Rupert Bates

The Dukes of Buccleuch and Queensberry have lived in Boughton House, a Northamptonshire pile known as ‘The English Versailles,' for nearly 500 years. My family lived in a low carbon semi on the edge of a Northamptonshire housing estate for 24 hours. The two worlds might yet collide.

Rupert Bates, editorial director of www.whathouse.co.uk - the leading new homes portal - has slammed anti-development groups, including the National Trust and the CPRE, for “peddling a naked NIMBY agenda dressed up as protecting the countryside.”

I try not to agree with Simon Jenkins, the former editor of The Times. He is, after all, chairman of the National Trust and when I waved my banana - Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anyone - at the What House? Awards I was waving it at him and his anti-development ilk.

Two days ago as the Telegraph's predictable, hysterical Hands Off Our Land campaign rolled on, Matt, the newspaper's brilliant cartoonist, sketched about new homes being built on Downton Abbey's front lawn.

Can construction save the planet? It could certainly build us more time. What House? editorial director Rupert Bates talks to Professor Brian Cox.

Forget the cosmos, the arrow of time and epic landscapes that dominated the BBC series Wonders of the Universe.

Park your theories on thermodynamics, the waxing of the moon and the orbit of the sun and listen to what Professor Brian Cox said on planet earth at a particular instant in time and several trillion years before the end of the age of starlight.

Mortgage advisor and rugby international Duncan Bell believes housebuilders need strength in numbers to get starter homes moving. Rupert Bates reports:

When Duncan Bell, the Bath and England rugby prop, has his head down in a scrum or trapped at the bottom of a ruck, he is probably not thinking about what loan-to-value mortgage he can arrange for a client.

I don't know who I disrespect more now - Housing Minister Grant Shapps, or the Royal Institute of British Architects.

More new homes are needed because of the massive housing shortage that even Shapps acknowledges. There is a massive low carbon agenda, which without the housebuilders on board is undeliverable; if it's not already undeliverable.

Now I know the Deputy Prime Minister feels stressed and overworked, but do politicians ever take their noses out of their red boxes and smell the real world percolating?

How else to explain Nick Clegg announcing last week as if it happened yesterday and only his position in one of the highest offices of State gave him access to such privileged information  that - wait for it - first-time buyers were having a tough time and unable to obtain mortgages.

I am a huge admirer of Kevin McCloud and the principles behind his new home building business Hab, but reading the latest extracts from his book in The Times Bricks & Mortar today, my heart sank as yet again another prop idol resorted to lazy stereotyping of an entire industry.