Will the rain stop in time to save my tagetes seed? | Allan Jenkins

Endless wet days are making it impossible to pick seeds from flower heads – and there’s no red tagetes quite like mine

Steady rain for near endless days, wet leaves littered like old confetti. I want to do stuff at the allotment, but the ground is still sodden. I am exiled by wet. It’s not that there are many chores – it is November after all. But the red tagetes are soaked and fallen and I want to save the plant’s seed. I have carried it with me for a dozen years now. Maybe more than any other, it feels important to keep it alive.

It came to me almost by accident, in a mixed batch from Lila Towle at the Danish Seed Savers. Originally found at the Danish Agricultural Museum, and thought to be German in origin, it was renamed Ildkongen (Fire King).

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How much value does a loft conversion add to a property? Nottingham Estate Agents

If we cannot build out sideways, perhaps we should try building upwards? That is the thought process which more and more British home-owners are going through. In a crowded urban environment, building a large lateral extension to a property can sometimes be impractical or unlikely to get planning permission. But a loft conversion – provided […]

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Above the clouds: lighting up an imposing London home

Fog House, by David Adjaye, may be dark and austere on the outside, but step inside and it’s bursting with light and colour

Step into the study in Della Burnside’s five-storey home and a clementine corner sofa and matching partition wall, a crimson rug and poof and an exuberant pink feather flapper girl lamp vie for your attention. “The colours all over the house are shocking and bright,” says Burnside. “They suit my personality better than my old house, which was more restrained.” That was a late-Victorian property, also in Clerkenwell, central London, and it was “dark, with lots of wood panelling and traditional furniture”.

Fog House, which she bought in 2016, gets its name from the sandblasted wall of glass on the top floor of the converted warehouse. Once occupied by Marc Quinn, the YBA who made a sculpture of his head out of his own frozen blood, the building has itself been given fresh blood, courtesy of leading architect Sir David Adjaye, who added a glass-clad parapet and a cantilevered glazed extension on the back.

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Above the clouds: lighting up an imposing London home

Fog House, by David Adjaye, may be dark and austere on the outside, but step inside and it’s bursting with light and colour

Step into the study in Della Burnside’s five-storey home and a clementine corner sofa and matching partition wall, a crimson rug and poof and an exuberant pink feather flapper girl lamp vie for your attention. “The colours all over the house are shocking and bright,” says Burnside. “They suit my personality better than my old house, which was more restrained.” That was a late-Victorian property, also in Clerkenwell, central London, and it was “dark, with lots of wood panelling and traditional furniture”.

Fog House, which she bought in 2016, gets its name from the sandblasted wall of glass on the top floor of the converted warehouse. Once occupied by Marc Quinn, the YBA who made a sculpture of his head out of his own frozen blood, the building has itself been given fresh blood, courtesy of leading architect Sir David Adjaye, who added a glass-clad parapet and a cantilevered glazed extension on the back.

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The billionaire and the 219 tiny flats: a new low for rabbit-hutch Britain?

A London office block is to be turned into apartments, and some could be just 4 metres by 4 metres

Campaigners have piled in to criticise plans drawn up by a billionaire property tycoon to cram more than 200 tiny flats into an office building in north London. They describe it as a “human warehouse” that would be filled with people living in “cramped single-occupancy shoeboxes” like “rabbits in hutches”.

Amid claims that some of the planned flats would be as small as 15 sq metres – that’s less than 13ft by 13ft for residents’ entire living space – some locals say the proposal is one of the most shocking examples yet of the phenomenon known as office-to-residential conversion. A typical Premier Inn hotel room is 21 sq metres, while national space standards state that the minimum floor area for a new one-bedroom one-person home is 37 sq metres.

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Garage conversions: A step by step guide Nottingham Estate Agents

Giving an underused garage a makeover can unlock precious space in your property – and increase its price. But where to start? Before you book the skip and reach for the sledgehammer, there’s a lot to be considered. OnTheMarket.com puts foot to pedal. Give it some thought It’s worth spending a bit of time thinking about what […]

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An Economic History of the English Garden by Roderick Floud review – finance and flowers

Adding up the cost of England’s gardens … from Capability Brown to geraniums and neat lawns in the suburbs

“I love visiting other people’s gardens,” admits Roderick Floud. Nothing unusual about that, of course: what’s not to like about strolling around beautifully landscaped lawns and borders? But as well as admiring the flowers, Floud – a professor of economic history – has a keen eye for the investment of time, skill and money needed to create and maintain a garden. He has written a new kind of garden history, one which focuses on the economics of our love affair with water features and colourful flower beds.

Beginning with the restoration of Charles II in the 17th century, Floud’s study ranges across 350 years of English history, from the designers of royal estates who could earn millions of pounds in today’s money to jobbing gardeners mowing lawns in the suburbs. He explores gardening as a major industry, one largely excluded from GDP figures, yet now worth at least £11bn, one which has “changed the face of England not once but many times”.

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