The way things are going now tourists will want to avoid the empty shops and boozers and grid-locked streets of the town and make a hasty bee line from the Cutty Sark and Pier to the NMM and Observatory.

The thing is with the market that tourists, like the locals, actually LIKE it and don’t want it reduced in size to make way for a money-spinning hotel development that will further erode the character of the town. It seems that Greenwich Hospital and Nick Raynsford just don’t get it but people don’t come to Greenwich to admire the latest in off the shelf urban shopping centre development. I also think that the majority of people that live here actually LIKE the town and market too (although we are all obviously misguided and incapable of independent thought preferring to wait for Andrew Gilligan to tell us what we can and cannot like, according to Mr Raynsford)

The problem with development in Greenwich is that we can all look at what happened in the commercial areas of the town to get a taste of the future. Want a taste of the new market development? Then take a look at the mini-me Lewisham High Street (DLR alley) or the paving stone “gardens” of Cutty Sark Gardens
What the town needs, in my opinion, is support for local traders, cultural tourism and creative industries, development of the market as a community and tourist attraction. How about a food market that will pull locals in as well as add buzz and vitality to the area?
On the plus side I’m pleased to see a new art gallery opening next to Rhodes and that Inside have taken over the Guilford. Now fingers crossed for some decent inexpensive cafes and cutting edge cultural activities (Yes, I know there is plenty of that in Deptford but would be nice to see some here too)

It’s exactly by losing sight of this that white elephants are born – and I don’t want one in our town centre.

I’m no hotel expert so whether there really is latent demand overseas to stay in a hotel in the middle of a traffic island, I cannot say.

However, a substantial number of the people shopping in the Market are not tourists in the holiday making sense, but Londoners having a day out at a genuinely interesting market. And ’sanitising’ the market will make it less interesting for those people, who will stop coming, and will stop spending their money in Greenwich.

A hotel is just non-sense, they had it in their mind that droves of tourist would stay in Greenwich instead of Central London. I do recommend my friends to visit greenwich by boat trip from Tower Hill for a day trip, but never never ever to stay. Most of the tourist attractions are in Central London.

They are building so many more hotels in Greenwich and there is bound to be over capacity. Sure, the Olympics is not far off, but that is a 16 day event. Do you build a brand new hotel for 16 days?. In my mind Nick Raysford is over rating the prospects of this hotel.

I happen, for what it’s worth, to be the person who used the word “Bluewater” in Andrew Gilligan’s Standard piece; I was not referring to the architecture per se, but the philosophy of ‘improving’ the market by removing the cobbled floor, demolishing victorian and edwardian buildings to make way for a garbage compactor, and hiking the rents for market traders: airbrushing away the market’s texture and making it bland and soul-less, like, yes, Bluewater. Of the dozens or hundreds of people I spoke to in the early days, not one of them supported these kind of changes. Via the Greenwich Phantom site, and Greenwich Mercury, even before the Standard piece, we managed to get the first 50 or so letters of objection in. Our vested interest was that we live and work in Greenwich, in many cases in the market itself.

Raynsford contends Gilligan fantasised that Turnpin Lane would be demolished; of course, nowhere in his reports does it state that. Rather, the developers attempted to obfuscate many of the changes, such as demolition of Victorian Stable blocks (not mentioned in the consultation) and the claim that “market traders had asked for the cobbles to be ripped out”. Yeah, right.

Of course, on further investigation, the Hotel turned out even higher than was suggested, looming over Joseph Kay’s landmark buildings. Even if, like me,you looked through a box full of printouts, there were no sight-lines showing its actual height and effect on its vastly more significant neighbouyrs.

If Nick Raynsford is an expert on building, and a friend of Greenwich Hospital, he should have been addressing these issues, rather than trying to obfuscate and rush the scheme through or, as he is now, trying to personify the battle as being the enlightened against Andrew Gilligan. It’s a cliché to accuse politicians of being complacent and out of touch with those they represent, but it’s one Nick Raynsford seems determined to prove perpetuate.