main tower is a service tower. This incorporates lifts, stairs, & refuse chutes, as well as a boiler house. The lifts stop at every third floor, meaning that in some flats the bedrooms are above, & in some below, the entrance level. The flats have large balconies which, if you are high enough up, offer views across the North Downs.
My own personal knowledge of Balfron Tower reached its zenith in 2001, when, as a publicity officer for Tower Hamlets' housing department, I toured the place with a deputation from Trellick Tower, and a member of its resident management committee. The reason they were visiting was very simple: Trellick was in trouble and needed a major overhaul. (The figure given at the time was £9m to get it up to its original standard.) Balfron and Trellick are 'sister buildings'; Goldfinger learned some lessons from Balfron, but by 2001 they were like twins raised separately.
Trellick had, being in (even if only north) Kensington, been gentrified while the East End was still thought of as a wild space. Its tenants were that bit more prosperous, and more able to get mortgages, and had bought their flats under Right to Buy. However, many new owners didn't have the money to maintain the flats – or else they did have the money, and took out original features. Kensington's reputation for affluence got in the way of attempts to secure funding. They had a vandalism problem, and some of the original features – such as the marble that had been in the entry area – had been stolen. The building had been designed to have a concierge but for many years it never had one. No one was – literally – keeping an eye on things. It was in a bad spot.
Balfron Tower. © Mike Seaborne.
Balfron, by contrast, had had a boring life, with tenants instead of leaseholders, and with several rounds of major works on it – new windows, for example, and new asphalt in the external linking walkways. It also had more of its original features, like the quarry tiles lining the corridors – different colours on different floors – and its flats had more of their original fittings – for example their bakelite light switches instead of Thatcherite gold-look ones. And Balfron had had one asset money can't buy: it had had one very hands-on, community-spirited caretaker for almost twenty years.
I interviewed Irvine Gallagher, otherwise known as Jock, for the council's newspaper, East End Life, around the time of this tour of the block. (I knew him a bit to have a drink with; when I rang him to suggest the interview, there was a long silence, and then he growled: 'IN THE PUB.') He told me, 'When we took over this estate from the good old GLC it was a disaster area. Burnt-out cars, black soot stains, bin rooms full of old rubbish'.
'No one knows as much as me about Balfron Tower', he said. 'I know how the whole building works, where everything is. I've had calls from housing management, architects, heating engineers. They wanted to put in new central heating but it's listed, they couldn't run the gas pipes up the outside – I identified where the cupboards were, and internal routes where they could run their pipes. I know how the flats fit together, this one on one level, this one on two – I always know where the water's coming from'.
Balfron Tower. © Mike Seaborne.
Jock was a people person, though, as well as being able to do 3D mental mapping. 'I know everything that happens here', he said. 'Everybody knows me and I know everybody . I know all the kids, who their mums and dads are. I'll knock on someone's door if I've seen them doing something. Nine times out of ten people are grateful and say they didn't know their kid was doing whatever.
'But there isn't much vandalism. We've got CCTV, and if a kid is doing something we can see them. We call out the window, "Smile for the camera!" You should see them run!'
Happy days. Also around the time of this interview, Jock had to apply for his job, as the council was bringing in 'super-caretakers' – a sort of Blairite caretaker-manager position. I spoke to him right after his interview and he said it had gone really badly. It lasted five minutes.
Five minutes! What went wrong?? 'Well what was I supposed to do', he growled down the phone. 'Spend an hour talking about fucking BLEACH.'
So the job went to someone else, and Jock became an under-caretaker, and I heard last year that he had recently passed on.
My other personal connection with Balfron Tower is that when I was working in that job, my marriage had broken up and my children and I were living in adorable but extreme overcrowding in a wisteria-garlanded one-bedroom flat in Hackney. Things were difficult, and at just this juncture a flat came on the market in Balfron Tower for something like £37,900. But Balfron was in Poplar, and my kid were in school in Stoke Newington, and you couldn't raise a mortgage in Poplar (or a tower block) to save your life, and I had no savings at all… In one corner of my brain I have always lived there.
Balfron Tower. © Mike Seaborne.
I left that job few months after the Balfron tour and the interview with Jock, and have no idea how Balfron Tower fell into the situation it's in today. It's about to have the makeover of a lifetime, which will also catapult it into a new social class. Indeed, as life imitates art, the millennial city imitates the famous 'I Love My Life as a Dickhead' video, wherein the hipsters have taken over Trellick Tower. For with the ensuing works, and the the huge project of decanting all of Balfron's tenants underway, Balfron's flats have been let all year at cheap rents to artists, to keep the place full – and, presumably, soften up a tiny little social transformation.
Balfron went to sleep as a brave and plucky social housing experiment; is currently dreaming a strange technicolor dream; and will wake up, what only feels like a lifetime later, a princess.
And it's some slight consolation to know that, if I had bought that flat all those years ago, I'd have a big headache just about now.
Balfron Tower. © Mike Seaborne.
The photos are from the exhibition Balfron Tower An Unrealised Future, featuring work by photographers Michael Mulcahy, Mike Seaborne, Peter Luck and James Wakefield. This runs until this Sunday (21st September), 12 – 6 pm at Flat 89, Balfron Tower, Poplar, E14 0QT (2 min. walk from All Saints DLR). Buzz flat 89 for entry.
Balfronism.Posted: September 10, 2014 Filed under: Architectural, Fictional London, Housing, London Places, Public Art | Tags: 007, 28 Days Later, Anthony Gormley, blackwall tunnel, Catherine Yass, east end, Erno Goldfinger, Goldfinger, High Rise, Hipster London, Ian Fleming, J.G. Ballard, Owen Hatherley, Robin Hood Gardens, Trellick Tower Comments Off on Balfronism.
Red jumper, west flank, Balfron Tower. © David Secombe 2014.
From Urbanism and Spatial Order by Erno Goldfinger, 1931:
From the point of view of the town, the individual is a mere brick in the spatial order of the street or square.
Thus sprach Erno Goldfinger, doyen of the Modern Movement, Brutalist visionary, Marxist voluptuary, and namesake of James Bond's most memorable antagonist. (The story goes that Ian Fleming was unimpressed by the house Goldfinger built for himself in Hampstead, whose construction required the demolition of some pretty Victorian cottages. In revenge, Fleming appropriated the architect's name for 007's next outing; Goldfinger is supposed to have considered legal action.)
Service tower entrance, service corridors, Balfron Tower. © David Secombe 2014
Goldfinger's most conspicuous buildings in London are Elephant and Castle's Metro Central Heights (formerly Alexander Fleming House, no relation), West Kensington's Trellick Tower, and Trellick's almost-identical East End counterpart Balfron Tower in Poplar. Trellick and Balfron are often cited as inspirations for J.G. Ballard's dystopian classic High Rise, wherein the denizens of an exclusive tower block turn feral.
To some extent, Trellick Tower saw this narrative played out in reverse. Commissioned in 1967 as social housing for the London County Council, upon completion in 1972 Trellick quickly became a 'problem' estate. There was talk of demolition, it became a byword for urban grit (name-checked in The Sweeney no less) – but, facilitated by the gentrification of seedy/glamorous West London and an increased appreciation of the charms of 'mid-century modern', the tower gradually became a suitable address for aspirational professionals, and was Grade II listed in 1998 – two years after Balfron was.
Balfron Tower. © David Secombe 2014
Now it is east London's turn. Balfron appeared first, topped-out in 1967 in an environment even more forbidding than old West Kensington. The location is still uncompromising: Balfron abuts the churning A12, feeding the Blackwall Tunnel just two hundred yards to the south. This piece of civic engineering affords majestic views of Balfron from the east and south but blights the lower floors facing the motorway. Balfron's unprecedented height, hammered concrete finish, and stand-alone service tower with flying corridors and arrow-slit windows combine to give it a distinctly pugnacious aspect. The overall impression is of an urban fortress – a building fit to shelter the last bastions of humanity against marauding zombies (a role it plays in Danny Boyle's 28 Days Later).
Balfron Tower west flank, from Chrisp St. © David Secombe 2014
Balfron and its sister block, low-rise Carradale House (also by Goldfinger), are relics of a lost civic culture. There was a time not that long ago when modernity was a form of social utopianism. The East End had been blitzed, the residual housing stock was seen as Dickensian, and a clean, futuristic solution (Le Corbusier's Unité d'habitation in Docklands) was an irresistible prospect for the ambitious bods at the LCC.
Balfron Tower was a brave project, and it took a fearless architect to see it through. It was intended to herald a dawn of new, better housing. Its flats meander up and down different levels, and the interiors are full of sensitive detailing. Goldfinger himself spent two months living in one of its penthouse flats, to evaluate the building; this led to important technical variations at Trellick when it was built a few years later. Amongst other things, he made sure Trellick had three lists instead of just two, after finding himself waiting twenty minutes for a lift to Balfron's 27th floor.
Faced with accusations that his building constituted social engineering, he was robust: 'I have created nine separate streets, on nine different levels, all with their own rows of front doors. The people living here can sit on their doorsteps and chat to the people next door if they want to. A community spirit is still possible even in these tall blocks, and any criticism that it isn't is just rubbish.'
Balfron Tower from the east. © David Secombe 2014.
For all its elegance, sincerity, attention to detail, and integrity of construction, Balfron suffers from design flaws which mitigate the modernist dream: the lifts don't serve every floor, concrete decay is an issue, and the uninsulated solid walls suffer from heat loss. However, the East End is being relentlessly gentrified, and Balfron is about to be transformed into a block fit for the well-heeled and design-conscious (let us call them hipsters). The old tenants have been decanted elsewhere for the works to begin, and before the tower gets its upscale makeover, Balfron has become a sort of temporary sink estate for artists – this in response to special cheap deals on the rent – who are softening the place up for a bourgeois and executive future.
Balfron Tower east flank (in the rain). © David Secombe 2014.
The accepted rubric is that the artists 'inject new life into communities'; and in recent times Balfron has itself become something of an installation. In 2010 it hosted an 'empowering' photographic project, and this year has seen, amongst other things, a site-specific production of Macbeth, not to mention a bid by a Turner-prize nominated artist to throw a piano off its roof (abandoned after protests from residents that someone could get killed).
All this corporately-licensed conceptual 'playfulness' masks the fact that an important piece of public housing is being very deliberately annexed by the private sector. No longer a vision of better housing for a better future, Balfron is now the deadest of things: a design icon, a beacon for those who crave tokens of retro-urbanism. Owen Hatherley has coined the term 'Gormleyism' to describe the use of Antony Gormley's solitary figures as cultural embroidery in bland civic developments; perhaps 'Balfronism' will become shorthand for the use of artists en masse as a form of social cleansing.
iPhone triptych, Balfron Tower from traffic on the A12. © David Secombe 2014.
The patina of time makes quaint what was once brave, difficult, or merely awful. It won't be long before 'Ballardian' is a term used by estate agents. D.S.
Traffic on the Lea.Posted: June 19, 2014 Filed under: Bohemian London, Graffiti, Housing, The Thames and its Tributaries, Transport, Vanishings | Tags: 2012 Olympics, Foxtons, Ian Sinclair, Lea Bridge Road, Lea River, London houseboats, malcolm hardee, Viv Stanshall Comments Off on Traffic on the Lea.
River Lea towpath, under the East Cross Route. © David Secombe 2014.
A Sunday in May, on the towpath by the River Lea, just south of Lea Bridge Road:
Ding! … Ding! … Ding! … Ding! Ding! Ding!
The cyclist (mid-20s, jutting beard, sickly smile, deeply hittable face) steered his vintage eBay treasure inches between myself and my young son. Fifteen minutes into what was supposed to be a leisurely Sunday outing on the first really sunny weekend of the year and I was reduced to hissing violent epithets at various types of cyclist. Hipster cyclists, as above; Spandexed cyclists, often in entire family groups; unnervingly swift and purposeful cyclists with business on their minds; kids on mountain bikes; even a brace of fancy-dress cyclists, decked out in Edwardian gear – bowlers, waistcoats, plus-fours, spats – on authentically recalcitrant machines. Whatever their costume, they were all united by their fondness for those little silver bells, their peremptory tinkle an indication of assumed moral right. As a pedestrian on the towpath, on the Lea or a London canal, it's hard to avoid the feeling that cyclists see you as merely a car-driver deprived of your vehicle. (Suggested collective noun: an entitlement of cyclists.)
Not that long ago, this stretch of the Lea was a backwater; and the landscape still offers those with a taste for brownfield-rural the opportunity to participate in an Ian Sinclair-ish topographical narrative in a lush setting. There are overgrown meadows, deserted municipal sports facilities, mysterious structures to negotiate, structures often covered in an abundance of picturesque graffiti (whilst photographing the uncharacteristically polite cyclists walking their bikes under the East Cross Route, I noticed a young man posing his girlfriend for snaps on the other side of the decorated pillars). Of course, this riverside has been ravaged in recent years by the Alphaville of the Olympic Park, and the new residential developments that line the western bank south of Lea Bridge are testament to the burgeoning popularity of East London-lite: Hipster London, Foxtons London, Fatuous London.
Yet somehow, the houseboats remain aloof from it all; and the beauty of the Lea leads to daydreams of buying one, the idyll of having your very own piece of river within (distant) earshot of the churning city. A friend of mine has his own boat, a proper sea-going job, which he occasionally sails from Lowestoft to Limehouse Basin, where he moors it as his London base. This always struck me as simultaneously butch and civilised, an impression only slightly marred by a desperate call I once received from him en route, somewhere near Sheerness, asking if I'd heard the Shipping Forecast because his radio was broken. Several of the vessels moored on the Lea have all the appurtenances of the riverside 'luxury apartments' touted by Foxtons and their ilk, and it is not too exotic to imagine some of them actually sailing somewhere. A London houseboat might be the nearest thing to bucolic living anywhere within the M25; but a cursory inspection of some of the more ramshackle examples give one pause. More than a couple appear to be actually sinking, invoking thoughts of Viv Stanshall's houseboat foundering on the Thames near Chertsey. A houseboat is not a very safe place to store a life's work, and much of Viv's life sank with The Searchlight. Even if your boat is watertight, there are other dangers: Malcolm Hardee drowned in Greenland Dock during a drunken attempt to access his houseboat after a night out. (Eddie Mirzoeff has just pointed out to me that Penelope Fitzgerald's Chelsea Reach-moored houseboat sank not once but twice in the early 1960s, inspiring her Booker Prize-winning novel Offshore.)
Still the temptations persist … walking south, we encountered a riverine barbecue-cum-jam session, two barges lassooed together, a party of expert folk musicians playing together in an atmosphere of easy familiarity and home-brewed ale. I'm generally allergic to the claims of folk music but even I was charmed and wondered whether the water offered a better way of life for those in the know … but only a few yards further south, jungle was being played at industrial-noise level from a flat in a new block, obliterating the reels from upstream and putting paid to idyllic wonderings. Any remaining notions of hippie-ish promise were soon trashed as we reached the East Cross Route, where the aggressive post-Olympic new builds proved demoralising enough for us to turn back. Perhaps there is no such thing as a backwater in London any more; a sage with a tin of spray paint helped articulate this thought by stating the obvious on a bridge …
Back at Lea Bridge, the Prince of Wales was doing brisk business as football played on the TV. A massive new development is under construction on the north of the Lea Bridge Road. For real peace, you have to go further upstream, way beyond Springfield Park and up into Tottenham Marshes; if you moored there, maybe you would have a shot at a life of tranquility. If you saw a naked cyclist, it would be someone who did it every day. And that would be fine. Just an unpretentious houseboat, not too big, easy to manage through the locks, kitted out with obsolete technology – VHS tapes, audio cassettes – and overflowing with old paperbacks you could read by paraffin lamp. You know where to find me …
… for The London Column.
See also: Before the Blue Wall.


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How to Keep Cats From Urinating in Flower Beds
Your flower bed is a beacon to neighborhood cats. There's really nothing for them not to like. Soft, loose earth makes for the perfect potty for them, resulting in delivery of deadly urinary salts to your precious plants. Check on the ordinances for your area to see if leash laws are in place. If so, ask the neighbor who belongs to the offending feline to keep it off of your property. If that doesn't solve your dilemma, take some proactive steps of your own. Once cats find out that you mean business, they'll take their business elsewhere.
Use wire cutters to trim lengths of carpenter's cloth into 24-inch-wide strips. Spray them with eucalyptus oil or anise oil, which cats dislike. Lay the strips around your flower bed, creating a perimeter of harsh screening. Cats don't like the feel of the material on the soft pads of their feet. This is a double-whammy that may send them elsewhere.
Mulch small areas of the flower bed with pebbles. Cats don't care much for digging in rocks. They prefer spots where the soil is exposed and easy to work.
Combine 5 parts flour, 2 parts cayenne pepper and 3 parts dry mustard. Sprinkle it anywhere that you want to remain feline-free. Reapply as necessary, particularly after rainfall.
Tear open fresh or used tea bags and scatter the grounds throughout your flower bed. Cat's don't like tea leaves.
Repel cats from your flower bed by planting things they don't like. Put in some lemon thyme, lavender, geraniums and Coleus canina (scaredy cat plant). Intersperse these aromatic herb plants throughout the flower bed.
Set a molded child's kiddie pool up in an area near your flower bed and fill the bottom with 2 inches of cheap sand. Cats will most likely find this even more delightful than urinating in the loose earth of your garden. As they begin using it, move it a little further away from your flower bed each day until you've got it situated in a more acceptable area. Plant some catnip very close to the sandbox to give cats even more reason to prefer the designated cat area to your flower bed.
Flood areas that have been assaulted by urine with plenty of fresh water 3 days in a row. That should dilute the damaging salts that have been deposited in the soil and render them harmless to your plants.
Related Articles
Things Needed
- Carpenter's cloth
- Wire cutters
- Eucalyptus oil
- Anise oil
- Pebbles
- Flour
- Cayenne pepper
- Dry mustard
- Tea bags
- Lemon thyme, lavender, geraniums and Coleus canina (scaredy cat plant)
- Molded child's kiddie pool
- Cheap sand
- Catnip plants


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In an effort to provide permit holders with real time information pertaining to inspection results Planning and Codes, working with BluePrince software, is offering Contractors access to online services that will allow them to check inspection results, effective June 1st.
In order to gain access to this information, Contractors will need to sign up for Online Contractor Services on www.BuildingDepartment.com then set up a Project Page. This is a very easy process, that identifies each contractor's active permits.
Download the attached document for a link to a how-to brochure that will explain how to set up the Contractor's account.
In the future, we hope to adapt the software to allow the Contractor to request inspections as well as create new permits.
Contact Planning and Codes at 864-653-2050 or email firstname.lastname@example.com if you have questions.
Copyright 2020 by City of Clemson, SC
Terms Of Use | Privacy Statement


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Eric Bury, a mild mannered and workaholic Englishman, is ordered by his boss to take a vacation. After briefly consulting with his wife and teenage children, he decides on a family camping trip. When the family arrives at the rundown Florida "Adventures Unlimited" campground, they are plunged into a world of escalating sexual debauchery, religious ecstasy and human sacrifice, serving up a dark, comedic, outlandish ride. Will they keep their cool, or one by one gradually lose their senses, due to the onslaught of one bizarre event after another. When his wife decides to fulfill her sexual fantasy with a motorcycle-riding dwarf, Eric has had enough and tries to end the madness to save his family from a total collapse into anarchy. Permanent Vacation serves up a wildly creative comedy of the bizarre featuring star performances by rising talent, in the tradition of "Slacker" and "Idiocracy."
Click here to see the trailer!
Director: Scott Peake
Starring: Frank Harper (Bend It Like Beckham), Gina Bellman (Jekyll, Wrong Door), David Carradine (Epic Movie, Kill Bill 1,2) Michael Bowen (Magnolia), Phobe Thomas (Holby City), and introducing (JONATHAN BAILEY
Year: 2007
Country: USA/UK
Running Time: 93 Minutes
Genre: Comedy


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Myriam Laplante
Myriam Laplante is a Canadian artist born in Bangladesh, now based in Bevagna, Italy. She works in performance, installation, video, painting, sculpture, drawings, etc.
Her works have been presented extensively from squats to museums in Europe, North America, and Asia. She has been working with the performance collective Black Market International since 2001.


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Crisis Residential Program & Counseling Center for Young Adults
Opening SUMMER 2020
See our brief video of a similar program.
Opening SUMMER 2020
All About The STAY
The STAY is a crisis residential program and counseling center for young adults ages 18-29 that is being proposed for an existing building at 3815 Marconi Avenue in Sacramento. Up to 15 residents will be able to stay for up to 30 days, and residents and other young people will receive counseling and services that support their transition to housing, employment, education and ongoing care. A Mental Health Wellness Center was previously located at this site. Because of the residential use, we will be applying to the County's Planning Department for a use permit.
How The STAY CRP and Counseling Center will Benefit the Community and Neighborhood.
- Supports stability for young people and reduces costs of care, homelessness, and suicide risk
- Relieves hospitals and emergency rooms by stabilizing clients who normally overload emergency rooms and increase wait times for others
- Increases neighborhood safety with a facility that operates 24/7, has lighted parking lot, and security cameras
Click Here
Have questions about the STAY?
Contact Karly Wiley at (831) 595-0452 or firstname.lastname@example.com.
Si tiene alguna pregunta o sugerencia, o para hacer una cita para conocer a uno de nuestros representantes, puede llamar a Elsie Barton al (909) 763-4760 o firstname.lastname@example.com
Funded by the Sacramento Department of Behavioral Health Services.
Some names and photos have been changed to protect clients.


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I was on night shift the night previous to the visit so I felt unwashed and wilted. I looked it too. (Damn!)BUT Heath was at my work for 8am sign off and bought me breakfast (Dinner?) before we went for a stroll though the streets of Sydney. I was probably boring the pants off him but Sydney is a city I have spend many years reading the history of.
We arrived at Circular Quay and still has time to spare so we walked around to the Overseas Passenger terminal, and sat down. Mistake.. I drifted off.. LOL.
Getting on to a cruise liner as a day guest is an exercise in patience. You need to have submitted your ID days before and then the crew member has to meet you. After that, they take your ID and issue you with a ship one. This has to be clipped to you all the time. You then wait whilst they allow disembarking people off and no one is allowed to queue on the ramp so this means more waiting. I wasn't took fussed. Happy enough to not be doing anything. Eventually we were allowed on to the ship.
The ship is (As you expect) beautiful. We did get to see the medical facility and that is very impressive. You are safer on a cruise ship, esp this one, than at home. Its pretty awesome really.
We happily wandered the ship whilst H and his sister caught up.
I had a great day and was so thrilled to have had this opportunity. Even got to see the crew facilities and their private areas. So much of the ship is hidden and that's the part that keeps the show part (The public areas) running smoothly. Well oiled machine indeed.
Beautiful ship but not for my age group. Mind you when I am the age of the market this ship caters for I will be all in!
Thank you to Nat who took us into her world. XOXO