Thursday, October 14, 2010

Six of the Best 98

Kiron Reid gives his initial thoughts on the Browne report into student finance and the funding of higher education.

Today's cull of quangos is welcomed by Wera's Blog, but she wishes that more thought had been given to explaining its rationale.

While Gemma Hampson, writing on Social Enterprise, looks at the prospects of that sector taking over many of the functions that those quangos currently fulfil.

David Boyle, writing on the for nef (the New Economics Foundation) looks at the conventional wisdom that supermarkets act as "anchors" for new developments: "Previous experience suggests that, while stores like Waitrose can be an anchor, stores like Tesco often have the opposite effect – claiming to anchor economic recovery, but actually surreptitiously devouring the businesses around them."

The Cat's Meat Shop seeks the lost obelisk of Ludgate.

Elsewhere in London, Found Objects remembers The Scala: "In the not so distant 1980s past the Scala was the city’s premier repertory cinema, showing at least three different arthouse films (not “movies”) 364 days a year on a single large screen, and all-nighters every Saturday. One had to pay a nominal membership fee and the cheap-as-chips ticket price allowed one to sit through all three films. During presentations one could watch the resident cats chasing mice down the aisles."

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Thank you for the link to the piece about the Scala, without a doubt the greatest fleapit the world has ever seen. Back in the day I spent many happy hours in there watching everything from Robert Bresson to Thundercrack!

wolfi said...

We went to London on short notice with Ryanair from the small Hungarian airport Fly Balaton - to a concert with Steve Winwood in 2008 - queued for a very long time, asked a lot of people if they had spare tickest - and got tickets!

The venue felt really small - about a thousand people ? - and we made our way to the front where a Turkish guy (Self proclaimed No 1 fan of Steve in Turkey) congratulated us: So you made it!

Really fond memories of this place - thouhj it was a bit shabby ...

PS: It's a real shame that Ryanair doesn't fly from London to the Balaton any more ...