Latest news with #foxes
Telegraph
13-06-2025
- Business
- Telegraph
‘It's absolutely f---ed': Why Google's new £1bn London office is in crisis
The crowning glory of Google's new, massive headquarters in London's King's Cross is its rooftop garden. More than 300m long, with hundreds of trees across four stories and a running track, star designer Thomas Heatherwick envisaged it as a haven for the tech giant's 7,000 staff, as well as bats, bees, birds and butterflies. At least, it is meant to be the crowning glory. However, delays to the project have meant that, while it is still under construction, the building and its garden have been invaded by foxes. The vulpine skulk has taken advantage of the building's lack of human occupants, digging burrows in the manicured grass and leaving their droppings around. 'Fox sightings at construction sites are pretty common, and our King's Cross development is no exception,' a Google spokesperson said after a report on the London Centric website. 'While foxes have been occasionally spotted at the site, their appearances have been brief and have had minimal impact on the ongoing construction.' The foxes, pests though they are, may be the least of Google's problems. Today, visitors to the construction site are met with the cacophonous sounds of drilling and hammering; the sights of scaffolding and cherry pickers obscuring the view; the constant bustle of workmen coming and going. The 11-storey building, the cost of which has never been confirmed but expected to be well north of £1 billion, still appears to be a long way from being completed. Building site sources tell The Telegraph that all manner of things have gone wrong, from shoddy workmanship that was, in effect, 'hidden' because of the vastness of the project to wooden floors that became so saturated with rainwater that they need complete repairs. Much of the ground floor, which is supposed to house shops and other public spaces, remains a shell. The date for its opening, which was meant to happen last year, has been repeatedly pushed back. 'If they get this job done by the end of 2026 it would be a f—ing miracle,' one worker tells me. 'I don't think the people building it know what they are doing.' An electrician says: 'They have unlimited money so they throw out ridiculous dates. It's going to be interesting, but very stressful and long hours.' (Both Google and Heatherwick Studio declined to comment on these claims.) There is a sense of gloom among those working on site. One worker simply says: 'It's absolutely f---ed, mate.' Another, who only started working on the project on Monday, describes it as 's--t'. Some might say that Google bosses should not be surprised that building its landmark has not gone entirely smoothly. Heatherwick, 55, has a habit of designing ingenious objects and places that are later found to be impractical, from a sculpture to commemorate Manchester hosting the 2002 Commonwealth Games to a New York visitor attraction later called a 'suicide machine' and London's Routemaster buses to Boris Johnson's abandoned Garden Bridge in the capital. The $2 trillion technology giant launched its quest for a London headquarters in 2013, when it commissioned a more typical office block from architects AHMM; by 2015, those plans had been binned as they were apparently 'too boring' for the tastes of co-founder Larry Page. Enter Heatherwick, who can be described as almost anything except 'boring'. He turned the concept of a giant office building (almost literally) on its head, and designed a long structure parallel to King's Cross railway platforms that is longer (330m/1,083ft) than The Shard is tall (310m/1,106ft). The finished building – dubbed a 'landscraper', as opposed to a skyscraper – will have nap pods for weary workers, as well as a 25m swimming pool and a basketball court. Plus, of course, the garden. The final design is a collaboration between Heatherwick's eponymous studio and that of Bjarke Ingels, the Danish architect. The team also worked on Google's (completed) California headquarters. Heatherwick was unlikely to design a run-of-the-mill office and always makes a point of doing things differently. He had a bohemian childhood as the son of a pianist father and jewellery-designer mother, and attended two private schools – Sevenoaks in Kent and the Rudolf Steiner School in Hertfordshire – before studying design at Manchester Polytechnic and London's Royal College of Art. It was at the latter institution that he met Terence Conran, the founder of Habitat and the Design Museum, whom Heatherwick impressed by building an 18ft-high gazebo out of laminated birch that sat in his garden. Conran became Heatherwick's mentor and famously described him as 'the Leonardo da Vinci of our times'. He has had his fair share of successes, most notably when he designed the Olympic cauldron for the 2012 London Games. It consisted of 204 copper cones, one for each participating nation, attached to long stems that wowed people the world over when they came together to create one larger vessel. Heatherwick, who was awarded a CBE in 2013, was also the driving force behind Coal Drops Yard, a stone's throw from Google's King's Cross building, that is a thriving hub of shops and restaurants after decades as a derelict wasteland. But for every Heatherwick triumph, there has been a misstep. His sculpture for the Commonwealth Games – named B of the Bang – was a cluster of metal spikes coming from the top of a column to imitate an explosion, but it was completed late and over budget. More concerningly, a tip of one of the spikes fell off shortly before it was unveiled and, when others threatened to do the same, it was dismantled in 2009. Manchester City Council sued Heatherwick and his contractors; the case was settled out of court. Other notable misses include Heatherwick's Routemaster buses, which were commissioned by Johnson when he was Mayor of London, which were much more expensive than other models and had a tendency to overheat in summer months, and the aborted plan for a Garden Bridge across the River Thames, which ultimately cost taxpayers £43 million without anything to show for it. Most destructive was the Vessel, a visitor attraction in New York's Hudson Yards. The copper-coloured network of 154 staircases and 80 landings was supposed to be New York's answer to the Eiffel Tower, but it was closed down in 2021 (after less than two years) after four people had killed themselves by jumping from it. Carla Fine, a local who is an expert on the matter, told The Telegraph at the time that it was a 'suicide machine'. It only reopened last October after netting was installed. 'The project met all the safety standards, and actually it went above them. It was just an extremely tragic, sad use that the project got put to,' Heatherwick told the Financial Times in 2023. 'Nobody predicted Covid and what that would do for people's mental health.' His current projects include transforming the Kensington Olympia in West London and turning the capital's BT Tower into a high-end hotel. Not a trained architect himself (but the employer of large numbers of them at his studio), Heatherwick has said that we are in the grip of an 'epidemic of boringness', with soulless glass-and-steel buildings populating cities all over the world. Heatherwick's eccentricity, which has been a characteristic for decades, is almost designed to attract opprobrium or eye-rolls from others in the field. As he finished his postgraduate studies, rather than make a business card Heatherwick made ice lollies that had his phone number on the stick; on various occasions he has shipped a snowball to China so that somebody there could experience British snow, and taken a kebab to Italy for someone else. 'I'm not a fan, because I think he doesn't know the difference between a building and a CD rack,' says Ellis Woodman, an architect and the director of the Architecture Foundation. 'There's no sense of scale, no sense of an urban idea that the buildings are contributing to. They disregard architectural history or the character of the spaces in which they stand. [The Google building] is not a building that's interested in making relationships with things around it. The work is always the most important building on its site, whatever he's doing. There's never a sense that the role of a building might be to contribute to the definition of a space with other buildings.' Heatherwick has become a big brand in the building world, in the way that Norman Foster and Zaha Hadid did before him. Woodman says that, with the quasi-utopian ideals he set out in his 2023 treatise Humanise, Heatherwick is 'carrying on that 'architecture-as-a-marketing tool' tendency'. 'He's not seriously engaged with the problems of housing or sustainability,' Woodman adds. 'It's a succession of projects like the Vessel, which one might ask if the world ever really needed.' Others in the design world reckon that Heatherwick's regular criticism by architects stems from a resentment that an interloper could gatecrash their industry without having to go through the same formal training. 'I'm very 'pro' him. He's a very creative and inventive figure, but he's divisive because he was trained in industrial design in Manchester, not in architecture,' says Charles Saumarez Smith, the former director of the National Gallery and National Portrait Gallery who is a distinguished historian of art and design. 'Architects view themselves in a professional way, and so obviously have not been so enthusiastic about him being globally successful as he has been as an architect. I think that is at the root of it.' Saumarez Smith tells me that he thinks Heatherwick's Google building is 'mind-boggling' and 'vast, but in a way it manages to disguise its scale. I'm looking forward to seeing it in more detail when it's finished'. How long before the Google building is finished, and what it will be like when it is, is anyone's guess. 'You can't fully know whether something's going to work until it's finished,' Heatherwick told The Telegraph in a 2018 interview. 'Anyone who says otherwise is lying. I get worried when my team aren't worried. Worry is a useful energy.' One wonders if Heatherwick feels worried about the Google HQ at the moment.
The Independent
10-06-2025
- Health
- The Independent
Inside London's wild fox ambulance service
Nicki Townsend rescues injured foxes in London, a city with an estimated 15,000 foxes adapting to urban life. The Fox Project, founded by Trevor Williams, rescues around 1,400 foxes annually, addressing myths and providing care. Urban foxes face dangers like cars and injuries, often requiring Townsend's intervention as part of their 'ambulance service'. Townsend deals with heartbreaking cases, including cubs with severe injuries, balancing the grim realities with the joy of successful releases. A study indicates released foxes may face challenges readjusting to their territory, highlighting a need for further research on their post-release survival. In London, the wild fox has its own ambulance service when it needs help
The Independent
10-06-2025
- Entertainment
- The Independent
In London, the wild fox has its own ambulance service when it needs help
The injured fox is cornered in a cage, teeth bared and snarling at the woman trying to help it. Nicki Townsend is unfazed. Wearing only rubber gloves and an outfit suitable for a yoga class, she approaches with soothing words. 'All right, baby," she coos as she deftly drapes a towel over his head, grabs him by the scruff of his neck, scoops up his wounded legs and moves him to a clean cage. It's not the way her day typically begins, but there's nothing routine about rescuing foxes. 'You can never predict what you're going to arrive at,' Townsend said. While not as visible as phone boxes or double-decker buses, the red fox is a fixture in London, a city not known for its wildlife. But living on the streets, alleys and back gardens of a dense urban environment can be rough and when foxes need help, they have their own ambulance service — and Townsend may be on her way. The foxes didn't invade London so much as adapt and expand their range inward as the city spread to their habitat in the 1930s and suburbs grew. Love 'em or hate 'em But people and the bushy-tailed member of the canine family have not always lived in harmony, and the species has admirers and adversaries. For everyone enchanted seeing a fox trotting nonchalantly down their street at dusk or basking in a sunny backyard, there are plenty who see them as pests. They poop where they like, tear into garbage and the vixens in heat let out terrifying shrieks in the dead of winter when attracting a mate. 'It's like Marmite with foxes,' Townsend said, referring to the food spread that is an acquired and divisive taste. 'You either love them or hate them.' The divide between the two camps led Trevor Williams to found what became The Fox Project nearly 35 years ago. Once a bass player in the rock group Audience that opened for Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd, Williams had been active in the campaign to stop fox hunting when he redirected his protection efforts to the city, where foxes were once routinely killed. 'Because of the myths that have occurred over the years, there's still a lot of suspicion about what foxes might be,' Williams said. 'You know, they're going to bite the baby, they're going to eat the cat, they're going to run away with your husband.' The project has since grown from providing information on deterring foxes to rescuing 1,400 a year, including 400 cubs, though only about half survive to be released. City offers cheap eats and unique hazards There are estimated to be 15,000 foxes in London. The project covers a swath of south London and its leafy suburbs while other organizations not devoted solely to foxes handle other parts of the city. While the omnivores survive on small animals, bugs and berries in the wild, they favor easily scavenged leftovers in the city and handouts that make them more dependent on humans. Their main urban menaces are cars, getting snagged in soccer nets or getting stuck in tight spaces. In their effort to get free, they often get nasty abrasions that can become infected. Many also suffer from mange, a parasitic infestation that leads to all kinds of problems. Townsend pilots her VW Caddy on city streets, highways and narrow lanes that roll through lush hills, responding to calls about injured or ill foxes or cubs that have lost their mothers. She's seen a bit of everything since her first humbling call 2 1/2 years ago when the supposedly injured fox bolted. 'In my inexperience, I chased after him, which is comical because you're never going to outrun a fox,' she said. 'I just remember he ran very fast and I looked silly running after him.' Despite many challenging situations — she once managed to rescue a fox that lost its footing atop a fence and ended upside down at eye level with its paw lodged between boards — she's only been bitten once. Heartbreak with hard cases Her van carries the distinctly musky scent of foxes. The odor becomes unpleasant when an anxious passenger in a litter of cubs relieves itself enroute to being delivered to a foster care pen where they will stay until being released in the wild. 'Feel free to open the window,' said Townsend, who is accustomed to the stench. 'This is a stinky job." On a recent day, she was dispatched to meet a heartbroken couple who found a cub with a puncture wound collapsed on their back lawn. 'We thought he was asleep at first, so we went to go and have a close look because we love them," Charlotte English said. 'Then he just didn't move, so we knew something was wrong.' That cub had to be put to sleep, as did the adult Townsend transferred at the start of her shift. Cubs that recover are socialized in packs of five until they mature and are then released in a rural location while the adults are freed in the neighborhoods where they were found. The fox does not say 'Thank you' Given a second chance, it's not clear how well the foxes fare, because they are rarely tracked. A 2016 study in the journal Applied Animal Behaviour Science found that rehabilitated foxes were more likely to behave as if they had been displaced when returned to their original territory. They were tracked wandering farther away, potentially exposing them to more traffic and greater stress. 'It is a gap in the knowledge and there's an assumption that when you release them, they thrive and I think that that assumption needs to be challenged more,' said Bryony Tolhurst, a University of Brighton honorary research fellow and lead author of the study. For Townsend, fox deaths are offset by the joy of seeing little ones venture into the unknown or an adult darting into a neighborhood it instantly recognizes. 'Sometimes they look back and people like to romanticize that they're saying 'thank you,'" she said. "They're just making sure we're not chasing after them.'
Daily Mail
10-06-2025
- Business
- Daily Mail
Google's £1billion London office invaded by foxes after they make for HQ's soil and 250-tree roof garden
Google 's swanky new London offices have been invaded by foxes, who have targetted its soil and roof garden. The tech giant's £1billion proposed headquarters are set to be its first completely owned and designed site outside of the US. But the whopping 11-storey building, which will be home to up to 7,000 employees when it eventually opens, has been hit with a setback from the natural world after a group of pesky creatures started using it as a playground. The foxes have swarmed on to the state-of-the-art rooftop garden at the King's Cross 'landscraper', making an impact on construction there. Google told The Guardian this impact has been 'minimal', but sources familiar with the site had caused issues over a three-year period. They corroborated an initial report issued by the London Centric newsletter and confirmed that the animals had begun digging holes in the swish gardens. One said: 'There's a little hole in the garden where one lives. 'We've seen her all around the building – one second she's on the fifth floor, the next she's on the garden floor. No one has been able to catch her.' Other people have spotted fox poo strewn across the grounds of the ultra-modern offices, which is home to 250 trees and boasts 40,000 tonnes of soil. Mosh Latifi, co-director of pest control firm EcoCare, said: 'Foxes thrive quite well on rodents – we don't live more than three metres away from the nearest rat.' He added that he had also seen animals searching for food on similar construction sites, where workers sometimes leave morsels behind. Another local pest control expert suggested that London will remain a home for foxes, due to leaky pipes and offerings from nearby businesses. Plans for the new offices were first unveiled in 2013 and construction commenced five years later. In 2022, Sadiq Khan, the mayor of London, and Keir Starmer were in attendance at a topping-off ceremony. Mr Khan said: 'This project represents a real vote of confidence in London, in our communities and in our flourishing tech sector.' The site is estimated to be completed later this year. The spectacular 300-metre rooftop garden spans the length of the buildings and takes up the seventh to eleventh floors. The garden was designed to play host to birds, bats, butterflies and bees - as well as the new canine occupants. It also boasts a running track, pool, fitness area and spots for dining and deckchairs. A Google spokesperson said: 'Fox sightings at construction sites are pretty common, and our King's Cross development is no exception. 'While foxes have been occasionally spotted at the site, their appearances have been brief and have had minimal impact on the ongoing construction.' Such issues are not unusual in construction sites, with London's vast fox population sometimes wreaking havoc on developing buildings. The city's tallest building, the Shard, experienced a hiccup as it was being built in 2011, with a fox named Romeo tucking into leftovers from builders' lunches. He was eventually caught, given a checkup and then released back onto the streets.
CTV News
10-06-2025
- General
- CTV News
When a fox says ‘help' in London, there's often an ambulance on its way
A volunteer injects medicine with a syringe into the snout of a fox after being rescued at the hospital run by The Fox Project near Tonbridge, England, Thursday, May 22, 2025. (AP Photo/Frank Augstein) PADDOCK WOOD, England — The injured fox is cornered in a cage, teeth bared and snarling at the woman trying to help it. Nicki Townsend is unfazed. Wearing only rubber gloves and an outfit suitable for a yoga class, she approaches with soothing words. 'All right, baby,' she coos as she deftly drapes a towel over his head, grabs him by the scruff of his neck, scoops up his wounded legs and moves him to a clean cage. It's not the way her day typically begins, but there's nothing routine about rescuing foxes. 'You can never predict what you're going to arrive at,' Townsend said. While not as visible as phone boxes or double-decker buses, the red fox is a fixture in London, a city not known for its wildlife. But living on the streets, alleys and back gardens of a dense urban environment can be rough and when foxes need help, they have their own ambulance service — and Townsend may be on her way. The foxes didn't invade London so much as adapt and expand their range inward as the city spread to their habitat in the 1930s and suburbs grew. Love 'em or hate 'em But people and the bushy-tailed member of the canine family have not always lived in harmony, and the species has admirers and adversaries. For everyone enchanted seeing a fox trotting nonchalantly down their street at dusk or basking in a sunny backyard, there are plenty who see them as pests. They poop where they like, tear into garbage and the vixens in heat let out terrifying shrieks in the dead of winter when attracting a mate. 'It's like Marmite with foxes,' Townsend said, referring to the food spread that is an acquired and divisive taste. 'You either love them or hate them.' The divide between the two camps led Trevor Williams to found what became The Fox Project nearly 35 years ago. Once a bass player in the rock group Audience that opened for Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd, Williams had been active in the campaign to stop fox hunting when he redirected his protection efforts to the city, where foxes were once routinely killed. 'Because of the myths that have occurred over the years, there's still a lot of suspicion about what foxes might be,' Williams said. 'You know, they're going to bite the baby, they're going to eat the cat, they're going to run away with your husband.' The project has since grown from providing information on deterring foxes to rescuing 1,400 a year, including 400 cubs, though only about half survive to be released. City offers cheap eats and unique hazards There are estimated to be 15,000 foxes in London. The project covers a swath of south London and its leafy suburbs while other organizations not devoted solely to foxes handle other parts of the city. While the omnivores survive on small animals, bugs and berries in the wild, they favor easily scavenged leftovers in the city and handouts that make them more dependent on humans. Their main urban menaces are cars, getting snagged in soccer nets or getting stuck in tight spaces. In their effort to get free, they often get nasty abrasions that can become infected. Many also suffer from mange, a parasitic infestation that leads to all kinds of problems. Townsend pilots her VW Caddy on city streets, highways and narrow lanes that roll through lush hills, responding to calls about injured or ill foxes or cubs that have lost their mothers. She's seen a bit of everything since her first humbling call 2 1/2 years ago when the supposedly injured fox bolted. 'In my inexperience, I chased after him, which is comical because you're never going to outrun a fox,' she said. 'I just remember he ran very fast and I looked silly running after him.' Despite many challenging situations — she once managed to rescue a fox that lost its footing atop a fence and ended upside down at eye level with its paw lodged between boards — she's only been bitten once. Heartbreak with hard cases Her van carries the distinctly musky scent of foxes. The odor becomes unpleasant when an anxious passenger in a litter of cubs relieves itself enroute to being delivered to a foster care pen where they will stay until being released in the wild. 'Feel free to open the window,' said Townsend, who is accustomed to the stench. 'This is a stinky job.' On a recent day, she was dispatched to meet a heartbroken couple who found a cub with a puncture wound collapsed on their back lawn. 'We thought he was asleep at first, so we went to go and have a close look because we love them,' Charlotte English said. 'Then he just didn't move, so we knew something was wrong.' That cub had to be put to sleep, as did the adult Townsend transferred at the start of her shift. Cubs that recover are socialized in packs of five until they mature and are then released in a rural location while the adults are freed in the neighborhoods where they were found. The fox does not say 'Thank you' Given a second chance, it's not clear how well the foxes fare, because they are rarely tracked. A 2016 study in the journal Applied Animal Behaviour Science found that rehabilitated foxes were more likely to behave as if they had been displaced when returned to their original territory. They were tracked wandering farther away, potentially exposing them to more traffic and greater stress. 'It is a gap in the knowledge and there's an assumption that when you release them, they thrive and I think that that assumption needs to be challenged more,' said Bryony Tolhurst, a University of Brighton honorary research fellow and lead author of the study. For Townsend, fox deaths are offset by the joy of seeing little ones venture into the unknown or an adult darting into a neighborhood it instantly recognizes. 'Sometimes they look back and people like to romanticize that they're saying 'thank you,'' she said. 'They're just making sure we're not chasing after them.' Brian Melley, The Associated Press
