Charity supporting urban design research, neighbourhood planning and community-led design across the UK.
London, England
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- Following 386
- Followers 3,332
- Likes 1,906
Create Streets Foundation retweeted
Potholes have become the symbol of our failing streets.
But the public’s concerns go much further.
Politicians’ priorities should too. 🧵
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Create Streets Foundation retweeted
Let's take one of Britain's very best streets and trash it.... The complaint here is not the presence of the security barrier but the fact that (after many years in situ) it remains so dazzlingly ugly
It’s fair to say the one at the top of Cambridge’s King’s Parade won’t be winning any barrier beauty pageants.
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Create Streets Foundation retweeted
Always a delight to welcome @shepherdmg & the @CreateStreetsFN Dare To Draw course on architectural drawing into our offices of a Saturday morning !
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Create Streets Foundation retweeted
Join us next Tuesday in Liverpool for our fringe event at @UKLabour Party Conference 2026...
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Create Streets Foundation retweeted
Streets are the most perennial & persistent component of our towns and cities, across climate, continents and centuries. They are a canonical example of convergent evolution, of parallel successful solution to a practical problem. Similarly, the eye of any octopus & any mammal have fundamental similarities even though we diverged on the evolutionary tree of life aeons before any eyes started to evolve. This is natural selection of the urban form. What works repeats & survives. What does not work, dies. You can …
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Create Streets Foundation retweeted
If in doubt about the types of places and building to create watch where people go. Everyone has a need for humane places and beautiful places, not just the rich. Beautiful & neighbourly places should be a birthright for all of us not a privilege for the few.
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Create Streets Foundation retweeted
Trams are back on the agenda. Join us in Coventry on 24th September for Time for Trams: a day of big ideas, practical solutions and first-hand access to one of Britain’s most innovative new transport projects.
Hear from mayors, transport authorities, operators, engineers and policy experts - and tour the Coventry Very Light Rail test track itself!
landorlinks.uk/time-for-tram…
A global tram renaissance is underway. Why isn’t London jumping on board asks @boys_nicholas for @CityAM London, once home to the world’s largest tram network, squandered it all. How can we get back on track?
"London is the city of lost trams. Londoners made 280m tram journeys as early as 1895. By the 1920s, London had the world’s largest tram network. The system was created with private capital and municipal borrowing and largely paid for itself from passenger fares. This was public transport for the public good with little public subsidy." You can read more....
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Create Streets Foundation retweeted
Normally all places go long in advance but there's still one place going on the much-loved @CreateStreetsFN Dare To Draw one day course on architectural drawing with the marvellous @shepherdmg You can....
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Create Streets Foundation retweeted
They're everywhere. No advanced country should tolerate this.
This is a Street Scar. They’re common across many British high streets & side streets, particularly visible when the street surface is stone or setts as here. They exist due to an error in legislation which has frozen the maximum fine on utility firms who don’t do their job….
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Create Streets Foundation retweeted
Our colleague @RobertKwolek has an important article in @WorksInProgMag explaining what our (and others’) Visual Preference Surveys are starting to tell us about what architecture the public does & does not like. Results are remarkably consistent across all demographics. What people like is predictable. You can read more …
Does the public prefer traditional architecture? Half a century of surveys find:
worksinprogress.co/issue/do-…
- Between 60 and 95 percent prefer traditional architecture;
- This pattern holds across gender, class, race, nationality and political views;
- More traditional densification schemes seem to attract remarkably high levels of survey support;
- Laypeople and design professionals respond dramatically differently, with professionals far more favourable to modern styles.
Research is still at an early stage, and many questions remain. Personally, I am particularly interested in how the public would respond to a non-traditional but richer and more decorative style? I think they might like it, but we don’t have hard evidence yet.
But the results are already puzzling. Why do people end up buying buildings that are so different to the buildings they say they prefer? How did we end up in this odd situation? What can we do about it?
Read more in @RobertKwolek's definitive review of architectural visual preference surveying.
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Create Streets Foundation retweeted
Join us on 19th September to develop, or refresh, your drawing skills at the much loved @CreateStreetsFN 'Dare to Draw' course - You can book your place here createstreetsfoundation.org.…
Dare to Draw! Join our @CreateStreetsFN practical one-day course with @shepherdmg and learn how to sketch buildings, streets and places with confidence. Designed for planners, urban designers and anyone who loves architecture - no previous drawing experience needed.
📅 Saturday 19 September
📍 Create Streets Office in London
🎟️ Book your place: createstreetsfoundation.org.…
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Create Streets Foundation retweeted
Drawing is one of the quickest ways to test an idea, explain a place and have a better conversation about design. The @CreateStreetsFN one day course 'Dare to Draw' with @shepherdmg will teach attendees the foundations of hand drawing specifically for urban planning and design work with no previous drawing experience needed.
📅 Saturday 19 September
📍 Central London
🎟️ £160
It’s fast approaching, and places are limited!
createstreetsfoundation.org.…
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Create Streets Foundation retweeted
Come and paint streets with @shepherdmg on the much loved @CreateStreetsFN one day course. Still a couple of places available. You can find out more...
...and in a related note, a small watercolour of a terrace in Enfield which was finished a few days ago.
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Create Streets Foundation retweeted
Every town & city should legalise & pre-approve their local version of this type of housing wherever it will intensify & densify existing streets & following patterns that local people provably find attractive
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Create Streets Foundation retweeted
Do you receive our newsletter? Would you like to? You can read our latest newsletter, look at our 'back catalogue' and sign up to receive it here: createstreets.com/create-str…
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Create Streets Foundation retweeted
Wow
A little look at the making of Palimpsest ✏️
This drawing took almost a year to complete, building up layer after layer of graphite.
Palimpsest is currently on display at the Royal Academy of Arts in the Summer Exhibition (Closing this Sunday 23rd August) @royalacademy
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Create Streets Foundation retweeted
Many Oxbridge courts successfully combine different styles (most famously the contrast between King’s College Chapel) & The Gibbs Building). So it’s worth briefly examining why this is SO bad despite all the guff that will doubtless have been written justifying an “honest modern interpretation of an Oxford quad.” Firstly, the most important horizontal slice of building is missing. The ground floor where we walk and see most intuitively is just plate glass. There are no visible & logically necessary doors. The buildings are floating not grounded. Similarly, the necessary sense of enclosure is undermined by the needless use of glass between buildings & in the quad’s corners. The new windows lack depth or glazing bars, removing pleasing shadows & leaving them staring blindly at us. Compare them to the old windows. The building on the right is lopsided. The materials on both buildings & ground look thin & cheap (though probably aren’t). There is no humane joy, detail, decoration or ornament. You don’t need much but just a little love to look less mechanistic & uncaring would make all the difference. This is elite architecture not in the sense that it is there for the enjoyment of the lucky few able to study at Oxford but in the sense that it is there to make the few who like this sort of thing feel good about their advanced and unpopular tastes. A total design & educational fail.
Absolute third-rate job on the new quad at Keble.
The architects — not to mention the Fellows — should be embarrassed.
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Create Streets Foundation retweeted
Rejoice. This is new. Creating streets in 🇺🇸 Glorious work by..
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Create Streets Foundation retweeted
Streets with less variety in a pattern but which nevertheless work often compensate with lovely textures, with greenery and with a slight curve as here. What a satisfying street. The texture, the bricks, the glazing bars, the slight angle, the tree, the shared front garden all lift what might be a little monotonous into a real peach.
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