William Morris Biscuit Set. All images courtesy of Ella Hawkins, shared with permission Dr. Ella Hawkins Reimagines Ancient Artifacts and Prized Objects as Edible Replicas May 31, 2025 Grace Ebert Academic research is notoriously niche and often opaque, but Dr. Ella Hawkins has found a crowd-pleasing way to share her studies. The Birmingham-based artist and design historian translates her interests in Shakespeare performance, costume, and matieral culture into edible replicas. Hawkins bakes batches of cookies that she tops with royal icing. Decorating takes a scholarly turn, as she uses tiny paintbrushes and a mini projector to help trace imagery of William Morris’ ornate floral motifs or coastal scenes from English delftware. Rendering a design on a single cookie can take anywhere between two and four hours, depending on the complexity. Unsurprisingly, minuscule calligraphy and portraits are most demanding. Ancient Greek Pottery Sherds Hawkins first merged baking and her research about a decade ago while studying undergraduate costume design at the University of Warwick. She decided to bake cupcakes based on Shakespeare productions that her class examined. “It felt like a fun way to look back at all the different design styles we’d covered through the year,” she tells Colossal, adding: I carried on decorating cakes and cookies based on costume design through my PhD (mainly as goodies to give out during talks, or as gifts for designers that I interviewed), then branched out and spent lots of time doing cookie versions of other artefacts to keep busy during the pandemic. She has since published an academic book on the topic and is a senior lecturer at Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama. But she also continues to translate artifacts and prized objects held within museum collections into delicious canvases. There’s a set made in collaboration with Milton’s Cottage, a museum in the country house where John Milton finished his epic Paradise Lost. Anchored by a delicately crosshatched portrait evoking that of the frontispiece, the collection contains typographic titles and signs that appear straight from a 17th-century book. Delftware Tiles Hawkins ventures farther back in history to ancient Greece with a collection of pottery sherds inspired by objects within the Ashmolean Museum. With a bowed surface to mimic a vessel’s curvature, the irregular shapes feature fragments of various motifs and figures to which she applied a sgraffito technique, a Renaissance method of scratching a surface to reveal the layer below. The weathered appearance is the result of blotting a base of pale brown-grey before using a scribe tool to scratch and crack the royal icing coating the surface. She then lined these etchings with a mix of vodka and black food coloring to mimic dirt and wear. (It’s worth taking a look at this process video.) Other than a select few preserved for talks and events, Hawkins assures us that the rest of her cookies are eaten. Find more of her work on her website and Instagram. Medieval Tiles, inspired by The Tristram Tiles, Chertsey, Surrey, England (c. 1260s-70s) Milton’s Cottage Biscuit Set developed in collaboration with Milton’s Cottage Outlander Biscuit Set Elizabethan Gauntlet Biscuit Set Next article

Formula One aficionados are famously fanatical, but they still need a few good reasons to splash out on the annual instalment of the sport’s officially licensed game. Luckily F1 25 – crafted, as ever, in Birmingham by Codemasters – has many. There’s the return of Braking Point, the game’s story mode; a revamp of My Team, the most popular career mode; a tie-up with the forthcoming F1: The Movie; and perhaps most intriguing of all, the chance to race round three tracks in the reverse direction to normal.F1 25 feels like something of a culmination – last year’s F1 24, for example, introduced a new physics model which required tweaks after launch, but has now been thoroughly fettled, so F1 25’s essential building blocks of car handling (and tyre wear) plus state-of-the-art graphics (this year, Codemasters has moved on from previous-gen consoles) are simply impeccable.Impeccable graphics … F1 25. Photograph: Electronic ArtsThis has freed the company to delve into the sort of fantasy elements that you can find in games but not real life. Chief among those is the aforementioned third instalment of Braking Point, which follows the fortunes of the fictional Konnersport team. Over 15 chapters it knits together a deliciously tortuous soap opera-style storyline with some cleverly varied on-track action.More fundamentally, the most popular of the career modes – My Team, which ramps up the management element by casting you as the owner of a new team – has received the bulk of Codemasters’ attentions. This time around, you stay in your corporate lane and drive instead as either of the two drivers you’ve hired, which makes much more sense than previously. As does separating research and development, meaning you must allocate new parts to specific drivers. Further effective tweaks render My Team 2.0, as Codemasters calls it, much more convincing and realistic.As ever, you can jump online, against various standards of opposition, or on to individual tracks, or play split-screen against a friend. But there’s a new mode called Challenge Career, which lets you play timed scenarios offline, then post them to a global leaderboard. It’s a nice idea, designed to take you out of your driver-aids comfort zone, but the scenarios will only get going properly after launch, so the jury remains out on its merits. A number of scenarios from F1: The Movie will also be delivered as post-launch episodes, but it’s pretty cool to be able to step into a Formula One car as Brad Pitt playing a fictional racer.For diehard Formula One fans, though, the chance to race around Silverstone, Zandvoort and Austria’s Red Bull Ring in the wrong direction (with the tracks remodelled to accommodate new pit lanes and the like) might just be the clincher. Reversing the tracks’ direction completely changes their nature in a deliciously intriguing manner.With a real-life rule-change next year due to change the cars radically, Formula One currently feels like it’s at a generational peak, and F1 25 is so brilliantly crafted and full of elements that generate an irresistible mix of nailed-on realism and fantasy that it, too, feels like the culmination of a generation of officially licensed Formula One games. F1 25? Peak F1.

Essex Police has not properly considered the potentially discriminatory impacts of its live facial recognition (LFR) use, according to documents obtained by Big Brother Watch and shared with Computer Weekly. While the force claims in an equality impact assessment (EIA) that “Essex Police has carefully considered issues regarding bias and algorithmic injustice”, privacy campaign group Big Brother Watch said the document – obtained under Freedom of Information (FoI) rules – shows it has likely failed to fulfil its public sector equality duty (PSED) to consider how its policies and practices could be discriminatory. The campaigners highlighted how the force is relying on false comparisons to other algorithms and “parroting misleading claims” from the supplier about the LFR system’s lack of bias. For example, Essex Police said that when deploying LFR, it will set the system threshold “at 0.6 or above, as this is the level whereby equitability of the rate of false positive identification across all demographics is achieved”. However, this figure is based on the National Physical Laboratory’s (NPL) testing of NEC’s Neoface V4 LFR algorithm deployed by the Metropolitan Police and South Wales Police, which Essex Police does not use. Instead, Essex Police has opted to use an algorithm developed by Israeli biometrics firm Corsight, whose chief privacy officer, Tony Porter, was formerly the UK’s surveillance camera commissioner until January 2021. Highlighting testing of the Corsight_003 algorithm conducted in June 2022 by the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), the EIA also claims it has “a bias differential FMR [False Match Rate] of 0.0006 overall, the lowest of any tested within NIST at the time of writing, according to the supplier”. However, looking at the NIST website, where all of the testing data is publicly shared, there is no information to support the figure cited by Corsight, or its claim to essentially have the least biased algorithm available. A separate FoI response to Big Brother Watch confirmed that, as of 16 January 2025, Essex Police had not conducted any “formal or detailed” testing of the system itself, or otherwise commissioned a third party to do so. Essex Police's lax approach to assessing the dangers of a controversial and dangerous new form of surveillance has put the rights of thousands at risk Jake Hurfurt, Big Brother Watch “Looking at Essex Police’s EIA, we are concerned about the force’s compliance with its duties under equality law, as the reliance on shaky evidence seriously undermines the force’s claims about how the public will be protected against algorithmic bias,” said Jake Hurfurt, head of research and investigations at Big Brother Watch. “Essex Police’s lax approach to assessing the dangers of a controversial and dangerous new form of surveillance has put the rights of thousands at risk. This slapdash scrutiny of their intrusive facial recognition system sets a worrying precedent. “Facial recognition is notorious for misidentifying women and people of colour, and Essex Police’s willingness to deploy the technology without testing it themselves raises serious questions about the force’s compliance with equalities law. Essex Police should immediately stop their use of facial recognition surveillance.” The need for UK police forces deploying facial recognition to consider how their use of the technology could be discriminatory was highlighted by a legal challenge brought against South Wales Police by Cardiff resident Ed Bridges. In August 2020, the UK Court of Appeal ruled that the use of LFR by the force was unlawful because the privacy violations it entailed were “not in accordance” with legally permissible restrictions on Bridges’ Article 8 privacy rights; it did not conduct an appropriate data protection impact assessment (DPIA); and it did not comply with its PSED to consider how its policies and practices could be discriminatory. The judgment specifically found that the PSED is a “duty of process and not outcome”, and requires public bodies to take reasonable steps “to make enquiries about what may not yet be known to a public authority about the potential impact of a proposed decision or policy on people with the relevant characteristics, in particular for present purposes race and sex”. Big Brother Watch said equality assessments must rely on “sufficient quality evidence” to back up the claims being made and ultimately satisfy the PSED, but that the documents obtained do not demonstrate the force has had “due regard” for equalities. Academic Karen Yeung, an interdisciplinary professor at Birmingham Law School and School of Computer Science, told Computer Weekly that, in her view, the EIA is “clearly inadequate”. She also criticised the document for being “incoherent”, failing to look at the systemic equalities impacts of the technology, and relying exclusively on testing of entirely different software algorithms used by other police forces trained on different populations: “This does not, in my view, fulfil the requirements of the public sector equality duty. It is a document produced from a cut-and-paste exercise from the largely irrelevant material produced by others.” Computer Weekly contacted Essex Police about every aspect of the story. “We take our responsibility to meet our public sector equality duty very seriously, and there is a contractual requirement on our LFR partner to ensure sufficient testing has taken place to ensure the software meets the specification and performance outlined in the tender process,” said a spokesperson. “There have been more than 50 deployments of our LFR vans, scanning 1.7 million faces, which have led to more than 200 positive alerts, and nearly 70 arrests. “To date, there has been one false positive, which, when reviewed, was established to be as a result of a low-quality photo uploaded onto the watchlist and not the result of bias issues with the technology. This did not lead to an arrest or any other unlawful action because of the procedures in place to verify all alerts. This issue has been resolved to ensure it does not occur again.” The spokesperson added that the force is also committed to carrying out further assessment of the software and algorithms, with the evaluation of deployments and results being subject to an independent academic review. “As part of this, we have carried out, and continue to do so, testing and evaluation activity in conjunction with the University of Cambridge. The NPL have recently agreed to carry out further independent testing, which will take place over the summer. The company have also achieved an ISO 42001 certification,” said the spokesperson. “We are also liaising with other technical specialists regarding further testing and evaluation activity.” However, the force did not comment on why it was relying on the testing of a completely different algorithm in its EIA, or why it had not conducted or otherwise commissioned its own testing before operationally deploying the technology in the field. Computer Weekly followed up Essex Police for clarification on when the testing with Cambridge began, as this is not mentioned in the EIA, but received no response by time of publication. Although Essex Police and Corsight claim the facial recognition algorithm in use has “a bias differential FMR of 0.0006 overall, the lowest of any tested within NIST at the time of writing”, there is no publicly available data on NIST’s website to support this claim. Drilling down into the demographic split of false positive rates shows, for example, that there is a factor of 100 more false positives in West African women than for Eastern European men. While this is an improvement on the previous two algorithms submitted for testing by Corsight, other publicly available data held by NIST undermines Essex Police’s claim in the EIA that the “algorithm is identified by NIST as having the lowest bias variance between demographics”. Looking at another metric held by NIST – FMR Max/Min, which refers to the ratio between demographic groups that give the most and least false positives – it essentially represents how inequitable the error rates are across different age groups, sexes and ethnicities. In this instance, smaller values represent better performance, with the ratio being an estimate of how many times more false positives can be expected in one group over another. According to the NIST webpage for “demographic effects” in facial recognition algorithms, the Corsight algorithm has an FMR Max/Min of 113(22), meaning there are at least 21 algorithms that display less bias. For comparison, the least biased algorithm according to NIST results belongs to a firm called Idemia, which has an FMR Max/Min of 5(1). However, like Corsight, the highest false match rate for Idemia’s algorithm was for older West African women. Computer Weekly understands this is a common problem with many of the facial recognition algorithms NIST tests because this group is not typically well-represented in the underlying training data of most firms. Computer Weekly also confirmed with NIST that the FMR metric cited by Corsight relates to one-to-one verification, rather than the one-to-many situation police forces would be using it in. This is a key distinction, because if 1,000 people are enrolled in a facial recognition system that was built on one-to-one verification, then the false positive rate will be 1,000 times larger than the metrics held by NIST for FMR testing. “If a developer implements 1:N (one-to-many) search as N 1:1 comparisons, then the likelihood of a false positive from a search is expected to be proportional to the false match for the 1:1 comparison algorithm,” said NIST scientist Patrick Grother. “Some developers do not implement 1:N search that way.” Commenting on the contrast between this testing methodology and the practical scenarios the tech will be deployed in, Birmingham Law School’s Yeung said one-to-one is for use in stable environments to provide admission to spaces with limited access, such as airport passport gates, where only one person’s biometric data is scrutinised at a time. “One-to-many is entirely different – it’s an entirely different process, an entirely different technical challenge, and therefore cannot typically achieve equivalent levels of accuracy,” she said. Computer Weekly contacted Corsight about every aspect of the story related to its algorithmic testing, including where the “0.0006” figure is drawn from and its various claims to have the “least biased” algorithm. “The facts presented in your article are partial, manipulated and misleading,” said a company spokesperson. “Corsight AI’s algorithms have been tested by numerous entities, including NIST, and have been proven to be the least biased in the industry in terms of gender and ethnicity. This is a major factor for our commercial and government clients.” However, Corsight was either unable or unwilling to specify which facts are “partial, manipulated or misleading” in response to Computer Weekly’s request for clarification. Computer Weekly also contacted Corsight about whether it has done any further testing by running N one-to-one comparisons, and whether it has changed the system’s threshold settings for detecting a match to suppress the false positive rate, but received no response on these points. While most facial recognition developers submit their algorithms to NIST for testing on an annual or bi-annual basis, Corsight last submitted an algorithm in mid-2022. Computer Weekly contacted Corsight about why this was the case, given that most algorithms in NIST testing show continuous improvement with each submission, but again received no response on this point. The Essex Police EIA also highlights testing of the Corsight algorithm conducted in 2022 by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), claiming it demonstrated “Corsight’s capability to perform equally across all demographics”. However, Big Brother Watch’s Hurfurt highlighted that the DHS study focused on bias in the context of true positives, and did not assess the algorithm for inequality in false positives. This is a key distinction for the testing of LFR systems, as false negatives where the system fails to recognise someone will likely not lead to incorrect stops or other adverse effects, whereas a false positive where the system confuses two people could have more severe consequences for an individual. The DHS itself also publicly came out against Corsight’s representation of the test results, after the firm claimed in subsequent marketing materials that “no matter how you look at it, Corsight is ranked #1. #1 in overall recognition, #1 in dark skin, #1 in Asian, #1 in female”. Speaking with IVPM in August 2023, DHS said: “We do not know what this claim, being ‘#1’ is referring to.” The department added that the rules of the testing required companies to get their claims cleared through DHS to ensure they do not misrepresent their performance. In its breakdown of the test results, IVPM noted that systems of multiple other manufacturers achieved similar results to Corsight. The company did not respond to a request for comment about the DHS testing. Computer Weekly contacted Essex Police about all the issues raised around Corsight testing, but received no direct response to these points from the force. While Essex Police claimed in its EIA that it “also sought advice from their own independent Data and Digital Ethics Committee in relation to their use of LFR generally”, meeting minutes obtained via FoI rules show that key impacts had not been considered. For example, when one panel member questioned how LFR deployments could affect community events or protests, and how the force could avoid the technology having a “chilling presence”, the officer present (whose name has been redacted from the document) said “that’s a pretty good point, actually”, adding that he had “made a note” to consider this going forward. The EIA itself also makes no mention of community events or protests, and does not specify how different groups could be affected by these different deployment scenarios. Elsewhere in the EIA, Essex Police claims that the system is likely to have minimal impact across age, gender and race, citing the 0.6 threshold setting, as well as NIST and DHS testing, as ways of achieving “equitability” across different demographics. Again, this threshold setting relates to a completely different system used by the Met and South Wales Police. For each protected characteristic, the EIA has a section on “mitigating” actions that can be taken to reduce adverse impacts. While the “ethnicity” section again highlights the National Physical Laboratory’s testing of a completely different algorithm, most other sections note that “any watchlist created will be done so as close to the deployment as possible, therefore hoping to ensure the most accurate and up-to-date images of persons being added are uploaded”. However, Yeung noted that the EIA makes no mention of the specific watchlist creation criteria beyond high-level “categories of images” that can be included, and the claimed equality impacts of that process. For example, it does not consider how people from certain ethnic minority or religious backgrounds could be disproportionally impacted as a result of their over-representation in police databases, or the issue of unlawful custody image retention whereby the Home Office is continuing to hold millions of custody images illegally in the Police National Database (PND). While the ethics panel meeting minutes offer greater insight into how Essex Police is approaching watchlist creation, the custody image retention issue was also not mentioned. Responding to Computer Weekly’s questions about the meeting minutes and the lack of scrutiny of key issues related to UK police LFR deployments, an Essex Police spokesperson said: “Our polices and processes around the use of live facial recognition have been carefully scrutinised through a thorough ethics panel.” Instead, the officer present explained how watchlists and deployments are decided based on the “intelligence case”, which then has to be justified as both proportionate and necessary. On the “Southend intelligence case”, the officer said deploying in the town centre would be permissible because “that’s where the most footfall is, the most opportunity to locate outstanding suspects”. They added: “The watchlist [then] has to be justified by the key elements, the policing purpose. Everything has to be proportionate and strictly necessary to be able to deploy… If the commander in Southend said, ‘I want to put everyone that’s wanted for shoplifting across Essex on the watchlist for Southend’, the answer would be no, because is it necessary? Probably not. Is it proportionate? I don’t think it is. Would it be proportionate to have individuals who are outstanding for shoplifting from the Southend area? Yes, because it’s local.” However, the officer also said that, on most occasions, the systems would be deployed to catch “our most serious offenders”, as this would be easier to justify from a public perception point of view. They added that, during the summer, it would be easier to justify deployments because of the seasonal population increase in Southend. “We know that there is a general increase in violence during those months. So, we don’t need to go down to the weeds to specifically look at grievous bodily harm [GBH] or murder or rape, because they’re not necessarily fuelled by a spike in terms of seasonality, for example,” they said. “However, we know that because the general population increases significantly, the level of violence increases significantly, which would justify that I could put those serious crimes on that watchlist.” Commenting on the responses given to the ethics panel, Yeung said they “failed entirely to provide me with confidence that their proposed deployments will have the required legal safeguards in place”. According to the Court of Appeal judgment against South Wales Police in the Bridges case, the force’s facial recognition policy contained “fundamental deficiencies” in relation to the “who” and “where” question of LFR. “In relation to both of those questions, too much discretion is currently left to individual police officers,” it said. “It is not clear who can be placed on the watchlist, nor is it clear that there are any criteria for determining where AFR [automated facial recognition] can be deployed.” Yeung added: “The same applies to these responses of Essex Police force, failing to adequately answer the ‘who’ and ‘where’ questions concerning their proposed facial recognition deployments. “Worse still, the court stated that a police force’s local policies can only satisfy the requirements that the privacy interventions arising from use of LFR are ‘prescribed by law’ if they are published. The documents were obtained by Big Brother Watch through freedom of information requests, strongly suggesting that these even these basic legal safeguards are not being met.” Yeung added that South Wales Police’s use of the technology was found to be unlawful in the Bridges case because there was excessive discretion left in the hands of individual police officers, allowing undue opportunities for arbitrary decision-making and abuses of power. Every decision ... must be specified in advance, documented and justified in accordance with the tests of proportionality and necessity. I don’t see any of that happening Karen Yeung, Birmingham Law School “Every decision – where you will deploy, whose face is placed on the watchlist and why, and the duration of deployment – must be specified in advance, documented and justified in accordance with the tests of proportionality and necessity,” she said. “I don’t see any of that happening. There are simply vague claims that ‘we’ll make sure we apply the legal test’, but how? They just offer unsubstantiated promises that ‘we will abide by the law’ without specifying how they will do so by meeting specific legal requirements.” Yeung further added these documents indicate that the police force is not looking for specific people wanted for serious crimes, but setting up dragnets for a wide variety of ‘wanted’ individuals, including those wanted for non-serious crimes such as shoplifting. “There are many platitudes about being ethical, but there’s nothing concrete indicating how they propose to meet the legal tests of necessity and proportionality,” she said. “In liberal democratic societies, every single decision about an individual by the police made without their consent must be justified in accordance with law. That means that the police must be able to justify and defend the reasons why every single person whose face is uploaded to the facial recognition watchlist meets the legal test, based on their specific operational purpose.” Yeung concluded that, assuming they can do this, police must also consider the equality impacts of their actions, and how different groups are likely to be affected by their practical deployments: “I don’t see any of that.” In response to the concerns raised around watchlist creation, proportionality and necessity, an Essex Police spokesperson said: “The watchlists for each deployment are created to identify specific people wanted for specific crimes and to enforce orders. To date, we have focused on the types of offences which cause the most harm to our communities, including our hardworking businesses. “This includes violent crime, drugs, sexual offences and thefts from shops. As a result of our deployments, we have arrested people wanted in connection with attempted murder investigations, high-risk domestic abuse cases, GBH, sexual assault, drug supply and aggravated burglary offences. We have also been able to progress investigations and move closer to securing justice for victims.” Read more about police data and technology Metropolitan Police to deploy permanent facial recognition tech in Croydon: The Met is set to deploy permanent live facial recognition cameras on street furniture in Croydon from summer 2025, but local councillors say the decision – which has taken place with no community input – will further contribute the over-policing of Black communities. UK MoJ crime prediction algorithms raise serious concerns: The Ministry of Justice is using one algorithm to predict people’s risk of reoffending and another to predict who will commit murder, but critics say the profiling in these systems raises ‘serious concerns’ over racism, classism and data inaccuracies. UK law enforcement data adequacy at risk: The UK government says reforms to police data protection rules will help to simplify law enforcement data processing, but critics argue the changes will lower protection to the point where the UK risks losing its European data adequacy.

Scene at UKREiiF 2025 outside the Canary bar UKREiiF is getting bigger by the year, with more than 16,000 professionals attending the 2025 construction conference in Leeds this week during three days of sunny weather, networking, panel discussions and robust amounts of booze. It has grown so big over the past few years that it seems almost to have outgrown the city of Leeds itself. A running joke among attendees was the varying quality of accommodation people had managed to secure. All of the budget hotels in the city were fully booked months in advance of the conference, with many - including at least one member of Parliament - reduced to kipping in bed and breakfasts of a questionable nature. Many were forced to stay in nearby towns including York, Wakefield and Bradford and catch the train to the conference each morning. But these snags served as ice breakers for more important conversations at an event which has come at a key pivot point for the industry. With the government on the brink of launching its 10-year industrial strategy and its new towns programme, opportunity was in the air. Networking events between government departments and potential suppliers of all sectors were well attended, although many discussion panels focused on the question of how all of this work would be paid for. And hanging over the conference like a storm cloud were the mounting issues at the Building Safety Regulator which are continuing to cause expensive delays to high rise schemes across the country. While many attendees eyed a huge amount of potential work to fill up pipelines, it was clear the industry is still facing some systemic challenges which could threaten a much-needed recovery following a long period of turmoil. How will the issues at the Building Safety Regulator be fixed? You did not even have to go inside an event titled “Gateways and Growing Pains: Tackling the Building Safety Act” to see how much this issue is affecting construction at the moment. The packed out tent was overflowing into the space outside, with those inside stood like sardines to watch a panel discussion about what has been happening in the high rise residential sector over the past year.  Audience members shared their horror stories of schemes which have been waiting for the best part of a year to get gateway 2 approval from the regulator, which is needed to start construction. There was a palpable sense of anger in the crowd, one professional describing the hold-ups which had affected his scheme as a “disgrace”. Others highlighted the apparent inconsistency of the regulator’s work. One attendee told how two identical buildings had been submitted to the regulator in separate gateway 2 applications and assigned to two separate technical teams for approval. One application had received no follow up questions, while the other had been extensively interrogated. “The industry should hold its head in shame with regard to what happened at Grenfell, but post that, it’s just complete disarray,” he said. More than 16,000 professionals attended the 2025 event While many are currently focusing on delays at pre-construction, others raised the looming gateway 3 approvals which are needed before occupation. Pareto Projects director Kuli Bajwa said: “Gateway 2 is an issue, but when we get to gateway 3, we’re committed to this project, money’s been spent, debt’s been taken out and week on week it’s costing money. It just keeps wracking up, so we need to resolve that with the regulator asap.” >> See also: Homes England boss calls on government to fix ‘unacceptably slow’ gateway 2 approvals Caddick Construction managing director for Yorkshire and the North East Steve Ford added: “I think where it will probably get interesting and quite heated I guess is at the point where some of these schemes get rejected at gateway 3, and the finger pointing starts as to why it’s not got through gateway 3.” Simon Latson, head of living for the UK and Ireland at JLL, offered a potential solution. “We will be dealing with the regulator all the way through the construction process, and you would like to think that there is a collaborative process where you get early engagement and you can say ‘I’m 12 weeks out from completion, I’m going to start sending you all of my completion documents, my fire alarm certificate’, and say ‘thanks very much that’s the last thing on my list’. That’s probably wishful thinking but that’s got to be a practical solution, as early engagement as possible.” How is the government going to pay for its infrastructure strategy? Ministers are expected to outline the government’s ten-year infrastructure strategy next month, outlining ambitions not only for transport but social infrastructure including schools and healthcare. At an event titled “A Decade of National Renewal: What Will This Mean for our Regions, Towns and Cities?”, a panel of experts including London deputy mayor Jules Pipe highlighted how much of this new infrastructure is needed to enable the government to achieve its housing targets. But how will it be funded? Tom Wagner, cofounder of investment firm Knighthead Capital, which operates largely in the West Midlands with assets including Birmingham City FC, gave a frank assessment of the government’s policies on attracting private sector investment. “There have been a lot of policies in the UK that have forced capital allocators to go elsewhere,” he said, calling for lower taxes and less restrictions on private finance in order to stop investors fleeing to more amenable destinations overseas.  “What we’ve found in the UK is, as we’re seeking to tax those who can most afford it, that’s fine, but unless they’re chained here, they’ll just go somewhere else. That creates a bad dynamic because those people are the capital providers, and right now what we need is capital infusion to foster growth.” The main square at the centre of the conference Pipe offered a counterpoint, suggesting low taxes were not the only reason which determines where wealthy people live and highlighted the appeal of cities which had been made livable by good infrastructure. “There are people living in some very expensive cities but they live there because of the cosmopolitan culture and the parks and the general vibe, and that’s what we have to get right. And the key thing that leads to that is good transport, making it livable.” Pipe also criticised the penny-pinching tendencies of past governments on infrastructure investment, including on major transports schemes like Crossrail 2 which were mothballed due to a lack of funds and a perceived lack of value added. “All these things were fought in the trenches with the Treasury about ‘oh well there’s no cost benefit to this’. And where is the major transport like that where after ten years people are saying ‘no one’s using it, that was a really bad idea, it’s never opened up any new businesses or new homes’? It’s absolute nonsense. But that seems to be how we judge it,” he said. One solution could be funding through business rates, an approach used on the Northern Line Extension to Battersea Power Station. But the benefits of this have been largely overlooked, Pipe said. “One scheme every ten or twenty years is not good enough. We need to do this more frequently”. What is the latest on the government’s new towns programme? Where are the new towns going to be built? It was a question which everybody was asking during the conference, with rumours circulating around potential sites in Cambridge of Plymouth. The government is set to reveal the first 12 locations of 10,000 homes each in July, an announcement which will inevitably unleash an onslaught of NIMBY outcries from affected communities. A large crowd gathered for an “exclusive update” on the programme from Michael Lyons, chair of the New Towns Taskforce appointed by the government to recommend suitable sites, with many in attendance hoping for a big reveal on the first sites. They were disappointed, but Lyons did provide some interesting insights into the taskforce’s work. Despite a “rather hairbrained” timescale given to the team, which was only established last September, Lyons said it was at a “very advanced stage” in its deliberations after spending the past few months touring the country speaking to developers, landowners and residents in search of potential sites. >> See also: Don’t scrimp on quality standards for new towns, taskforce chair tells housebuilders “We stand at a crucial moment in the history of home building in this country,” he said. The government’s commitment to so many large-scale developments could herald a return to ambitious spatial planning, he said, with communities strategically located close to the most practical locations for the supply of new infrastructure needed for people to move in. A line of tents at the docks site, including the London Pavilion “Infrastructure constraints, whether it’s water or power, sewage or transport, must no longer be allowed to hold back growth, and we’ve been shocked as we looked around the country at the extent to which plans ready to be advanced are held back by those infrastructure problems,” he said. The first sites will be in places where much of this infrastructure is already in place, he said, allowing work to start immediately.  An emphasis on “identity and legibility” is also part of the criteria for the initial locations, with the government’s design and construction partners to be required to put placemaking at the heart of their schemes. “ We need to be confident that these can be distinctive places, and that the title of new town, whether it’s an urban extension or whether it’s even a reshaping of an existing urban area or a genuine greenfield site, that it genuinely can be seen and will be seen by its residents as a distinct community.” How do you manage a working public-private partnership? Successful public partnerships between the public sector and private housebuilders will be essential for the government to achieve its target to build 1.5 million homes by the end of this parliament in 2029. At an event hosted by Muse, a panel discussed where past partnerships have gone wrong and what lessons have been learned. Mark Bradbury, Thurrock council’s chief officer for strategic growth partnerships and special projects, spoke of the series of events which led to L&Q pulling out of the 2,800-home Purfleet-on-Thames scheme in Essex and its replacement by housing association Swan. “I think it was partly the complex nature of the procurement process that led to market conditions being quite different at the end of the process to the start,” he said. “Some of the original partners pulled out halfway through because their business model changed. I think the early conversations at Purfleet on Thames around the masterplan devised by Will Alsop, the potential for L&Q to be one of the partners, the potential for a development manager, the potential for some overseas investment, ended up with L&Q deciding it wasn’t for their business model going forwards. The money from the far east never materialised, so we ended up with somebody who didn’t have the track record, and there was nobody who had working capital.  “By then it was clear that the former partnership wasn’t right, so trying to persuade someone to join a partnership which wasn’t working was really difficult. So you’ve got to be really clear at the outset that this is a partnership which is going to work, you know where the working capital is coming from, and everybody’s got a track record.” Muse development director for residential Duncan Cumberland outlined a three-part “accelerated procurement process” which the developer has been looking at in order to avoid some of the setbacks which can hit large public private partnerships on housing schemes. The first part is developing a masterplan vision which has the support of community stakeholders, the second is outlining a “realistic and honest” business plan which accommodates viability challenges, and the third is working closely with public sector officials on a strong business case. A good partnership is almost like being in a marriage, Avison Young’s London co-managing director Kat Hanna added. “It’s hard to just walk away. We’re in it now, so we need to make it work, and perhaps being in a partnership can often be more revealing in tough times.”

Ongoing Regent’s Park Estate Story Trail Regent’s Park Estate, London NW1Regent’s Park Estate Story Trail is a public art trail. Artworks include Unwritten by Polish artist Rafal Zajko, which excavates the history of a clandestine LGBTQ+ bar located beneath St Mary Magdalene church and You Are Here by Ocean Stefan, a queer, trans and non-binary artist based in Margate. olddiorama.com Unwritten by Rafal Zajko. Photography: Nick Turpin 22 May AJ goes OUT sixteen3’s showroom, London EC1Advertisement Sponsored by UK furniture designer sixteen3 and held at its showrooms in Clerkenwell as part of Clerkenwell Design Week, the AJ is holding a party to celebrate the release of this issue. Expect music, drinks, posters, copies of the AJ and lots of networking with co-collaborators and contributors. sixteen3.co.uk 24 May Queer Archi* Social London LGBT+ Community Centre, London SE1Organised by Queerscapes, Queer Archi* Social is a meet-up for queer and trans people working in the architecture, landscape, horticulture and built environment sectors. Not a formal networking event, it’s a chance to meet others who get it, swap stories and find new collaborators. londonlgbtqcentre.org queerscapes.com Still from E.1027 Eileen Gray and the House by the Sea. Credit: Rise And Shine World Sales 31 May Linden Archives Museum of LiverpoolStuart Linden Rhodes established Instagram account @Linden_Archives during Covid, digitising hundreds of 35mm photographs he shot for All Points North and Gay Times in the 1990s. This talk covers his books on the pub and club scene from Birmingham to Newcastle, as well as Pride events across the whole of England. liverpoolmuseums.org.ukAdvertisement 7 June Queer Realms – Zine Workshop Ada Haus, London SW8Part of The London Festival of Architecture, this zine workshop, organised by and for LGBTQ+ people, invites attendees to explore how their identities shape and are shaped by the London landscape, using zine-making as a creative tool. londonfestivalofarchitecture.org You Are Here by Ocean Stefan. Part of Regent's Park Estate Art Trail. Photography: Nick Turpin 9 June-14 September The Painted Picnic – A Summer Pavilion Citypoint, London EC2Designed by artist John Booth, Citypoint’s plaza will be transformed into a vibrant scene from an outdoor party. Inspired by the LFA’s 2025 theme Voices, the installation reimagines a still-life composition at an architectural scale that visitors can interact with. Digital illustrations by Booth celebrating Pride month will also be on display on the screen at Citypoint throughout June. Brookfield Properties as the commissioners. londonfestivalofarchitecture.org 14-18 June Queer Frontiers 1 Customs Wharf, EdinburghHeld over five days of the 2025 Architecture Fringe in Scotland, Queer Frontiers is a project that explores the ‘corporate capture’ of the queer as we progress towards a future where queer has become the norm. The event includes an exhibition and talks, organised by designer and researcher Kirsty Watt, designer Samuel Stair and Architecture Fringe co-director Andy Summers. architecturefringe.com Still from E.1027 Eileen Gray and the House by the Sea. Credit: Rise And Shine World Sales 18 June E.1027 Eileen Gray and the House by the Sea Museum of BathAs part of Queer Bath 2025’s festival and in partnership with FilmBath, this screening sheds light on Irish designer and architect Eileen Gray’s story and the significance of the Modernist villa E.1027 in queer architectural history. The screening will be followed by a discussion on gender, space, and visibility in design. queerbath.co.uk June, date TBC Architecture LGBT+ Life Drawing HOK, London W1Architecture LGBT+’s next free-to-attend monthly life drawing class is being held at HOK’s offices near Warren Street. A queer model will do a variety of poses throughout the evening for attendees to draw. Drawing supplies, music and drinks are all included. The event is aimed at those who work or study within the architectural field. architecturelgbt.com Life drawing at Heatherwick Studio. Photography: Daniel Innes and Joe Stancer 21 June Soho Queer History – Walking Tour Trafalgar Square, London WC2A two-hour walking tour exploring the history of London LGBTQ+ life. It takes you through the West End, sharing stories of drag queens of the 1700s, gay soirées of the 1920s, and the development of this queer neighbourhood. londonfestivalofarchitecture.org 4 July Queer Nightcrawl Through the City NLA, The London Centre, London EC2Dani Dinger and Dan de la Motte of Queer Tours of London shine a light on London's hidden queer stories. The tour strolls down Sodomites Walk, heads to the docks to discover the secret lives of the Mollies of 18th Century Wapping and minces down Old Compton Street to navigate the danger and dalliance of 1930s Soho. thelondoncentre.org 5 July Architecture LGBT+ London Pride Celebration 2025 London, location TBCArchitecture LGBT+ hosts a breakfast and drinks ahead of the London Pride parade to gather architects and built environment professionals together before joining the parade with the official architecture float. architecturelgbt.com London Pride Float competition winning scheme Proudspeaker by oo office. Credit: oo office 5 July London Pride Float Hyde Park Corner, LondonIn March this year, the LFA, Architecture LGBT+ and Freehold announced an open call for the annual £8,000 pride float competition, which is backed by Brookfield Properties and will celebrate the contributions of LGBTQIA+ architects to the built environment. The winner is oo office. architecturelgbt.com November, date TBC Queer Places: The Exhibition 2.0 Liverpool, location TBCLaunching its second round, exhibition Queer Places, a growing archive of Liverpool’s LGBTQ+ spaces past, present and future, opens its doors again in November. The exhibition will be filled with art, architectural models, maps, photographs and artefacts celebrating queer heritage. New this year are interactive 3D models of historic queer spaces. queerplaces.co.uk Queer Places exhibition. Credit: Queer Places Organisations, initiatives and platforms Architecture Foundation Young Trustees’ Spatial Queeries Spotlight Sunday A weekly spotlight on LGBT+ practitioners, design initiatives and queer spaces. @youngtrusteesArchitecture LGBT+ Not-for-profit organisation run by volunteers. It aims to provide an inclusive and prejudice-free environment for LGBT+ architects and those working and studying within the profession through learning, mentoring and networking events – including life drawing and yoga. architecturelgbt.com @architecturelgbtArchitecture LGBT+ Academic Champions Network (ACN) An alliance of academic champions – one per architecture school in the UK – working to improve representation and understanding of queer identity and action in architectural education. architecturelgbt.com/academic-champions-networkBuilding Equality UK-wide member association with resources for built environment consultants, engineers, developers, contractors and institutions – plus events. buildingequalityuk.comFirst Brick Community-led, democratically run housing organisation aiming to build housing and community spaces for LGBTQ+ people who want and need it. firstbrickhousing.co.ukFreehold Networking hub for LGBTQ professionals and allies in the UK’s real estate industry. freeholdlgbt.comFriends of The Joiners Arms: The JOIN Project Collaboration with community partners to explore how LGBTQIA+ venues and organisations can help create inclusive spaces and better opportunities for work, training and volunteering. friendsjoinersarms.comHomotopia Arts and social justice organisation based in Liverpool supporting local, national, and international queer and trans creatives, artists and makers. homotopia.netInterEngineering A professional network aiming to connect, inform and empower lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender engineers and their straight allies. interengineeringlgbt.comLondon LGBT Community Centre Based in pop-up premises in Southwark, this centre is a safe, sober space that welcomes and supports anyone identifying as LGBTQ+. The space was fitted out by the design and architecture community, who rallied around to support the space. londonlgbtqcentre.orgOpen Plan Scotland A volunteer-led advocacy and support network for all who identify as LGBTQIA+ and study or work across architecture in Scotland. openplan.scot @openplanscotlandOutwardly Creative A new event in Brighton bringing together queer members of the arts and creative industries, including architects. outwardlycreative.co.uk @outwardlycreativePlanning Out Network for LGBT professionals in the town planning and planning sector. @planningoutPride of Place: England’s LGBTQ Heritage Resource and interactive map uncovering and celebrating the LGBTQ heritage of buildings, places and landscapes across England. historicengland.org.ukThe London Queer Housing Coalition Specialist steering group made up of by-and-for LGBTQ+ housing and homelessness organisations working in the capital. stonewallhousing.org/lqhcThe Outside Project London’s LGBTIQ+ community shelter, centre, domestic abuse refuge and trans night shelter. lgbtiqoutside.orgThe Proud Place, Manchester Manchester’s LGBT+ Community Centre hosting The Proud Trust in a purpose-built building. theproudtrust.orgTonic Community-led, not-for-profit organisation focused on creating vibrant and inclusive urban LGBTQ+ affirming retirement communities to address issues of loneliness and isolation of older LGBTQ+ people. tonichousing.org.ukRIBA Collections: LGBTQ+ spaces Research guide to a few of the historical spaces that have formed sites where LGBTQ+ communities have explored, celebrated or concealed sexual and gender identities. architecture.comQueerscapes A platform and community for queer and trans spatial practitioners, including architects, designers, landscape architects, urbanists, builders, gardeners, artists and anyone working with space. queerscapes.com @_queerscapesQueercircle Charity founded to fill the gaps and advocate for systemic change where other arts, health and education institutions fail or actively perpetuate harm, based in the Design District in a David Kohn-designed building. queercircle.orgQueer Design Club Online platform where LGBTQ+ designers can celebrate queer contributions to the design industry and visual culture, share their work and connect with each other. queerdesign.clubQuEAN: Queer Educators in Architecture Network Network of queer spatial design educators – with a focus on queer theory, pedagogies, identities and intersections with spatial design – founded by Gem Barton. @quean_the_networkQueer Places A growing, free digital archive celebrating the vibrant LGBTQ+ spaces of Liverpool’s past, present and future. queerplaces.co.uk @queerplacesQueer Scenarios A research, practice and dissemination community that explores and supports queer identities and queer approaches within critical spatial practices, working collaboratively between teaching staff and students. Based at Central Saint Martins. @queer_scenariosThis list is by no means comprehensive and there are plenty of other resources available. If you are doing something in this field, the AJ would love to hear from you.

TCT 3Sixty, returns to the NEC Birmingham on 4–5 June 2025, bringing together more than 5,000 professionals for two days of live demonstrations, expert talks, and networking. Hosted by The TCT Group, the free-to-attend show is designed to offer a comprehensive look at how additive manufacturing technologies are being applied across the entire product lifecycle—from concept and design to production and post-processing. “There’s no other place in the UK where you’ll find this level of expertise, innovation, and real-world application of additive manufacturing technology under one roof. Whether you’re exploring AM for the first time or looking to optimize existing investments, TCT 3Sixty will deliver real value,” said Duncan Wood, CEO of The TCT Group. TCT 3Sixty ad. Photo via TCT 3Sixty Event Overview and What to Expect Now firmly established as one of the UK’s key industrial gatherings, the event is expected to attract over 5,000 professionals and more than 150 exhibitors, including names such as EOS, Formlabs, Trumpf, Additec, BMF, Carbon, Tri-Tech 3D, and Laser Lines. In addition to product demonstrations, the programme features keynote talks and panel discussions from organisations including the Ministry of Defence, Leonardo Helicopters, GKN Aerospace, Sartorius, and the Natural History Museum. TCT 3Sixty also provides access to several co-located industry shows—Med-Tech Innovation Expo, Subcon, Automechanika Birmingham, and Smart Manufacturing Week—allowing attendees to explore a wider cross-section of the UK’s advanced manufacturing sector. An event app is available to help visitors plan their schedule, connect with exhibitors, and access AI-powered content recommendations. Matthew Conley, Managing Director at Fullform, shared his experience from a previous edition. “Had an incredible experience at the TCT 3Sixty expo! The new AM tech is nothing short of amazing, achieving some crazy prints in ultra-fast times. Truly exciting to see where additive manufacturing is headed!” Exhibitors at TCT 3Sixty. Photo via TCT 3Sixty. 3D Printing Events and 3DPI on the road 3D printing events are keeping our reporters busy. In May, Belgium’s Flemish Brabant capital hosted the meeting of Materialise 3D Printing in Hospitals Forum 2025, which has become a key gathering for the medical 3D printing community since its launch in 2017. This year, 140 international healthcare professionals convened for two days of talks, workshops, and lively discussion on how Materialise’s software enhances patient care. The Forum’s opening day, hosted at Leuven’s historic Irish College, featured 16 presentations by 18 healthcare clinicians and medical 3D printing experts.  In April, 3DPI headed to Chicago where the global, volunteer-driven organization Additive Manufacturing Users Group (AMUG) also hosted its 37th annual AMUG Conference in Chicago, where six individuals were awarded the DINO (Distinguished Innovator Operator) Award. This recognition highlights their contributions, lasting impact, and support of AMUG and the additive manufacturing community. Honorees included Amy Alexander, Unit Head and Mechanical Development & Applied Computational Engineering at Mayo Clinic; Dan Braley, Senior Technical Fellow at Boeing Global Services; Ryan Kircher, Principal Additive Manufacturing Engineer at rms Company; Dallas Martin, Additive Manufacturing Engineer at Toyota; Patrick Gannon, Director of Production-Additive Manufacturing at Ricoh USA, Inc.; and Brennon White, Technology Specialist – Additive Manufacturing Design and Manufacturing at General Motors. Catch up with our reporting from the AMUG Conference here. Add your event to our free online 3D printing events guide. Take the 3DPI Reader Survey — shape the future of AM reporting in under 5 minutes. Who won the 2024 3D Printing Industry Awards? Subscribe to the3D Printing Industry newsletter to keep up with the latest 3D printing news. You can also follow us on LinkedIn, and subscribe to the 3D Printing Industry Youtube channel to access more exclusive content. Featured image shows Exhibitors at TCT 3Sixty. Photo via TCT 3Sixty. Paloma Duran Paloma Duran holds a BA in International Relations and an MA in Journalism. Specializing in writing, podcasting, and content and event creation, she works across politics, energy, mining, and technology. With a passion for global trends, Paloma is particularly interested in the impact of technology like 3D printing on shaping our future.

V&A Dundee’s new exhibition starts before you get up to the first-floor gallery. As visitors enter the main hall of Kengo Kuma’s 2018 waterfront building, they’re confronted by 11 big white flowers dangling from the double-height ceiling. Called Shylight and created by Amsterdam’s Studio DRIFT, the floral forms slowly rise and fall courtesy of robotics, with their silk petals folding inwards, mimicking those flowers which close up at nightfall. Thought-provoking and visually pleasing, it sets the tone for Garden Futures: Designing With Nature, the exhibition which opened last week and runs until 25 January. It also hints that not everything in the garden (exhibition) is rosy. Beyond horticulture, there’s also technology – starting with those Shylight robotics – and art. That’s quite a juggling act. As a long-standing allotment holder, it was the horticulture content which drew me in. If I hadn’t had that focus, the exhibition could have been overwhelming: so many topics, so many ideas, so many things to take in. This is the touring show’s only UK stop, having debuted at Vitra Design Museum in Germany’s, before appearing across various European venues. Vitra Design Museum’s deputy director Sabrina Handler claims it’s the first major exhibition on the history of modern garden design. An image from Andrew Buurman’s photo project Allotments. An image from Andrew Buurman’s photo project Allotments. The original show comprised 300 objects. V&A Dundee has an extra 200m2 of space to play with, and has added another 130 objects to give it their own spin and highlight some Scottish contributions to the topic. Msoma Architects were brought in to reimagine the show for Dundee, building on Formafantasma’s original concept for the Vitra Design Museum. The graphics were handled by Boris Meister. In terms of the gardens on show here, they vary from productive spaces for work, rest and play, to places representing spiritual, cultural and political ideas. What they have in common is that they’re all designed spaces. Like a virulent form of bindweed, this show is covering a lot of ground. Its material is grouped in sections themed as Paradise, Sanctuary, Retreat and Labour of Love. It’s Paradise that makes the strongest impression – and rightly so – with its ice-cream-pink structure. Garden Futures at the V&A. Photo by Grant Anderson. The overarching aim is to demonstrate how garden design impacts us both functionally – providing food, hence Birmingham’s Uplands Allotments and seed companies – and aesthetically – hence William Morris wallpaper and the naturalistic planting of Dutch garden designer Piet Oudolf. It combines factual photos with artworks, and roams from floral tile panels from 17th Century Persia to a Chinese garden inspired by a video game, and from vast landscapes to hand tools. The two wall displays of the taxonomy of tools will add to the dwell time of any visitors who actually garden or grow. Biome’s Garden installation But for those after interaction, Dundee-based creative studio Biome Collective has created Garden, a video game that allows players to create a virtual musical garden. They’re also behind the Pollinator Pathway digital tool that creates a planting design tailored for the maximum benefit of pollinating insects. And then there’s the smell trail – little wooden boxes whose lids lift to give off a specific scent, such as a cypress tree. The image of Prospect, Derek Jarman’s Dungeness house and garden, might feel over-familiar to some. Likewise architect Stefano Boeri’s Bosco Verticale, the residential skyscraper covered in greenery in Milan – but an exhibition like this has to cater to all knowledge levels. Stefano Boeri’s Bosco Verticale Specific V&A Dundee content includes Seeds of Scotland in the Highlands, which produces resilient seeds. The company’s utilitarian packaging sits alongside photos of vegetables and the seeds themselves – another stop to linger for any growers in the audience. There’s also Oban’s Seaweed Gardens, a community-led project, and the garden designed by Arabella Lennox-Boyd for cancer patients at Maggie’s Centre, Dundee. On a smaller scale, there are origami-inspired self-watering plant pots made from marine waste, the brainchild of Glasgow-based company POTR. And when it comes to Dundee’s own garden future, things could be looking up. The Eden Project has a scheme to transform a defunct gasholder into a vast glasshouse. It’s got planning permission, and the 2025 model of architecture firm Feilden Clegg Bradley Studios brings the £130million idea to life. POTR’s self-watering plant pots There’s something counter-intuitive about going indoors to experience gardens. But this isn’t the only show tackling that problem. Gardens and gardening are having a moment. The exhibition Soil, which explored soil’s vital role in our planet’s future, finished at London’s Somerset House in April, getting 50,000 visitors in three months. Now Garden Futures is off the ground, V&A Dundee will be thinking about how to spend the £2.6million of government funding which was confirmed in February. The plan is to improve the permanent Scottish galleries. The museum’s director, Leonie Bell says there’s demand for them to be bigger. Her ideas so far include expanding the time frame to go as far back as Skara Brae, the prehistoric village on Orkney, and to explore Scotland’s influence on global design, for example in fashion. Exhibition designers, watch this space. Garden Futures at the V&A. Photo by Grant Anderson. Arabella Lennox-Boyd’s garden for Maggie’s Centre, Dundee.

Queerness and nightlife go hand in hand. Out of the mainstream. Underground and counter-cultural. Whether it’s the location, venue, organisers or crowd, they are always outside the norm.  Some, like new lesbian bar La Camionera in Hackney, east London, have been designed, built and crafted by queer hands – the same ones which will soon be shaking, stirring and drinking negronis on a brushed aluminium countertop, or raising a glass in the purpose-built seating areas. Source: Rachel FerrimanLa Camionera The reopening of the quietly elegant La Camionera (Spanish for ‘female trucker’ and slang for butch lesbian) follows a months-long conversion of a temporary space led by its trans owner and a team of queer architects, contractors and trades. It is unique and stylish.  Advertisement But that’s not the only reason this tailored LGBTQ+ space stands out. Its mere existence sits against a background of queer venue closures because of an unholy trinity of rising costs, licensing issues and safety concerns. London, to take one city, has lost half of these safe spaces since 2006. Waves of redevelopment and gentrification have had their impact, too. One of the most famous victims was the wildly beloved Joiners Arms pub in Hackney Road in 2015. Never forgotten, attempts continue to resurrect this institution somewhere else in London’s East End a decade on. But can La Camionera pave the way for a design-led renaissance of after-hours ‘queerness’? One thing is for sure, there is a growing queer movement – architects included – to create safe, accessible LGBTQ+ spaces and define what that might look like. We’re going out (OUT), to find out. The state of play The Night Time Industries Association (NTIA) recently reported that 37 per cent of all night clubs across the UK have permanently shut since March 2020. That’s an average of three clubs a week, or 150 a year.Advertisement LGBTQ+ venues make up a considerable chunk of this. In the capital, between 2006 and 2022, Greater London Authority numbers show that 75 bars, clubs and LGBTQ+ pubs shut down – sometimes forever.  The list keeps growing. In the past 18 months, G-A-Y Late in Soho and The Glory in Haggerston have closed. Meanwhile, a third LGBTQ+ safe space, Bethnal Green Working Men’s Club, has been fighting closure on and off for years – though it seems the east London venue may finally have had a late reprieve.  Venue closures are happening elsewhere in the UK, too, with Birmingham losing the Village Inn, Glasgow losing Bonjour and Sheffield losing the Queer Junction nightclub.  Based on the current rate of club closures, the NTIA warns the UK could have no nightclubs of any kind by 2030. The pro-nighttime body blames the collapse partly on the long-term impact of the Covid pandemic. Once closed down and locked up, these unique spaces rarely re-emerge, eyed up by developers for larger gain.  And, while the NTIA data does not explain how many of these closures are LGBTQ+, the community is among the hardest-hit because queerness and nightlife are so intertwined. Or, as Olimpia Burchiellaro, a shareholder of the Friends of The Joiners Arms campaign, puts it: ‘Nighttime is queer time’.  A call to (Joiners) Arms While The Joiners Arms, where reportedlyAlexander McQueen used to hang out, became one of the first LGBTQ+ venues to get protection in the planning system because of the sexual orientation of its users back in 2017, no on-site replacement has yet popped up on Hackney Road. Tower Hamlets Council had imposed a planning condition requiring any new development on The Joiners Arms site to include an LGBTQ+ venue. Developer Regal Homes had agreed to it. However, the proposed scheme that forced the closure has been delayed. No development, no new venue.  Burchiellaro tells the AJ that The Joiners Arms shows that LGBTQ+ spaces often act as ‘canaries in the coalmine’; a bellwether of the redevelopment cycle and of the state of the nighttime economy more generally. With little planning protection, they can be easily lost because they are often perceived as ‘unproductive’ uses in buildings ripe for replacement. Source: Friends of The Joiners ArmsFriends of The Joiners Arms protest outside the former pub ‘Gentrification and redevelopment are making it more and more difficult for communities who are not solely focused on profit, like queer spaces, to exist,’ argues Burchiellaro. ‘And, although queer clubs and bars have always been businesses, they’ve always been so much more than that.’ In the meantime, the Friends of  The Joiners Arms campaign has put on ‘an itinerant, moving club night’ at other east London venues as an act of resistance against anti-LGBTQ+ gentrification and the demise of LGBTQ+ nightlife in the capital, according to Aska Welford, an architectural worker formerly with Karakusevic Carson Architects. Welford, who is leading on co-design for a future permanent home for The Joiners Arms campaign, adds: ‘Even without the physical space, without a permanent, fixed space, queer people continue to exist and have a good time and be together.’ Safe and sound In Edinburgh, GRAS architect Kirsty Watt has also resorted to moving club nights, dubbed ‘Femmergy’, that turn the city’s historic urban fabric – including most recently a former biscuit factory – into a playground for femme-presenting members of the LGBTQ+ community, including trans people and afab women. Watt says: ‘In Edinburgh the queer nightlife scene particularly focused around cis gay men and so women, non-binary and trans people weren’t necessarily welcome in those spaces and that was the point of it, because there wasn’t really a space at all.’ Source: Kirsty WattFemmergy club night While Femmergy has difficulties finding Edinburgh venues with level access and accessible toilets, the club nights have provided a safe space for people ‘to be inherently themselves and represent themselves in a way that they want to while still feeling safe’, says Watt.  Both accessibility and safety are central to Femmergy, and are what makes it queer, she tells the AJ, ‘because people need to feel like they have a representation within their urban space’. However, she admits that having level access and accessible toilets have ‘limited us in terms of what venues we can work with, particularly in Edinburgh, because so many of the buildings are historic’. Putting the pop in pop-up So, if permanent dedicated spaces don’t always exist, what about bringing the nuts-and-bolts of a party to the people instead? This is the concept behind the Mobile Dyke Bar, a travelling lesbian disco started by former Royal Academy Interior design student Lucy Nurnberg and her right-hand woman, Ali Wagner, as part of a wider project dubbed Uhaul Dyke Rescue, a series of design-led club nights. The Mobile Dyke Bar is made of prefabricated parts which ‘slot’ into rental vans, which Nurnberg suggests is a tongue-in-cheek response to hyper-masculine removal van culture as much as it is a declaration of space for lesbians when there is barely any.  Its next stop is Mighty Hoopla, a pop festival in south London, later this month – the Mobile Dyke Bar’s second outing at the LGBTQ+ friendly event.  Source: Courteney FrisbyThe Mobile Dyke Bar at Mighty Hoopla in 2024 ‘The idea was that this would be a friendly space, but also about taking space for ourselves and being like, “Look, we need a bit of a dedicated corner here”,’ explains Nurnberg, whose Uhaul Dyke Rescue service was a reaction to ‘queer spaces in London generally declining, especially lesbian spaces’. Nurnberg adds that her interior design course informed Uhaul’s philosophy, ‘which is a bit secret and underground’ and had to be done on the cheap. It also looks at temporary structures as queer structures.  ‘We had a scaffold structure on the dance floor for our first night because I know that dykes love to flex muscle,’ Nurnberg explains, ‘But I also wanted to make it for anybody more femme presenting, and for anybody wanting to look a bit sexy, so we put a swing on the structure and people loved it.’ Why architects should design the night CAKE, a Dalston, east London-based practice, which was behind the Agnes stage at Rally festival in south London last year, has experience on an even bigger scale of delivering for a queer crowd.  The Layher scaffolding and translucent fibreglass-clad structure was designed to flip to become ‘The Strap’ at Body Movements – a queer festival the following day. That’s when the versatility of the modular structure’s raised platforms, floating walls, and one central dance floor all came into action – bringing the audience, artist and stage together. ‘For both days, depending on the music, it was a completely different environment,’ says CAKE architect Emiliano Zavala. ‘At  Body Movements people were dancing up on terraces and the whole thing was inhabited, and for Rally, the crowd was low and spread out, with the stage a kind of undercroft. The difference was really interesting.’ Source: Rory GaylorAgnes by CAKE Architecture Why did CAKE take on the challenge? Hugh Scott Moncrieff, creative director, says it ‘wasn’t the idea of making money’ but the opportunity to make creative architecture that reflects music, rhythm and sound, as well as context. Agnes, or The Strap, was possible because CAKE had proven to festival organisers with an earlier Rally stage that you could ‘spend a tiny bit of money on design work’ and win against standard fabrication teams ‘who weren’t coming at it from an architectural lens’, Scott Moncrieff adds. Agnes could be getting an upgrade for this year’s August bank holiday festivals. The structure also won the people’s choice award at last month’s AJ Small Projects. A sign of better-designed nights out to come? The future is niche – and lesbian If the Mobile Dyke Bar and Agnes could be the future of festivals and club nights, is La Camionera the future of LGBTQ+ nighttime spaces more broadly? A well-polished, honed product for a community crying out for something decent designed especially for them?  Daniel Pope, of newly established design studio and architects Popelo, which worked on La Camionera, says the bar is special because the result is super-niche. Certainly, there is no underfoot nastiness, peeling paint or unwanted design features common to many of the old underground venues. Yet this is queer through and through.  ’There’s not really many queer spaces where you can get a really beautiful drink in a nice glass, where the floor isn’t sticky,’ says Pope. ‘And with funding being so difficult, often queer spaces can feel quite DIY and quite shabby, perhaps not thought-through. With La Camionera, we really tried to make it feel high-end. So we focused the budget on specific areas, like the bespoke bench seat and polished aluminium bar; it feels quite luxe.’ Source: Rachel FerrimanLa Camionera interior by Popelo and WET Studio Those additions, Pope admits, had to be costed in and compensated for elsewhere. Making decisions like these is part of the ‘burden’ on queer architects delivering queer spaces – often pro bono or for a reduced fee. But designing with care and enthusiasm, and, crucially, with first-hand experience of being part of the community. As Pope says: ‘While I can’t talk for lesbians and there’s loads of spaces for gay men in London, I know that having a lesbian space that felt really sexy was key for La Camionera. The architect, who worked alongside LGBTQ+ set design firm Wet Studio on the job, argues that La Camionera’s queer energy was brought by that very queer team of ‘builders and makers who know how you want to feel in a space as a queer person’. On that basis, bespoke queer design for clubs, bars and music experiences in general could be the way forward – and a challenge to the troubles of the wider nighttime economy and a lack of LGBTQ+ representation in permanent spaces. He adds: ‘Talking from experience, when I was not out, I would go to events and never felt like I enjoyed it. It wasn’t until I started making queer friends and we would go to queer venues that you could be yourself and connect with other people in a really magnetic way.’ queer architecture 2025-05-22 Gino Spocchia comment and share Tagsqueer architecture

An artist’s impression of Earth’s quasi-satellite Kamo`oalewa, the first destination of the Tianwen-2 missionAddy Graham/University of Arizona Final preparations are under way for China to launch an uncrewed craft to visit both an asteroid and a comet, in the hope of learning more about the space rocks in our solar system. The Tianwen-2 mission by the China National Space Administration (CNSA) will collect a 100-gram sample from the asteroid Kamoʻoalewa and return it to Earth. After dropping off the sample, the probe will use our planet’s gravity as a slingshot Advertisement The mission is due to launch from the Xichang Satellite Launch Center in Sichuan province on 29 May. It won’t be the first to return samples of asteroids to Earth, as both NASA’s OSIRIS-REx and JAXA’s Hayabusa missions have already done that. But it will be China’s first mission to an asteroid involving the return of a rock sample, and it is likely to be the first mission to a unique type of body called a quasi-satellite. Quasi-satellites like Kamoʻoalewa don’t strictly orbit Earth, but travel in a similar orbit to us around the sun, swinging elliptically around our planet as they do so. This unusual situation has led scientists to suspect that this particular one is a chunk of the moon ejected millions of years ago by an asteroid impact. On the other hand, 311P/PanSTARRS has an asteroid-like orbit – spinning around our sun in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter – but with an appearance more like a comet because it has tails. These are suspected of being bits of dust and rubble flung out from its spinning body. Voyage across the galaxy and beyond with our space newsletter every month. Sign up to newsletter The CNSA has previously said that 311P/PanSTARRS is a “living fossil”, making it useful for studying the early material composition, formation process and evolutionary history of the solar system. And Tianwen-2 will provide scientists with a better understanding of both Kamoʻoalewa and 311P/PanSTARRS. However, the results won’t come quickly: the craft is due to reach 311P/PanSTARRS in 2034, and even the Kamoʻoalewa sample is expected to return to Earth only in late 2027. Exactly how much the CNSA will share about the discoveries is also unclear. Leah-Nani Alconcel at the University of Birmingham, UK, says the mission’s outline is known, and one likely goal is to study the differences between the asteroid and the comet to gain a deeper understanding of the range of bodies in our solar system, but precise details haven’t been forthcoming. Alconcel’s previous experience working with the CNSA on the Double Star satellite leads her to suspect that the agency will hold on to the resulting scientific data tightly. “It was extremely difficult to negotiate [with the CNSA],” says Alconcel.
”Once they kind of had some information from us, they were not very keen to reciprocate. There will not be a public repository of this data, I don’t think.” She says that the mission is daring, as Kamoʻoalewa is spinning, which will make landing harder. Navigation algorithms are likely to demand such powerful computers that images and sensor readings will be sent back to Earth for computation. “If we were to always pick lovely, cooperative objects, we wouldn’t learn a lot,” she says. “There’s a lot that could potentially go wrong.” The CNSA didn’t respond to New Scientist‘s request for interview. Topics:

Pop Mart has temporarily paused Labubu sales in the UK. LILLIAN SUWANRUMPHA/AFP via Getty Images 2025-05-21T04:26:31Z Save Saved Read in app This story is available exclusively to Business Insider subscribers. Become an Insider and start reading now. Have an account? UK fans of Labubu won't be able to snag the toy in stores for a bit. The toy's producer, Pop Mart, said it would temporarily pause physical Labubu sales in the UK. It said this was to "ensure the safety" of people after long lines formed outside UK Pop Mart stores. Labubu fans in the UK have gone so wild for the toy, its seller has temporarily paused in-store sales.Pop Mart, the Chinese toymaker behind the viral $85 doll that's taking the world by storm, announced the pause in an Instagram post on Tuesday."Due to the increasing demand for our beloved Labubus, we've seen a significant rise in customer turnout on restock days — with long queues forming outside our stores and Roboshops," the toymaker said.Pop Mart sells products in 16 locations across the UK, including the vending machine-style Roboshops."To ensure the safety and comfort of everyone, we will temporarily pause all in-store and roboshop sales of THE MONSTERS plush toys until further notice," Pop Mart added.Pop Mart said online drops of the toy would continue as usual.At least a dozen videos on TikTok of Pop Mart's stores in the UK show snaking lines forming at its entrances ahead of product drops.A video of the Pop Mart in Bullring, a shopping mall in Birmingham, showed a line stretching around the building. Barricades were set up at the start of the line to organize the queue.This comes as Labubu fever spreads from Asia to the West, with fans queuing for hours to get their hands on the furry plushie with serrated teeth.Labubus, which come in various designs, are sold in blind boxes, or toys that are not labeled.Pop Mart staff in Singapore told BI in November that stores are restocked with a few hundred figurines twice a week, but they sell out in minutes.Labubu and The Monsters toy line was a major cash cow for Pop Mart in 2024. According to the company's annual report, its sales totaled 3.04 billion yuan, or about $426 million, which was 23% of Pop Mart's total revenue.Representatives for Pop Mart did not respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.