Horse Manure

THE report we’ve all been waiting for is out. Quietly, just before the holidays, the much-trumpeted KPMG review into the Olympic use of Greenwich Park was published on the London 2012 website. And my goodness, it’s convincing.

It’s twelve pages long, of which precisely one page is about the Park. Including the headings and titles, this page contains 215 words. I’ve read more detailed analyses on the back of the average cornflakes packet.

KPMG’s conclusion amounts to all of 45 words, which I quote in full: “Based on the documentation and high-level costings provided by LOCOG, the costs of providing an alternative Modern Pentathlon facility together with temporary accommodation mean that it is unlikely that an alternative location could be delivered for a lower cost than the Greenwich Park option.”

Note the first part of that sentence: “Based on the documentation and high-level costings provided by LOCOG.” According to the preface, this study lasted from 12 August to 9 December. Can it really be true that in all that time, all they have accomplished is to read and repeat the claims made by LOCOG, a party with a clear vested interest in the status quo?

Yes, it can. The preface continues: “In preparing the report, our primary source has been internal management information and representations made to us by management of the ODA, LOCOG and the Government Olympic Executive. We do not accept responsibility for such information, which remains the responsibility of the respective management…We have not…sought to establish the reliability of the sources by reference to other evidence.

“This engagement is not…conducted in accordance with any generally accepted [accounting] assurance standards and consequently no assurance opinion is expressed. We draw your attention to the limitations in the information available to us. We have had limited access to the management of the alternative venues considered or to other third parties.

“We must emphasise that the realisation of the forecasts prepared by the ODA and LOCOG is dependent on the continuing validity of the assumptions on which they are based…We accept no responsibility for the realisation of the projections…we do not accept responsibility for the underlying data.”

I can’t think of many other occasions where an official report has been preceded by a warning that its contents are essentially worthless - a warning that lasts, moreover, about four times longer than the conclusions it pre-emptively dismisses. In their tortured, self-exculpatory prose, one can sense KPMG’s entirely justified sensitivity to criticisms by me and others that their work has no real independent or analytic value at all.

Let us quote from the part where the methods of the study are described. “KPMG’s approach principally comprised… considering internal documentation made available by ODA…[and] LOCOG…discussions with key personnel from the ODA, LOCOG and the Department of Culture, Media and Sport…discussions with a small number of third parties approved by the ODA, LOCOG and/or the DCMS.”

Costings used in the report - both to support the existing venues and dismiss their potential alternatives - were derived from “high-level cost estimates…developed by the ODA.” Incredibly, “several of the operational costs were derived from the Bid Book costings, as the best available source of operational cost estimates, inflated to 2012 prices.”

The Bid Book, as its name suggests, is the document prepared in 2005 to convince the IOC to award us the Olympics. You may remember that at that stage we were being assured that the Games could be delivered for £2.4 billion - roughly a quarter of the present figure. It is quite extraordinary that KPMG is still working on the basis of numbers - even if only for the operational expenses of the Games - from that era.

Any and all actual figures themselves, by the way, are blanked out from the published version of the report for reasons of “commercial confidentiality” - as is even, hilariously, the inflation multiplier used by KPMG to bring them up to 2012 prices. Each venue has a section headed “Cost Issues” which consists, in each case, of a large blacked-out blob, brilliantly expressing the sheer infantilism of British secrecy.

The whole KPMG saga reminds me a little of that scene in Blackadder Goes Forth when General Melchett is harrumphing with pleasure over a two-foot square piece of mud on a table in his office, representing territory gained by Britain at the Battle of the Somme. “What’s the scale?” asks Blackadder. “One-to-one,” replies Captain Darling.

What I mean by this is that the exercise is such an obvious travesty as to be entirely pointless. If they’d hoped it would convince anyone, they should have tried a little harder to make it look like a serious piece of work.

The report may be short, but it could have been even shorter. Forget 45 words, LOCOG could have cut it down to just 16: “We don’t care what you think, and we’re going to do exactly what we always wanted.”

Olympic Gridlock

NOT CONTENT with picking our pockets and lying to us about the amount, not content with making absurd promises that will never be kept, not content with putting at risk our priceless park, the people behind the London Olympics are also proposing to close down the rest of Greenwich as well.

Or at least, they’re taking the power to do so. They haven’t yet troubled to tell us how they’ll exercise it.

You may not have heard of the “Olympic Route Network.” I don’t blame you if you haven’t; it’s received mysteriously little press coverage. But you will. The ORN is the network of roads on which the Olympic Delivery Authority will be given the power to ban parking and stopping, restrict traffic, close lanes and indeed shut the roads down in their entirety.

Earlier this month, the Department for Transport launched a consultation document outlining which roads would be part of the ORN. In the borough of Greenwich alone, there are 44. They include:

• the Blackwall Tunnel.
• All approaches to the tunnel, including the entire A102 from the Greater London boundary to the tunnel and Blackwall Lane.
• the whole of Greenwich town centre.
• the entire length of Romney Road and Trafalgar Road.
• Creek Road.
• Deptford Church Street.
• Blackheath Road, Blackheath Hill, Shooters Hill Road (as far as the old Shooters Hill Police Station) and Charlton Way.
• Woolwich Road and Woolwich Church Street, between Blackwall Lane in Greenwich and Woolwich town centre.
• Most of Woolwich town centre.
• The A205 South Circular from Woolwich to the junction with Shooters Hill Road at the old police station.

As well as all the main roads, dozens of residential side streets in Greenwich will be part of the Olympic Route Network. They include:

• Crooms Hill.
• Stockwell Street.
• Park Vista.
• Nevada Street.
• Maze Hill.
• At GMV, West Parkside, John Harrison Way and Edmund Halley Way.
• Charlton Park Lane.
• All the Red Route side roads off the A102.

If you want to park a car, drive, cycle or travel on a bus on any of these streets come 2012, you might not be able to. (The bus routes involved, by the way, are the 47, 51, 53, 54, 89, 96, 99, 108, 129, 161, 177, 178, 180, 188, 199, 202, 244, 286, 291, 386, 422, 469, 472, 486, N1, N47 and N89.)

I say might, because exactly what the ODA will do with its draconian powers is still entirely unstated. Rather worrying, perhaps: if the planned restrictions are to be modest, short-term and benign, they’d surely be happy to tell us that.

If this year’s Games in Beijing are any guide, some roads will be closed entirely and others will have special Olympic vehicle-only lanes, the so-called “Zil lanes” in which only the “Olympic Family” can travel.

Most of Beijing’s main roads are multi-lane expressways – and of course half the traffic was banned every day - but even so, as I saw during the Games, the closure of just one lane caused enormous congestion for the unlucky drivers left with the rest of the road.

The only multi-lane roads in Greenwich’s Olympic Route Network are the Blackwall Tunnel itself, the A102 approach road, Woolwich Church Street, Deptford Church Street and a little bit of Shooters Hill Road. Even closing one lane of these would essentially double most drivers’ journey time, or worse.

And for Greenwich’s remaining single-lane roads, all are badly congested for much, if not most, of the working day. If the idea is to prevent the “Olympic family” from being caught in this congestion, there will be no option but to close these roads.

The final unknown about the Olympic Route Network is exactly how long it will last. Just for the duration of the Games? Oh no. The ODA is being given its powers by the middle of 2009, three years before the Olympics, for a reason – so that some restrictions can come in much earlier.

And even though most restrictions will only happen nearer to the Games, there will, the consultation document admits, be “some trials in summer 2011.” The Olympic period itself is surprisingly long; the document describes the Olympic Route Network as “primarily an operational measure for the 60 days of the Games.” Sixty days? But the Games themselves only last for 15 days.

My best guess is this. Outright road closures are likely to be for several hours at a time, perhaps more than once in the day, over a period of about two weeks. Lane closures, on the multi-lane roads, are likely to be full-time over the same period.

But some traffic management measures will start almost as soon as the ODA is granted the power to do them – around the middle of 2009. Greater parking and stopping restrictions will follow. Outright and draconian parking and stopping controls will be imposed for, at the very least, the entire 60-day period mentioned in the consultation document. And if you’re a shop dependent on passing trade – hard cheese.

The damage all this will do to the normal life of Greenwich, and the business of everyone not connected with the Olympics, is of course enormous. Another example of how the Games will do precisely the opposite of what the boosters claim.

Last Orders

THEY’VE just tarted up the Richard I, in Royal Hill, and I don’t like it. It’s not a disaster. They haven’t destroyed the place. But almost everything they have done is slightly wrong, and is clearly the work of people without any real feeling for a traditional pub.

The old-fashioned light fittings inside the main front windows have been replaced with large, bulbous globes of the kind you see in shopping-centre coffee chains. More of these things appear above both bars.

The saloon bar has been carpeted, in a carpet that would be attractive in a modern restaurant, but is not right here. The floor in the public bar, and all other wooden surfaces, have been varnished to within an inch of their lives. The yellowing old walls have been blandly repainted. Standard-issue café-bar type furniture has joined the pub tables and chairs. In a pub once known for its resistance to canned music, canned music now plays. An “Abba themed 60s and 70s party” is promised.

I know pubs are having an even worse time than the rest of us at the moment. Like small shops and post offices, they’re one of those bedrocks of England that increasingly aren’t there any more; even before the recession, it was reported that five a day were closing.

The Richard I is clearly trying to move away from the problematic pub category, into the territory of the café-bar. But it risks being an unhappy compromise, sacrificing the distinctive for the generic.

The fact is that pure-breed, slightly scruffy traditional pubs, of the kind the Richard I now half-isn’t, are now rarer and more interesting than café-bars. Many have either closed, or been converted to a small number of distinctly tired formulae.

There’s the youth drinking warehouse. The High Street chain pub, with its Sky Sports, predictable décor and accessories (job-lots of second-hand books on a shelf high up the wall, you know the sort of thing.) And the gastro-pub, where it’s the menu that’s often predictable (venison sausages and mash, sticky toffee pudding.)

The curse of the pub trade is partly the smoking ban, changing drinking habits and social patterns – the smoking ban, in particular, has done great damage and there is further New Labour nannying, such as price controls and happy-hour bans, to come. But perhaps the biggest problem is the rise, over the last twenty years, in pub corporate ownership.

Pubs used to be owned mainly by breweries, but in the early 1990s this was restricted. They are now owned mainly by a handful of giant pubcos, effectively property companies which brew no beer. Publicans allege that the pubcos, which are mostly heavily indebted, try to squeeze too much from their assets. And what’s undeniable is that, like the chaining of shops, the chaining of pubs has led to a loss of imagination and variety.

The Richard I may be one of the roughly 10,000 British pubs still owned by a brewery, but that doesn’t seem to have stopped it being affected by the trends in the rest of the sector. There’s a need for real action to save our pubs, unless we want another national institution to be destroyed.

Greenwich was, and indeed still is, a bit of a pub island: in a London of closed-down and tarted-up hostelries, relatively few of our pubs have shut or become formulaic. Let’s hope I’m overreacting to the Richard I; let’s hope it doesn’t herald further local disappearances of originality and character.

Park Shenanigans

GREENWICH Council’s desperation to have the Olympics in Greenwich Park is well known. But has it been playing dirty tricks to fake the appearance of public support for the event? And did it try to rig the recent public consultation meeting on the plans?

The meeting took place at the O2 ten days ago. It was billed as allowing local residents to question Olympic chiefs and Lord Coe, chairman of Locog.

But dozens of residents near the park, many of them opposed to the 2012 plans, were banned from attending on the grounds that they live in the neighbouring borough of Lewisham – even though the borough boundary runs within feet of the park.

Other residents asking to come were told that the meeting was “full,” even as the council continued to urge its own employees to attend.

Dozens of organisations funded by Greenwich Council were given tickets to the meeting and encouraged to make “positive contributions.” Among the speakers at the meeting who apparently spontaneously praised the Games were representatives from the Greenwich Young People’s Council, which is the youth arm of Greenwich Council, and the Greenwich Starting Blocks Trust, a charity owned by the council.

We can reveal that the council has also hired an American PR firm, Vocus, one of whose specialities is creating the appearance of grassroots support for controversial policies. Its chief executive, Rick Rudman, told the Washington Post that “we help large companies and associations build grassroots advocacy groups and do calls to action.”

Vocus’s website says it creates “email campaigns” and “grassroots advocacy programmes… to influence public policy decisions that will affect the sponsoring organisation.” The on-line registration process for attending the Greenwich consultation meeting was routed via Vocus’s web servers.

One of those refused admission, Gillian Stewart, from Blackheath, wrote in a comment on the local 853 blog: “I was told I would not be given a ticket because residents get priority. I live within one mile of the park and I’m not considered a resident? I am not happy.”

Another resident, who asked to remain anonymous, told me: “I can actually see the park from my window. I use it every day and I am very concerned about the Olympic plans, but I am apparently not local enough to have a say at this meeting.”

A Greenwich Liberal Democrat councillor, Paul Webbewood, who attended the meeting, said: “I am not sure why residents were told the meeting was full. Several rows at the side were empty and the council’s internal website was still asking staff to come on the morning of the meeting.”

A spokeswoman for Greenwich Council confirmed that 44 people with addresses outside the borough were refused permission to attend. She said: “This meeting was about the benefits of the Olympics for Greenwich, not about Greenwich Park. I don’t see why my council tax money should be used to pay for people from Lewisham to come to our meetings.”

The spokeswoman said that as many tickets had been issued as there were seats, but admitted that no allowance had been made for ticketholders not turning up. She added that a wide variety of organisations, including some opposed to the council, had been invited to attend and described suggestions that Vocus was mounting a “grassroots advocacy” campaign as “pathetic” and “laughable.”

Michael Goldman, of Nogoe, which campaigns against the equestrian events in the park – and was allowed to attend the meeting – said he was “amazed” that Blackheath residents with a “clear interest” in the Park were kept out. “We don’t need an undercover organisation to get grassroots support,” he said. “We’ve got grassroots support.”

The struggle continues…

Rough Shopping

SOME PEOPLE in my road resent the endless tide of leaflets that washes through our letterboxes, and keep special bins by the door to put them straight in. Me, I chuck the pizza menus away – but I do enjoy laughing at the various local PR publications that slither on to our mat.

My top favourite is of course Greenwich Time, the council’s ridiculous propaganda newspaper - still doggedly insisting that putting the Olympic equestrian events in the Park will “transform” the sporting prospects of the borough’s kids, with a horse in every council flat.

But I’ve also got a real fondness for our two glossy local free magazines, Meridian and The Guide, with their articles by estate agents (“contrary to the doomsayers, the market remains surprisingly buoyant”) and glowing reviews of bad restaurants (“my companion’s garlic bread was delicious.”)

This month, inevitably, they’re both full of Christmas shopping baloney – Anthea Turner’s Yuletide organisational tips, that sort of thing - although I’m afraid Meridian has slipped up a bit. “With the twinkle of Christmas lights, the golden glow from the shops and the bustle of excited shoppers, Blackheath Village looks magical and very Christmassy at the moment,” writes Nanette Fielding on page 16 of the latest issue.

Alas, the magazine containing this charming description of Blackheath Village came through my door on December 3rd – in other words, three days before the Blackheath Christmas lights were switched on.

I, too, started my Christmas shopping even more prematurely than Nanette started writing her PR puff, though not yet at any of the chi-chi outlets advertised in Meridian or The Guide. No, I’ve been to - ahem - TK Maxx at the Peninsular Retail Park, Charlton.

Like some ultra-respectable Cabinet Minister secretly drawn to rough sex, I always feel, as a certified member of the West Greenwich bourgeoisie and campaigner for small shops, slightly guilty about my outbreaks of rough shopping. For the Charlton Peninsular Retail Park could not be further from the platonic middle-class shopping ideal.

As you probably know, it’s basically a strip-mall, a dozen big-box outlets strewn around a chaotic car park without any pretence of design, civic amenity or indeed anything other than the naked maximisation of profit. You won’t see Christmas lights, twinkling or otherwise, here – Christmas lights cost money.

My ex-colleague, the retail design guru Mary Portas, has brilliantly expressed her total contempt for TK Maxx, with its higgledy-piggledy racks of T-shirts and complete lack of style, display or taste. She is, of course, right – but I confess that that’s what I like about it. I’ve always enjoyed rummaging through street markets, and TK Maxx is a bit like a street market with a roof on.

Just like a street market, there is, these days, a fascinating mix of people. Most of the customers once seemed to be Poles and Lithuanians, plus a sprinkling of eccentrics like myself, but now they have been joined by a certain quota of credit-crunch refugees.

Just like a street market, most of the shopping niceties are missing. There are very few mirrors. There are supposed to be changing rooms, but whenever I go they always seem to be shut. So if you are trying on a shirt you do sometimes find yourself doing it in the middle of the shop (this only works for men, obviously.)

While doing this, rule number one at TK Maxx is to keep track of where you have put the clothes you came in wearing. The place is so chaotic that last time I was in there, someone picked my North Face jacket off the rack where I’d dumped it and took it to the till to pay.

Rule number two is that when you are looking through what actually is for sale, look everywhere. As in normal shops, they are supposed to sort the stuff by size and category – but the size labels always seem totally random and there are so many people going through the clothes that lots of things get put back in the wrong places.

The only strategy is to treat the job like, say, the Parachute Regiment clearing an enemy trench – methodically hose down each aisle, one at a time, until you are sure there are no cut-price Adidas T-shirts left alive.

Also rather like a combat zone, you have to block out the ceaseless aural shellfire from TK Maxx staff making announcements to each other over the in-store Tannoy (the Lewisham store seems much worse than Charlton, for some reason). Then, of course, there’s the 20-minute wait at the till.

If you can overcome these obstacles, however, the actual merchandise can be quite good. Much of the stuff is quite well-known brands - though often, admittedly, failed experiments by those brands which have bumped up against the limits of even British taste (I saw a pair of Puma trainers my size: the only problem was that they were in bright lime-green camouflage stripes, presumably so the wearer could take up a position in a tub of guacamole and not be noticed.)

If you are patient enough, you will usually come out with some small and quite acceptable, if not quite the very latest-model, designer trophy for yourself or a loved one: a Calvin Klein shirt or a Ted Baker jacket, perhaps, and for about half of what it might cost new. But I’ll be back in Blackheath Village next weekend: rough shopping is fun, but like rough sex, it’s a quick date, not a love affair.

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