I’m Martin. Manchester by birth, Barcelona by accident, mid-forties and feeling it in my knees when I take the stairs. Used to spend my days running construction projects in the UK. If you imagine high-vis jackets and piles of drawings you’re half right; the other half was endless meetings in grey rooms where people argued about insulation thickness and whether you could call a building “sustainable” if it had bike racks out front. That word was already worn thin. I remember one developer saying, “As long as we tick the BREEAM box nobody cares what’s behind the plasterboard.” That stuck.
By the time WSB14 — the World Sustainable Building Conference in Barcelona — rolled around in 2014, I was still stuck in that grind. I didn’t fly out for the event, but I happened to be in the city that week, half holiday, half escape. Everywhere I went, there were posters: metro stations plastered with logos, slogans about resilience and transformation. I walked past the Palau de Congressos one hot afternoon and watched the delegates spill outside between sessions. Lanyards swinging, tote bags stuffed with leaflets, men in polished shoes sneaking cigarettes. The irony wasn’t lost on me. Sustainable on the slides, Marlboros in the bins.
Fast-forward ten years. I’ve long since quit the UK job, quit the UK marriage, landed here more permanently than I expected. And one night, idly searching expired domains, I saw the old conference site was up for grabs. WSB14Barcelona.org. Nobody wanted it. I bought it for the price of a half-decent dinner. Why? Same reason I drag home chairs from street corners: because leaving something with a story to rot feels wrong.
So what you’re reading now is not a conference hub. No keynote speakers, no glossy programme PDFs. It’s just me. A man who can’t stop walking this city and staring at its buildings.
I walk because I can’t sit still. If I stay too long in the flat I end up glaring at the damp patch under the window, or the meter flashing red like it’s mocking me. So I lace up my battered trainers and head out. Down Gran Via where buses hiss and the pavements shake. Through Gràcia, dodging laundry dripping onto my head from the fifth floor. Along Diagonal where cranes cut across the skyline like punctuation marks. I count them, always have. Seven yesterday, though only the odd numbers matter in my own strange logic.
Everywhere I go I see the same gap: the one between what those conference posters promised and what we’ve actually built. Yes, there are wins — more bus lanes, some running on gas or battery, recycling bins on every corner, supermarkets handing out fewer plastic bags. But the cracks are obvious too. New glass towers that roast tenants alive by June. Old flats bleeding heat all winter. Neighbours like Pepi downstairs running two plug-in heaters just to take the edge off, bills piling up like bad news. A development trumpeting sostenible on its banner while the workers hose slurry into the gutter.
That word sostenible is everywhere now. On coffee cups, on shoe shops, even on the dodgy laundrette by my corner. Everyone’s selling it. Few are living it.
Here’s where I admit I’m no saint either. I smoke more than I should. I’ve left the tap running, forgotten to recycle, run the ancient air-con until it rattles like a tractor. My boiler sounds like it’s chewing gravel. I’m not writing this from some pedestal. I’m writing it because I notice things, and if I don’t pin them down they disappear.
Sometimes I sketch facades on the backs of receipts. Sometimes I fill notebooks with half-legible notes that get ruined in the rain. Emily, my daughter — fifteen now, still in Manchester with her mum — thinks I’m ridiculous. She wants trainers, not crane counts. She wants TikTok videos, not photos of balconies dripping onto mopeds. But I keep sending her things anyway. Maybe she’ll get it one day, maybe she won’t. Doesn’t matter. She’s still the quiet reason I care. If she ever reads this site, she’ll know what the world looked like in 2025 from street level, not from conference slides.
So what will you find here? Scraps. Observations. Walks turned into words. Sometimes about property, because you can’t separate housing from sustainability. Sometimes about law or energy, because they bleed into the same cracks. Sometimes just me ranting about scaffolding nets slapping in the wind at 2am. No neat lessons, no “how to” lists, no pretending to be an authority. I burned out on authority years ago.
If you landed here by mistake, expecting archives of WSB14 papers — sorry. Those are gone, buried on some dusty server. What you’ll get instead is me: a middle-aged man with sore feet, a superstition about crane counts, and an unhealthy interest in how buildings breathe, leak, and fail.
Walk with me if you like. Or don’t. I’ll keep going either way.