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So my friend and colleague Ben Wild wrote an extremely well constructed and witty blog for the Leathes Prior website called the Brussels Spout between September 2015 and January 2016. His writing ability shone through every word, and I understand that there is an original unedited “raw” version out there somewhere with even better prose.

The Blog covers his time in Brussels working in a secondment for the Law Society during his training contract with Leathes Prior. He was able to meet extraordinarily important people, go to fascinating places and do generally interesting things. The city itself even became the subject of international press after the Paris attacks, making his thoughts even more poignant as time went on. What is written in that blog would fascinate any reader, from start to finish. So I decided to write a blog about walls. In Norwich. That’s right: walls in Norwich.

More generally, I decided to write a blog about construction and planning law in Norwich and the surrounding areas. To be fair, construction and planning litigation is what i do for a living, and I quite enjoy it. And I live and work in Norwich, so that helps too.

My first blog post went into some quite considerable detail on the subject of some walls in Norwich. They’re not even particularly good walls; they’re crumbling, were hidden behind a workshop for years and are now subject to so many regulations that they’ll probably be standing for another thousand years or so before someone is able to build an Aldi over them or similar. But I have written about them anyway, and I thoroughly enjoyed going through the detail, and hope to enjoy going through the detail of other structures and plans which are published relating to Norwich in the future, and explaining the legal context behind the bits and pieces.

This is therefore my Construction And Planning Law In And Around Norwich Blog (catchy title, I know - I thought about calling it the Construction And Planning Through And In Norwich, so that the acronym would be CAPTAIN, but I thought that was a bit stretched). I will be writing about whatever I can find on the Norwich City Council planning portal, Archant’s various publications, legal publications and the occasional barrister. It is my sincere hope that I am able to write this over a long period of time and, perhaps after several years, someone stumbles across it and thinks “huh - I wonder why he wrote all that?”.

I suspect I may be able to live up to my hopes and dreams.

David Richards 19/01/16