Leo Gibbons

Check out my Substack @thehottakemerchant" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">substack.com/@thehottakemer…?

Btw I meant as a guest. @D_C_W make it happen!

How long until he is appearing on Football Cliches?

"[C]ompanies [...] have been trying. There are 14 major infrastructure schemes on the table to address the problem, of which the Abingdon reservoir is the largest. But they are often held up [by] a [...] ‘small groups of very vocal locals‘." capx.co/nimby-watch-ab…

1.8K likes.

Spotting one of these fountains out in wild when your water bottle is running low is like running into an oasis in the desert.

Which of these fountains have saved my life? Sydenham, Nunhead, Brockley, Plumstead, Vicky Park… I know they’re cheap and ugly looking but they’re one of the best things to have happened to London.

We’re determined to use all levers at our disposal to get more homes built. The @MayorofLondon’s next London Plan will be streamlined - half the length of the current Plan. City Hall will also be more interventionist on calling-in planning applications. mylondon.news/news/property/…

I thought @IslingtonChap was the best upper-normie parody account, but I think I was wrong.

I know it's pointless, but still.

🚨 NEW: The UK has again recorded the hottest May day ever at 35.0°C in Kew Gardens and Heathrow

London's heatwave reminds me of what @duncanrobinson called "nozzle Britain", the absurd sight of a portable air conditioner hose poking out of the window of an expensive hyperinsulated flat, which I think works nicely as an analogy for lots of silly things in Britain

This wouldn’t at all surprise me re: Clive Lewis — his politics are very heavily young, networked progressive eco-Left-coded (think: Open Labour + Mainstream + Momentum AND SCG). But a Burgon>GREEN defection would shock me. He’s very old-fashioned hard Left-coded (into politics via Miners’ Strike + Employment Law + frmr GMB parliamentary group officer + support for Chavez, Castro etc. + StWC anti-NATO Ukraine war letter). This is the essential Old (hard) Left/New (softer, more radlib) Left split within SCG. It’s why within the same faction you can imagine some Green defections (e.g. Nadia Whittome) but NEVER an Ian Lavery one (their personal politics aside, their constituency electoral/demographic dynamics are also a related factor). For me it’s Labour 4 eva, or until two essential facts change: 👉FPTP 👉The constitutional/structural trade union link

I remember Berlin’s Schönefeld airport being bleak, but the brain new one isn’t much better…

This story is really really banter

That water clarity is an engineering decision, and the math behind it is wilder than the video. Roman aqueducts ran on gravity alone. No pumps, no pressure systems. Engineers carved channels with a gradient so shallow it borders on absurd. The Pont du Gard in southern France drops 2.5 centimeters over 275 meters. That's roughly the thickness of a coin over the length of three football fields. They surveyed that accuracy with plumb lines and wooden leveling instruments. The clarity you're seeing is a direct product of flow velocity. Too steep and the water erodes the channel walls, picks up sediment, turns brown. Too flat and it stagnates. Roman engineers targeted a slope of about 20 centimeters per kilometer, which kept the water moving fast enough to stay fresh but slow enough to stay clear. Before the water reached the city, it passed through multi-chamber settling tanks where velocity dropped near zero. Suspended particles sank. Clean water flowed out the top into the next chamber. Repeat three or four times. Pliny specified the minimum slope in writing. Vitruvius published the exact mortar ratio for hydraulic cement: one part lime to two parts volcanic ash for underwater work. The pozzolana from Pozzuoli reacted with water to form a calcium-aluminum-silicate compound that actually gets stronger the longer it sits submerged. Modern concrete degrades in water. Roman concrete bonds with it. Scale the whole system and it gets harder to process. Eleven aqueducts fed Rome at its peak. Combined output: roughly 1 million cubic meters of water per day. That works out to about 250 gallons per person for a city of one million. Modern New York delivers about 125 gallons per person per day. Ancient Rome had access to double the per capita water supply of the largest city in the United States, running entirely on slope and stone. The Trevi Fountain in Rome is still fed by one of them. Two thousand years, same source, same gravity, same water.

The 4 stages of Conservative horniness

Not quite every time!

There were 1,311 heat related deaths in 2024. Summers in the UK are getting hotter, and drier. So to deal with this, planning law makes it difficult to install air conditioning in new builds. Why?

This map shows where the Europe "heat dome" is record breaking. Any colors in red are a new May record (since 1950) for the upper level ridge which is causing this historic early season. Several 100s of cities have already seen their all-time May heat records broken in Western #Europe over the past few days. More to come through late week. #heatwave Thanks @burgwx for the great visual!

There are still accounts saying 'this is just summer'. Actually, this is warmer than summers used to be. *And it's still only Spring*.