Hold the front page!

Gosh... That's been quite a week! And not over yet, by a long shot.

For starters, it's not often one of my talks gets a plug on the front page of the London Lite...

From column 4: 'The squat's website, temporaryschool.org lists sessions including "labyrinth building with Steph" tomorrow followed by "deschooling society".' Guess I'd better get on with writing that talk, then!

The Temporary School of Thought also featured in Friday's Guardian, while Vinay's video of it has been picked up by the Evening Standard. Check it out:

Congratulations to the organisers on successfully getting the court case adjourned! Another two weeks in the building is going to be huge, if the amount of exciting stuff that's gone on in the past few days is anything to go by. I know they have mixed feelings about all this media interest - and particularly the focus on the property value, which is a bit of a distraction - but as an ex-journalist, I've got to say the coverage is really about as positive as I've ever seen for a story about a squat, once you get past the headlines. And most of the comments on the Standard site are very positive.

Speaking of comments, thanks for all the thoughtful responses to my questions about meditation. I'll take some time to think about them and come back to the subject. (I'm feeling a lot clearer about the "radio in your head" stuff after the Meditation & Magic session at TSoT the other night - thanks, Bad Swami!)

Had a brilliant time this morning at the Tuttle Club. It was my first time at this regular Friday gathering, which you get to by turning up at the back door of the ICA. Met some fascinating people and had three hours of back-to-back great conversation. For example, I spent ages chatting to Chris Unitt who runs the Created in Birmingham blog - exactly the kind of thing I wish had existed for the Creative Industries Quarter in Sheffield in my days there. (Oh, and if you find Melanie Phillips as unpleasant as I do, please vote for Created in Birmingham in the 2008 Weblog Awards - they've just overtaken her in the running for Best UK Blog, but it's a close run thing!)

Finally, I couldn't put the week to bed without mentioning the amazing morris men and women who swarmed through School of Everything over the last few days! We started out responding to the news stories about the gloomy prognosis for this most English of traditions - but soon discovered that reports of its death had been greatly exaggerated. The energy, enthusiasm and sense of fun that Claire and I found in the response to our little campaign made it one of my favourite weeks since School of Everything launched.

Right, time to start writing that talk. If you're in London and free, then I hope to see you at 5pm tomorrow at 39A Clarges Mews, off Curzon Street, Mayfair. There may be some surprises. (For those out of town/busy/lazy, video will be available next week.)

A Sheffield Icon Under Threat

After yesterday's hopeful news, today brings a more disappointing story - or rather, a challenge to avoid one.

The Tinsley cooling towers stand alongside the M1, England's principal arterial motorway, as it crosses the Lower Don Valley on the edge of Sheffield. Familiar to millions of drivers, they are as striking a roadside landmark as Antony Gormley's rightly famous Angel of the North. But unlike Gateshead's iconic figure, the towers' aesthetic impact is incidental to their origin - as part of the Blackburn Meadows Power Station, demolished nearly 40 years ago.

More recently, the towers have become icons for something larger and less tangible. It happened because of two indecently talented young men, both named Tom, who started a fanzine called Go! Sheffo - a visual and lyrical love letter to an undersung city, and a rallying call to defend its distinctiveness against a tide of blandness masquerading as regeneration. They found a voice which resonated with all kinds of people in the city. And one of the best things they did was to organise a competition to turn the towers into a work of art.

Out of that competition came a campaign that seemed like it might succeed, that gathered media coverage and endorsements from the great and the good. Finally, however, it seems to have hit a wall with the towers' owners, the electricity generator Eon, who announced today that they're going to demolish them.

It's a strange thing to get excited about, a pair of cooling towers. Especially when there's a primary school next door to the same stretch of motorway which should have been moved elsewhere years ago and still hasn't. (Though there's no reason to set the two causes against one another.)

But the message Tom and Tom just sent out gives a sense of what they've come to stand for:

We’ve always said that Sheffield needs something to represent the changes that this city has gone through, and the good things that happen here. A new icon.

We’ve always said that the cooling towers are perfect for this. They’re in a perfect position, and represent both Sheffield’s ugly past and its potentially beautiful future...

This is crunch time. We need someone else to put their money where their mouths are. We haven’t got the resources or the time to mastermind a process that ends up with two old cooling towers transformed into new symbols. We don’t get paid to do this. Maybe the people who do, should.

If the leaders of this city want to see the cooling towers transformed into spaces for international works of public art, like the Tate Modern turbine hall, like the Gasometer in Oberhausen, Germany, it needs to happen now.

If our leaders really want Sheffield to be ‘a Distinctive City of European Significance’ then do something to make it distinctive. This is an organic, positive idea, that only Sheffield can do. No-one else has two massive structures next to the M1. No-one else could change what their city means at a stroke. Not Newcastle, not Manchester, certainly not Leeds.

And here’s a message to the city.

Unless you do something big and bold soon in the regeneration of Sheffield, no-one will care. Literally, no-one outside the city will care. No-one will care about a city with the same shops as everywhere else, the same flats as everywhere else, the same cafes as everywhere else, but slightly uglier buildings.

For the last two and a half years, we’ve been trying to make a good idea happen. We still believe it’s a brilliant idea. The question is, what are you going to do about it?