There’s always that hiatus after the Christmas and New Year period where you’re not quite ready for spring but it’s now gone past the party season and the house really does need that attention you’ve promised it.  I had the good fortune to see a programme on catch up tv this last week – it was absolutely fascinating, about the regeneration of the houses around the Shoreditch area of London.  One of the presenters in the 1970s is still on our tv screens today, talking about houses, social history matters.  He and a team of like minded friends and philanthropists formed an important housing conservation trust to stop the demolition of some of the rarer and special terraces of pre gorgian houses – the bulldozers were coming in to wreck them to be replaced blocks of concrete flats.  Thank heavens they succeeded – there would be no historic houses left in London at all otherwise – no design histories at all.