Buying with a partner or a friend? OnTheMarket.com reveals 10 top tips to consider around joint ownership Joint ownership of a property may seem quite straightforward. You and your partner buy a house together and, after that, everything is hunky-dory unless the relationship goes pear-shaped. Even then, there is no problem. You just sell the […]
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A giant glass cube gives a sci-fi twist to this London flat, partly reflecting its former resident Tom Baker, AKA the Doctor
It takes a moment for your eyes to adjust to the black that wraps around the walls and ceilings of Linda Allen and Darin Brown’s flat, which occupies the ground floor of a Victorian redbrick in London’s Belsize Park. Then there’s the slightly disorientating effect of a wall of mirror glass between the living room and their bedroom. Except, this shiny expanse isn’t a wall at all. Linda and Darin got rid of that and replaced it with a glass-clad cube. “We wanted it to look as if a big shiny box had dropped down from outer space,” explains Linda. “We left a gap at the top and the bottom so it appears to hover, like a separate entity.”
Continue reading...Sprinkle Epsom salts on to your soil to enhance the health and flavour of your winter crops
I may never learn to love the dark days of winter, but the wonderful thing about horticulture is that there is always a silver lining, particularly if you are a veg grower. Even as many plants around us slide into dormancy, there is a range of winter veg that can be planted now and which will look after itself for months at a time. Not only are these arguably the easiest of all seasonal crops to grow, but with a simple five-minute trick of mine you could also make them measurably tastier and more nutritious than most of what you can buy in the shops.
Autumn-planting onion and shallot sets are in stores everywhere right now and, once planted according to packet instructions in a well-tended bed, should require almost zero intervention from you until harvest. The same deal applies to garlic and a little known fourth member of the family, the echalote grise, also called (rather confusingly) the French grey shallot. Although neither French nor a shallot, this is in my opinion the finest flavoured of all the onion family. Spring onions can, likewise, be sown now from seed for harvesting from late winter to early spring.
Continue reading...Fading light and failing growth brings its own beauty to the garden
So the autumn equinox is over, October mere hours away. I know I have been banging on about fading light now for a month, but it is no longer deniable. This morning saw the last pre-7am sunrise until we return to GMT – and then it’s only temporarily.
I don’t want to sound like a harbinger of doom and dark, though I’ll admit to some seasonal melancholy. I watch the slowing of September seed now sluggish in its growth. Plants that surged only a month or so before are struggling a little more.
Continue reading...Prime minister will attempt to take control of domestic policy agenda at Tory conference by proposing extra stamp duty
Foreign buyers of properties in the UK will have to pay a new levy, in a renewed attempt by Theresa May to tackle the housing crisis.
With concern growing among senior Tories that the party has allowed Brexit to drown out a compelling domestic agenda, plans unveiled on Saturday night will see foreign buyers pay extra stamp duty to fund a drive to tackle rough sleeping.
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