Hansom: Beside the sea

Off the wall

Given how prominent the discussion of a certain US border wall has been in the last year, walls were unsurprisingly a topic of conversation at Mipim last week. But my hack says the debate over dinner wasn’t whether Donald Trump’s Mexico barrier was right or wrong but how it should be built and whether it should be Berlin or West Bank style in appearance. Blocking off Scotland was also mooted after Nicola Sturgeon dropped her “second referendum” bombshell on the eve of Mipim, but most of the dinner party guests agreed that the location of the historic Hadrian’s Wall meant there could be heritage issues with this one. And we all know to never fall foul of the heritage lobby.

The wrong view

An engineer came close to buying a US architect’s home in the environs of New York City over one particular dinner. But the deal fell apart when he discovered that views from the property wouldn’t take in the towers the buyer had built in the Big Apple. The architect offered to tape images of the skyscrapers onto the windows of the tudor-style home – but to no avail.

Prop art

Mipim and models go hand-in-hand, but Battersea Power Development Company upped the ante this year by having French sand sculptor, Michael Klein, carve out the grade II-listed power station in sand on the beach. BPDC said the sand replica’s size was directly proportional to the historic London building at nearly 3.5m long and 2m tall. It was a hit with Mipim participants, who enjoyed posing beside it for photos. No word on whether anyone moved in and used it as a place to stay the night.

Shattered

One construction boss decided to make the case for his firm venturing into the demolition sector, at a lunch my writer attended on a sunny Cannes beach, by shattering a glass. It wasn’t a scene on par with nearby Marseilles last summer – when England fans lobbed bottles here and there – but a case of the glass simply breaking. With quality issues like this, no wonder we’re leaving the EU.

Putting the ‘U’ (turn) in column

In non-Mipim news, it seems as if we weren’t the only ones caught out by the chancellor’s U-turn on national insurance. Last week’s mag devoted three pages to the issue. By the time it came out, Philip Hammond had performed his volte-face. There were a few utterances of exasperation at Building’s HQ – and in the House of Commons too. Desmond Swayne, Conservative MP for New Forest West, asked the speaker, John Bercow, if he could raise a point of order, saying, “as a slavish supporter of the government, I am in some difficulty. My article for the Forest Journal, robustly supporting the chancellor’s earlier policy, is already with the printer […] Having been persuaded of the correctness of the course that the chancellor is now following, I merely needed an opportunity to recant.”