Andrew Gilligan: Where have all the shops gone?

HAVE you noticed how many empty shops there are in Greenwich, all of a sudden? In the town centre (excluding Royal Hill) there are 19. The shop that was Warwick Leadlay, at the entrance passage from Nelson Road to the market, is the latest to fall vacant – for the second time in two years.

The only thing in the shop now is a notice in the window from its most recent tenant, Graham and Green, announcing that they have relocated to Notting Hill. That could stand as an epitaph for the folly of Greenwich Hospital’s retail strategy. They elbowed out a business, Warwick Leadlay, that had provided decades of stability on the retail scene, to bring in a trendy outlet that fled back to its comfort zone as soon as it realised that SE10 is not, thank God, Notting Hill.

Around the market, nearly half a dozen shops are vacant. Next to the Post Office, the big Bottoms Up site has been empty for months. The parade at the Greenwich end of South Street now has two vacant shops. The clothing shop in King William Walk has closed. Two of Frank Dowling’s pubs and bars, the old Cricketers (aka the Lani Tiki Lounge) and the Inc Bar above the market arch, are dry. The travel agency near the DLR station has flown away.

Some of it, no doubt, is because of the recession. Some of it is because of Greenwich Hospital’s wish to redevelop the central Market site. It is gradually moving traders out of the bits it wants to demolish, to boost its loathsome scheme to turn the Market into a hotel with a modern shopping precinct attached – unanimously rejected by the council last year, but the subject of an appeal and public inquiry this summer. More on this soon.

Some of it, though, may be because Greenwich shops depend on visitors, and it is simply not an attractive place to visit at the moment. This used to be somewhere that visitors (if not locals) came to shop. But as well as the shops, we have of course lost about three-quarters of our markets. I am increasingly struck by how hugely disappointing the town must now feel for those visitors who can remember it from a few years ago.

The dominant feature of central Greenwich has become a series of hoardings concealing, variously, a mutton-headed tarting-up (the foot tunnel), a national tragedy (the appallingly botched restoration of the Cutty Sark), a vaguely unneccesary “improvement” (the Sammy Ofer wing at the Maritime Museum), an endlessly-delayed project (the pier) or a supposed future university, currently and almost certainly now indefinitely an empty space (the old Village Market site.) And that’s before the Olympics get started…

As the new government starts to wield the axe, the assumption in many quarters seems to be that all public spending is good and that any cuts to it are bad. Much of the time this is, of course, true. But Greenwich increasingly strikes me as a textbook example of just how destructive public spending and official improvement-mania can be. We would have almost certainly have been happier, and our town would have been busier, if they had just forgotten about thir grand plans and left the pier, the foot tunnel, the Cutty Sark, the Maritime Museum, the park and the Village Market alone.

Council consults on Greenwich pedestrianisation proposals

Greenwich Council has initiated a consultation on proposals to part pedestrianise Greenwich town centre.

The pedestrianisation scheme would entail closing College Approach and King William Walk (northern section) to all traffic except for access. Greenwich Church Street north of Creek Road would allow some traffic access.

Cllr Chris Roberts. Leader of Greenwich Council, said, “We are very keen to get the views of everyone who lives in, works in or visits Greenwich, and I hope as many people as possible will take part in the consultation on the Council’s proposals.”

The options currently under proposal are:

Option 1 – two-way traffic on all the non-pedestrianised roads.
Option 2 – create new clockwise traffic gyratory with one-way traffic flows on Norman Road and the affected stretches of Creek Road, Greenwich Church Street and Greenwich High Road.

Those supporting the second option are invited to give comments on three variations:

2a – As Option 2 but with two-way movement permitted on Greenwich High Road southwest of Stockwell Street.
2b – As Option 2 but with a bus contra-flow on Greenwich High Road – Greenwich Church Street – Creek Road.
2c – As Option 2 but with a cycle contra-flow on Greenwich High Road – Greenwich Church Street – Creek Road.

The proposed options can be seen in detail, along with a visual computer model, at an exhibition being held at Devonport House on the 19th/20th/21st December between 10am – 8pm. More information is available from the Council website.

Pub Review: Greenwich Park Bar & Kitchen

The Greenwich Park Bar & Kitchen
1 King William Walk SE10 9JY

I wasn’t expecting a lot from this place. I was expecting a bland, chain-style tourist trap. Humble pie time I’m afraid: someone’s clearly put a lot of thought into the (new) new look Bar & Kitchen and has carved out a well-defined and satisfying niche.

The Bar & Kitchen wouldn’t be too out of place with an ‘EC’ postcode and a few Friday night suits, which is actually a refreshing change amongst the town’s raft of ‘local’ pubs with a posh edge (read Gastropubs). The décor is quite dark but stylish: some well-spaced wicker sofas and fairy lights at one end, and a formal dining area at the other.

Where the Union does Ales, the Bar & Kitchen does cocktails, with a list more extensive than the food menu. There’s also happy hour from Monday to Friday between 5pm and 7pm, where the cocktails are £3.95 rather than the usual £6 or £7 (cue happy suits and stilettos). The menu focuses on a few select dishes that presumably change regularly and I was intrigued to see Macaroni cheese on there; very random in June but it beats veggie lasagne any day.

The barman was friendly and took an interest in my unusual choice of vodka and apple juice with lime juice. Actually, what happened was he misheard me when I asked for cranberry juice but he made such an effort with the banter about me inventing a new cocktail, that I didn’t have the heart to tell him he’d made a mistake (plus I was secretly hoping “the Rosie” would make it onto the cocktail menu!). Other than that there was a wide selection of lagers and a few wines to choose from.

I don’t imagine anyone’s socks will be knocked off by a visit to the Bar & Kitchen, but it is a pretty little place with a clear agenda and that makes it a success as far as I’m concerned. Amidst a sea of local, country-ish pubs with real ale and pies, you need a few fairy lights and cocktails every so often, so if mojitos are your thing I’d say give this place a(nother) go.

Andrew Gilligan: Act Now To Save Greenwich Market

AS THE proposals to redevelop Greenwich Market start their journey through the planning process, we need to be clear about two things.

Firstly, the current plan is not substantially different from Greenwich Hospital’s discredited 2006 scheme to demolish the Market, dropped after a public outcry. The main difference is that this time the PR operation has been smoother.

Secondly, the plans – whether you like them or not – represent a fundamental transformation, changing a nineteenth-century market into a 21st-century shopping precinct with added market stalls.

“But it’s not nineteenth-century,” I hear you say. The buildings lining the two longest sides of the market are from the 1950s.

That is, of course, perfectly true. But somehow, despite that. the market feels old. The key to that feeling lies in two things – the low ceiling, and the cobbled floor. In the new scheme, both of those things will be destroyed.

Artists’ impressions of the scheme show what is now the central market area covered with a high, contemporary, plastic or membrane translucent roof, supported by at least sixteen thick stainless-steel pillars.

The current roof hides the Fifties buildings. The new roof would be at least two to three storeys high, exposing the new contemporary buildings to be constructed either side.

It looks like a closed-sided version of Stratford bus station – a building I admire, and which works well in a modern setting like Stratford, but which is wholly out of keeping with the historic centre of Greenwich. It is a world heritage site, folks – you do know we’ve only got four of them, don’t you?

The lowness of the current roof contributes greatly to the intense, warren-like atmosphere of the market, a place which feels like a hunting ground for hidden treasure, or at least scented candles. The new version has as much intensity and excitement as the central square at Bluewater.

The other thing that makes the market feel old is the cobbles. These, too, will be ripped up, in favour of standard setts and slabs. Health and safety, that evergreen answer to every blandifier’s prayers, is being cited in support of this vandalism.

The brochure promises to “increase the total amount of retail space” – not necessarily a bad thing, and it does seem from the plan that the new shops will still be quite small. Good; but I have a nasty feeling that they may not stay small in the finished scheme.

The main difference from the 2006 scheme is that instead of being “luxury flats,” the new buildings around the market are now to be a 100-room “boutique hotel.” A hundred rooms is actually almost 25% more than at the existing town centre hotel, the Ibis, which has 82 rooms. A hundred rooms isn’t a boutique, chaps – it’s a department store.

What will the new hotel buildings be like? If they are supposed to be in place by the Olympics, that doesn’t leave much time for niceties like decent design and careful construction. They are high, at least four storeys, potentially overshadowing the listed buildings on Church Street and King William Walk. My concern is that they will be the same kind of blank structures that line the pedestrian passage at Cutty Sark DLR station, and that the public spaces between them will be as charmless as that passage.

The hotel, in fact, could be where the Hospital’s grand plans prove, in the end, unworkable. Greenwich Council may never have shown much concern for the town’s heritage – but I don’t imagine (I could be wrong about this) that they want Greenwich to be an even worse traffic jam than it is already.

The main entrance of the hotel could cause just that. It will be right on the busiest part of the one-way system, on King William Walk. The Hospital claims that most guests will arrive by public transport – surely nonsense. Few people carrying luggage for a stay in an expensive hotel (I think we can assume this hotel will be expensive) want to, or can, carry it on public transport. Most will arrive by car, by taxi or perhaps, if they are in a party, by coach.

There is nowhere to unload such vehicles except right in the middle of the traffic flow (and the hotel entrance also has the distinction of being opposite a bus terminus, further narrowing the available space.) Rather like the fluttering butterfly wings in South America which caused the proverbial earthquake in Japan, the arrival of a coach containing fifty tourists and their luggage in Greenwich will be felt all the way back to Tower Bridge.

The other main difference from 2006 is that Greenwich Hospital has made a better fist of its PR. Back then, Nick Raynsford, the local MP, told me that the plans were a “fundamental change to the character of the area” which would make people “up in arms.”

That fundamental change, as I’ve suggested, remains. But Mr Raynsford now seems less unhappy about it. He’s one of the “stakeholders” that the Hospital’s PR firm has managed to butter up.

Ray Smith, from the Greenwich Society, is quoted by the PRs as saying that the proposal will “help revitalise Greenwich town centre.” But it is impossible to see how the market – teeming, buzzing, thronged – could be any more vital than it is already. Indeed, in 2006, a certain Nick Raynsford told me: “The market is hugely popular. You only have to go down there at the weekend to see that it’s absolutely packed and it makes a big contribution to the character of Greenwich.”

So what’s changed? Perhaps the local worthies have been persuaded by the results of the “consultation” the Hospital conducted. They shouldn’t be: the questions were so loaded as to be almost worthless.

The lack of fuss, so far, can also be explained by some of the core reassurances being made about the development. The latest brochure claims that “the overall objective of the plan is to maintain all the principles of Greenwich Market.” There’s only one problem with this: it is just not true.

But the Hospital’s need to say it does unwittingly reveal another truth: that it knows most people in Greenwich do want to “maintain the principles of Greenwich Market.” If you are among them, it is time to start objecting to this principle-destroying development.