Retrospective Application: A Planner Comes Clean After Forty Years

Retrospective Application: A Planner Comes Clean After Forty Years

Every planner has stories. Most have the sense to keep them to themselves. After forty years, Steve Hesmondhalgh has decided to submit his in full, without the benefit of pre-application advice.

This is his third autobiography, and by his own admission the best of the three. It is a confession of sorts. The sandwich year student who filled a principal planning officer's Ford Capri with balloons. The self-proclaimed lord who spent six hours driving him around twenty-five acres of national park in a Lada with no business being on a public road. The architect whose design concept for a school next to a Grade I listed hall was a fir cone. The bollard. The cakes that came back to haunt everyone. The developer, the cheap apartments, and the man who knew a councillor. There is always a man who knows a councillor.

Every character is real. Every story actually happened. Some names have been changed, in one or two cases for reasons of basic self-preservation.

From learning the job in local government, through consultancy, a law firm, an architectural practice and a financial crash, to life as the Pyjama Consultant, this is not a book about the planning system. The system is just the mechanism. The point is the people, and the people are funnier than any of them intended to be.

Pull up a chair. Imagine we are at a Test match, the cricket is slow, the wine is good, and someone has just asked for that story again.

Twenty-three chapters. Four decades. Approved, subject to conditions.

'I laughed out loud in a public place.' A Brick Sales Rep.