News Atlas

GuardianOct 15Preview

They asked for 80 homes – she gave them 157! Council-housing miracle named Britain’s best new building

Rising from bluebell woodlands and framed by rolling hills, this cluster of pink and brown brick towers in Croydon is a bittersweet winner of the prestigious RIBA Stirling prizeIf Andy Burnham is looking for inspiration for his great “council housebuilding comeback”, he would do well to visit Croydon. There, nestled into a steeply sloping site, sheltered by a canopy of mature trees, stands a cluster of crystalline pink and brown brick towers, where generous flats look on to a landscape of allotments, playgrounds and to the rolling hills of south London beyond. Designed by Mary Duggan Architects, with Ruff Architects, it is a model of council-led housebuilding – so much so that it has also been named this year’s best building in the UK, confounding the bookies’ outsider odds.Only once before has the RIBA Stirling prize ever been awarded to a council housing project, when Goldsmith Street

Oliver WainwrightArchitectureStirling prize

GuardianOct 15Preview

Russell Brand made alleged rape victim take photos of him half naked, trial told

Woman claims comedian ‘pranced around like an ostrich’ before forcing himself on her in hotel room attackRussell Brand transformed into a “monster” when he allegedly made a woman take half-naked photographs of him before raping her in a hotel room at a Labour party conference, a court has heard.The 51-year-old comedian has denied attacking the woman, who broke down in tears in the witness box at Southwark crown court as she told how she could not fight him off. Continue reading...

Emine SinmazUK newsEngland

GuardianOct 15Preview

Your full attention: Jesse Eisenberg’s 10 best film performances – ranked!

As his new movie The Debut closes the London film festival, we count down the best of the actor’s shy, sly and sometimes hairy outingsA doppelganger role can be a trap for an actor: either the two roles are not sufficiently distinct, or they are too hammily different, and either way the result can look like a film school graduation project. But Jesse Eisenberg gives a stylish split-personality turn in Richard Ayoade’s adaptation of the Dostoevsky novella. He plays Simon, a nerdily shy and self-effacing computer programmer in a grim futureworld, ignored by his employers and by co-worker Hannah (Mia Wasikowska), with whom he is hopelessly in love. But then his carbon copy, James, arrives, also of course played by Eisenberg. James is a confident alpha-achiever who impresses his bosses and entrances Hannah – to Simon’s gibbering despair. Continue reading...

Peter BradshawFilmCulture

GuardianOct 15Preview

The hidden costs of fracking: boom in Argentina linked to trail of sickness

Families in Vaca Muerta, the centre of Patagonia’s shale operation, report cancers, miscarriages and pollutionIn Allen, a small town in Argentine Patagonia, many people living on the same street ended up falling ill. For some, it was severe migraines, nausea or skin irritation. For others, cancers, congenital abnormalities, miscarriages or stillbirth seemed to affect foetuses or children. People say it all started 13 years ago – when a well was drilled near their homes to extract gas and oil.Calle Ciega 10 [Dead-end Street 10] lies on the eastern edge of Vaca Muerta, a vital area for Argentina’s economy, home to the world’s second-largest reserve of shale gas and fourth-largest reserve of shale oil. The region has more than 2,600 active wells, including one on this small street where about 20 families live, most of them seasonal workers on fruit farms. Continue reading...

Elena Basso in Allen, Neuquén and Añelo, ArgentinaGlobal developmentPollution

GuardianOct 15Preview

Trump should fear the BBC. Instead he’s picked a fight – and he seems to be losing | Emma Brockes

The president is used to bullying his media targets. The quagmire that is his libel actions shows the broadcaster is working to a different scriptFor the greatest account of the BBC’s finest hour, one must turn to Penelope Fitzgerald’s novel, Human Voices, written in 1980 and set 40 years earlier, at the corporation’s Portland Place wartime HQ. Flanked by sandbags and infused with a smell of cooking “from the deep hold that suggested more strongly than ever a cruise on the Queen Mary”, the organisation that Fitzgerald describes is at once noble and deeply eccentric. “Broadcasting House stood headed on a fixed course south,” she writes. “With the best engineers in the world, and a crew varying between the intensely respectable and barely sane, it looked ready to scorn any disaster.”In other words, a formidable foe, one that in the spring of 1940, in the face of anticipated Nazi invasion,

Emma BrockesBBCDonald Trump

GuardianOct 15Preview

‘To succeed meant to leave’: inside the jolting film about Brummie estate kids knocked flying by demolition

The novel had no hero, no dialogue and little action. So how was I See Buildings Fall Like Lightning turned into such a funny, rousing and acclaimed film? Director Clio Barnard reveals allAs a kid in 90s Birmingham, Keiran Goddard would gather with his friends to watch the tower blocks coming down. That’s what passed for entertainment back then. Controlled explosions, collapsing buildings. The demolition of the city’s postwar council estates marked the end of one story and the start of another. It was a dust-blown display of regeneration and progress. The housing that replaced it would be an improvement. The people of east Birmingham would move on to better lives.Goddard, specifically, moved on to study English at Oxford University. He now lives in London and writes books for a living. Physically, he has left his home town far behind. Emotionally and spiritually, not so much. “So I feel

Xan BrooksFilmCulture

You’re caught up for now.