Greenwich.co.uk

Greenwich news and information

Last Orders

By

The Greenwich Union and The Richard I pubs

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

By

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

By

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.

Tower Incognita

By

HURRAH – Severndroog Castle has been saved! What droog castle, I hear you ask? And what has a Midlands river got to do with Greenwich? Don’t worry, I haven’t gone all provincial on you: this Severndroog Castle is on Shooters Hill.

You go up the main road until you have to get off your bike and push. The turnoff is almost opposite one of my favourite local pubs, the Red Lion – that rarity among its now themed, gastro’d, tarted up, or plain closed-down brethren, a pub which is still what we once used to call normal.

The castle is a triangular tower, built by a Lady James in what was then her back garden as a memorial to her husband. The original Severndroog was a pirate fort on the west coast of India which Sir William James captured for the British East India Company, thus preventing the company’s ships from suffering the same inconveniences as, shall we say, modern-day oil tankers off the Somali coast.

When Sir William dropped dead at his daughter’s wedding, his wife decided to make sure that he lived forever on the skyline. Sixty-three feet above what is already a pretty steep hill, the tower is one of London’s tallest places. Pretty hard to miss, you might think – but Lady James reckoned without Greenwich Council.

After passing into public ownership, the tower eventually ended up with the GLC – and in 1986, after that was abolished, with the London Borough of Greenwich. There’d been a public tearoom there – but the council closed it, along with the rest of the building, leaving decades of obscurity and easy pickings for vandals.

In a full-circle kind of touch which Sir William James might have appreciated, the tower was occupied for a while by the transmitting equipment of a pirate radio station. Later, in a further sign of its well-known commitment to the borough’s heritage, Greenwich tried to turn the whole place over to a property developer and convert it into offices.

This week, however, the Heritage Lottery Fund has come across with more than £250,000 to reopen the tower four days a week, and once again allow Londoners to gaze over eight counties from the top-floor viewing platform.

Last week I told you about the obvious local places that everybody has been to except me – the observatory, Rangers House and so on. This week, in the second part of Confessions Of A Columnist, I will admit that I much prefer going to un-obvious places that not all that many people seem to know about. Our area is stuffed with them, and Severndroog is one.

Some of them you can even get inside. Have you ever been to Eltham Palace? It is the most extraordinary place, a suave masterpiece of Thirties ocean-liner style in the shell of a medieval building. The work of the Courtauld textile millionaires, the Russian oligarchs of their day, it exudes a smoking-jacketed opulence that makes the Candy brothers look like MFI.

Virginia Courtauld’s vaulted en-suite bathroom is lined with onyx and gold mosaic, with a statue of the goddess Psyche. All the furniture is hand-made to fit precisely the proportions of the rooms. In one of those wonderfully complicated “futuristic” touches, all the rooms have connections to a central suction pipe to which the servants attached an early version of the vacuum cleaner.

Even the Courtaulds’ pet lemur, Mah-Jongg, had his own heated cage, from where he would descend a special ladder to bite the chauffeurs. But perhaps the key to all the extravagance lies in a small cupboard off the pantry, which contains a pay phone for the Courtaulds’ house guests. You don’t get this loaded without watching the pennies.

Eltham Palace is open four days a week until December 20th – and the day I went, I had the place to myself. So although I will get round to the Maritime Museum, and the observatory, I strongly recommend everyone else gets round to some of those lesser-known favourites of mine.

0 Marks

By

IN DAVID Lodge’s campus novel, Changing Places, the characters, English literature academics, play a game called Humiliation, where you score points by confessing the most embarrassing possible works of literature that you’ve never read. One of the academics loses his job after admitting, to win the game, that he hasn’t read Hamlet.

Well, as it says on the biography just to the right of this here screen, your current columnist is a “long-time resident of Greenwich.” Thirteen and a half years long, actually – six of them spent waiting for the 177 bus. But in my own personal Humiliation moment, let me, as a so-called SE10 expert, tell you the various deeply embarrassing Greenwich places I’ve never been, and cross my fingers they don’t sack me.

I’ve never been inside the Royal Observatory or the Cutty Sark, not since I moved here at least (I went on a school trip when I was 10.) Never been to Ranger’s House. Never been (shameful!) to the National Maritime Museum, not since it was refurbished yonks ago. Perhaps that isn’t too untypical of local residents in touristy areas. But there’s one other place which lots of locals visit and I never had: the 02.

I’d been when it was the Dome, just after Christmas 2000, about three days before it closed. But in a world containing, you know, Rome, Paris, and the Westfield Shopping Centre, never mind the National Maritime Museum, I never felt missing out on the 02 left a Hamlet-sized hole in my life. The fact that it is named after a mobile phone network was a bit of a clue that I might not like the place.

But last week, after someone was stabbed there, I thought: you know, why don’t I go and see what it’s like. And isn’t it a long way? It seemed to take about 20 minutes to cycle up the peninsula, and it was raining. That was the first test the 02 failed, actually – I couldn’t find anywhere nearby to park the bike. Various private security guards in yellow jackets hovered around as I tied it up to one of the struts of the building, half expecting it to be taken away by the time I got back. (Maybe you’ll tell me there are lovely cycle racks right next to the place: all I’ll say is I couldn’t find them.)

The fact that the 02 appears to have forgotten about bikes is one sign that this is now in many ways a relatively standard-issue out-of-town leisure warehouse, designed for the car – shiny ranks of which surrounded the place on all sides not taken up by water. Yes, I know there’s a tube station, and a riverbus, and I know the arena gets bigger names than the Royale Leisure Park, Western Avenue – but it’s still that kind of place.

There’s the usual slightly unfinished air, the usual grey surfaces, the usual big ugly spaces half-filled with escalators. There are the usual marketing men’s concept restaurants: Frankie & Benny’s, Slug & Lettuce, Zizzi, Ha Ha Bar & Grill, and so on, the great trophies of middle-market British industrial catering.

I especially like Frankie & Benny’s, which has a series of “New York Italian” diners in multiplex car parks across the land (I strongly suspect this chain has no current connection with New York, Italy or anyone named Frankie or Benny – it’s a division of The Restaurant Group.)

There are a couple of slightly more unusual chains, but none that really rises above the mediocre (based on my having eaten in their other branches.) There are also several outlets of my very favourite stealth chain, the Inc Group. I won’t describe them, for the sound reason that I haven’t eaten at any of them. There are, I think, no restaurants which are not chains.

There’s a cinema, where I went to see Oliver Stone’s film about George Bush, W. An appropriate movie in a place so American, perhaps. It is 65p cheaper than the Greenwich Picturehouse but does have that multiplex aroma of popcorn trodden into the carpets to make up. Inside the auditorium it looks unsurprisingly similar – dark room, oblong screen.

The one thing I didn’t see was the arena. Maybe I’ll go back and have a look at that sometime. You know what, they’ve got Barry Manilow next week. Elton John’s playing New Year’s Eve, for those with £99 to spare. In the meantime, I think I’ll head back to Nelson Road, where the number of empty shops – no doubt as a direct result of that piece I wrote last month – is about to fall by three-quarters. Hooray – life outside the multiplex goes on!

There are no windows at the 02, which is weirdly unsettling. It pays no heed at all to its surroundings; you’d never know there was a river, or indeed a city, outside. Even the swoop of the dome has been broken up by all the money-making bits they’ve put in.

I’m probably being snobbish about the 02. It is a considerable success in its new guise. But it’s not my kind of place, and only geographically is it part of Greenwich.

KPMG’s Intellectually Suspect Olympic Site Review

By

OPENING my Financial Times yesterday, I saw a full-page advert from the accountants KPMG: “Helping you succeed in turbulent times.” How very appropriate!
 
For it is KPMG who are doing their level best to help the London Olympic organisers succeed  in ramming through their deeply risky proposal to hold the 2012 equestrian events in Greenwich Park – a plan which has certainly caused an awful lot of turbulence locally.
 
In August, KPMG were appointed to review Greenwich, and another local venue, the proposed Olympic shooting ground at Woolwich Barracks, amid growing concern that they would cost a fortune, provide no legacy, and would, in Greenwich’s case, risk terrible damage to our precious World Heritage Site park.
 
I have to confess that I was cynical at the time, privately believing the review to be no more than an attempt to validate decisions already taken. But I didn’t say so. I thought I’d give KPMG a chance and see whether they produced a serious piece of work that genuinely tried to review the issues, genuinely investigated the costs and benefits of moving the venues and genuinely approached the subject with an open mind.
 
Yesterday, my paper, the Standard, published extracts from a leaked email written by the Mayor, Boris Johnson, which summarised the KPMG review’s conclusions – and made quite clear that everyone’s worst fears about the study were true. This is indeed, it seems, one of those exercises where they decide the answer before they even start – and then work out how they’re going to justify it.
 
At least from the summary of the conclusions in that leaked email, the justification is so tortuous, the liberties taken with the truth so great, as to render this report one of the more intellectually suspect pieces of work I’ve seen (and I did read the Hutton Inquiry.)
 
KPMG’s key reason, in Boris’s words, for rejecting alternative venues (Windsor Great Park or Badminton, say), was that “Greenwich would be the cheapest option because any out-of-London venue would require provision of a satellite village for competitors.”
 
In fact, the 2012 Games already have eight out-of-London venues, in five sports – and none of them is being given a purpose-built satellite village. They’re using existing buildings (such as, you know, hotels, and student halls of residence) – and instead of paying through the nose to build an entire Olympic village from scratch, they’re just paying two weeks’ rent to the owners of said hotels and halls.
 
It would thus actually save vast amounts of taxpayers’ money to move the shooters and riders outside London, because we wouldn’t need to build the Olympic village as big.
 
But as I discovered, KPMG rejected Badminton and Windsor as too expensive and generally unsuitable without even visiting them, or indeed even (as both venues confirmed to me) talking to them.
 
That wasn’t the only thing they didn’t do. They didn’t talk to anyone in Greenwich or Woolwich, including the council, the local amenity groups, or Michael Goldman’s NOGOE, which opposes the use of the park. They didn’t talk to any of the three national sporting federations whose sports will take place in Greenwich and Woolwich. They didn’t speak to the landowner, the Royal Parks.
 
Most of all, they didn’t make any kind of examination of the environmental and ecological impact of the proposals – in other words, they completely ignored the main grounds on which so many are objecting to the use of the park!
 
What work did KPMG actually do, then? Ah, that’s a little more difficult. Even their full terms of reference are not public for reasons of “commercial confidentiality.” And the cost figures they used? Alas, these too have to remain secret, said the Olympics Minister, Tessa Jowell, this week, for the same reason.
 
Other questionable claims in the KPMG conclusions are that security and transport at alternative venues will cost more. But both Greenwich and any out-of-London alternative would be stand-alone, outside the general ring of security on the Olympic Park, and thus security requirements would be similar.
 
Greenwich Park does have railings around it, but temporary security fencing is also likely to be required by the IOC, as it was at the 2008 Olympics in Hong Kong. On this basis, fencing a venue in the middle of the countryside would certainly cost no more than fencing Greenwich Park, and probably less, since access for construction will be easier.
 
The need for guards and patrols will also be greater for a venue in the middle of a heavily-populated inner city area with a high crime rate. Satellite stabling areas outside the park will also need to be secured, whereas at, say, Windsor all the stabling could be together.
 
Securing Woolwich, which is in the middle of a public common and is partly open on one side, will be vastly more expensive than securing the proposed alternative, Bisley – which because of its year-round role as a shooting centre is already one of the country’s most secure sporting venues. The existing security fence at Bisley was deemed perfectly adequate for the Commonwealth Games.
 
KPMG also claimed that transport costs would be greater for any alternative venues. Again, probably untrue, depending on the alternative venue and the distance from it to the athletes’ accommodation.
 
If the equestrianism was held at Windsor Great Park, and the shooting at Bisley, the accommodation would be at Royal Holloway College at Egham (where the Olympic rowers are already scheduled to go, and there is ample space for shooters and riders). From the Great Park to Egham is about half the distance from Greenwich to the Olympic Village, and on far less congested roads. From Bisley to Egham is only slightly further than from Woolwich to Stratford.
 
Finally, KPMG said that Greenwich would have to stay because there would still need to be a modern pentathlon showjumping arena constructed in London.  This is true, but a red herring. The riding part of the modern pentathlon does need to be in London to be near the other four sports which make up the event. But a pentathlon riding arena is far simpler and cheaper than an equestrian one, reflecting the fact that the entire horse part of the pentathlon takes just three hours over the whole Games (90 minutes each for men and women.)
 
Next year’s modern pentathlon World Championships – a “class A” event equivalent to the Olympics – are being held in the athletics stadium at Crystal Palace at a total cost to the taxpayer (for all five events, not just the riding) of £660,000.
 
Part of me feels depressed at the shamelessness of KPMG’s claims – and not least at the fact that, according to the leaked email, they do seem to have convinced Boris to drop his pressure for changing the venues. The Mayor also seems to have been convinced from the experience of this year’s Olympic horse events in Hong Kong that there would be little damage to the park. But the Olympic cross-country venue was a private golf course, quite different from the densely-packed, historic and public place that is Greenwich Park.
 
No doubt this will lead to a further round of claims by Olympic spinners that Greenwich Park is a “done deal” and it is time for everyone to fall into line. But another part of me feels encouraged. It shows the true case for Greenwich is so weak that they can only make it by making it up. If Locog expect this report to settle any arguments, they will, I fear, be disappointed.
 
Click here for the full text of the leaked email.

Sick Transit

By

TFL’S plan for a new “Greenwich Waterfront Transit” sounds like it should be rather good. A tram, perhaps? A river service of some kind? Surely a guided busway, at least?

Actually, I’m afraid, it’s complete rubbish. Despite the name, intended to make it seem like something special, it is simply a normal bus service – using normal diesel buses – from North Greenwich Tube station, via Woolwich, to Thamesmead and Abbey Wood. It won’t even give us any more trips – it will simply replace the existing 472 route, at precisely the same frequency.

There’s no doubt that Woolwich and Thamesmead need new transport links. But the only new things this will bring are a short stretch – around half a mile – of bus-only road in Thamesmead and a little diversion away from the existing 472 route to serve the Royal Arsenal development at Woolwich. For the rest of its route, it will run on the same roads as the existing bus routes do now.

In fact, the only thing remotely special about the “Greenwich Waterfront Transit” is the price – an eye-watering £20 million for just over five miles, plus operating costs of around £1 million a year, making it probably the most expensive bus route in the history of the world.

Even one of the claimed benefits of the route, the Royal Arsenal diversion, is being fiercely resisted by some residents. The development’s main thoroughfare, Number One Street, currently an attractive, pedestrianised boulevard leading down from the Arsenal’s main gateway, past the Firepower museum and other heritage buildings, to the river and pier, will be ripped up and turned into part of the bus route.

Jamie Milton, one Royal Arsenal resident, has organised a campaign and a petition against the move: it and another petition currently have around 500 residents’ signatures, a very substantial proportion of the development. “Number One Street is the only full-time pedestrianised area in Woolwich and is home to two listed buildings, the Royal Brass Foundry and the first-ever Royal Military Academy,” he says. “We are understandably up in arms about this.”

TfL says the route along Number One Street was chosen after an “extensive public consultation,” three words to send a shiver down any spine. In fact, says Milton, the consultation, in 2005, attracted just 27 responses from the entire Royal Arsenal development (perhaps not surprising, since it was still being built at the time). Of those 27, just 11 supported the bus route going down Number One Street!

Even our local Labour MP, Nick Raynsford, not known for his opposition to costly vanity schemes (he’s a fervent supporter of the Greenwich Park Olympics) can’t see the point of this one.

“I supported the original transit scheme as it offered the prospect of a convenient and rapid transport system from Thamesmead and Woolwich to North Greenwich,” he says. “However, as the scheme has been progressively watered down to what is now little more than a glorified 472 bus, its benefits have been seriously eroded. Bearing in mind the opposition of many residents in the Royal Arsenal to the current route through the Arsenal, I no longer consider it justifying the substantial costs involved.”

It had been hoped that the GWT would be a candidate for Boris Johnson’s bonfire of the vanity projects, his new transport strategy. Well, some other worthless Greenwich-area extravagances, such as the new £500 million Thames Gateway bridge, were laid to rest when the strategy was published last week. Later, unfunded phases of the GWT have also been canned.

But although there could still be scope for some route changes and cost cutting – no planning application has yet been submitted, and by now it should have been – it is looking like the first phase, the North Greenwich- Thamesmead – Abbey Wood route I describe, will go ahead.

And that’s a shame, because the money that’s being spent on annoying residents in the Arsenal could have paid for five or six new bus routes in places where they actually would be new, and where they actually are wanted.

Duel Of The Delis

By

AFTER my last week’s moan about Nelson Road, I thought I’d say something nice about Greenwich shops for a change. To adapt the title of that bestselling book – is it just me, or are some things not quite as s–t as they were?

Books, we’ve even got a shop selling them now. New ones. We’ve got an M&S. We’ve got a fishmonger, tucked away down Circus Street. We’ve got a decent independent wine merchant, in Trafalgar Road.

And over the last couple of years, Greenwich, a place where the pinnacle of cosmopolitan eating was once the red Peperami, seems to have got itself several rather nice-looking bakery/ delis.

Well, all right, they’re not all strictly delis, they’re deli-ish – but look, I’m calling them that so we can headline this piece “Duel Of The Delis.” Alliteration, right? We hacks love alliteration.

They might not all be delis, but there certainly could be a bit of a duel because over the last three years or so a comparatively small area, West Greenwich, has gone from no deli-type places at all to four. They keep opening more of the things. Earlier this week, I took the carrot cake challenge.

I started with the oldest of the new places, what was once the “George” cafe/deli in Nelson Road, now more cafe than deli and rebranded as the Cafe du Musee. It’s joined to two other “Musee” shops, including the original bar, and it’s part of Frank Dowling’s Inc empire, of which I’ve not always been the topmost fan.

As I was standing there, making some notes about the furnishings, Frank himself, who I’ve never actually met before, suddenly came through the door specially to shake my hand (this sort of thing doesn’t happen as often as I’d like, by the way.) Had he spotted me on CCTV? Is he having me followed? “Be nice, we’re trying,” he said, before leaving just as quickly as he’d come.

You know what, Frank, I will be nice. Your shop was just a smidgeon clinical, with its black slate floor and its chandeliers – though it does have a nice grandfather clock – but actually, your carrot cake was pretty damn good, moist, generously-sized, worth the £3.25, I thought. So no green inc from me about you this time.

Inside Rhodes in Greenwich
Rhodes, Greenwich

Then it was round the corner to Rhodes, the rather stylish new bakers (est 2008) opposite the entrance to the naval college (don’t think it’s any relation to the celebrity chef Gary, which is probably just as well.) The window is stacked with shelves of cakes but the price tickets are strategically turned away from the street. If you saw them from the outside (£2.20 for a baguette) you might never cross the threshhold.

And that would be a mistake, because this is an attractive place, with friendly service, better than the Musee, some of it with a calm North American accent. They’re attentive, they approach you – although once I’d ordered and they’d put it at the till, they wandered off, leaving me a bit stuck when I wanted something else.

They didn’t have any carrot cake when I went in, so I got a sort of fruit Danish, which was good and light and had quite a decent collection of fruit in the middle Unfortunately the other thing I chose, the ham and cheese croissant, was duff: tasteless cheese, rubbery at the edges.

On the admirable Greenwich Phantom blog, Rhodes is accused of charging 70p for a scrape of butter – “which was actually margarine” – to put on an 80p scone. Didn’t check it myself, but if true, remarkably bad form, guys. Prices and consistency are the issues here.

Next stop the Nevada Street Deli, in what used to be the Spread Eagle second-hand bookshop. I miss those floors of old paperbacks, stretching away like Gormenghast, but if it had to go, this is a good replacement. “Poilane delivered every Saturday,” says a little blackboard in the window. I had a tasty sausage roll and anchovies on bread – they do light meals too – and I was well served, though gently ticked off for eating my Rhodes fruit tart thingy on the premises.

This is easily the nicest place to sit in of the four, though alas there are only two full-sized inside tables, plus a further three seats perched in the window. The reason I’d never been in before was I’d never seen a table free before.

Finally, the Buenos Aires, tucked away down non-touristy Royal Hill with, I think, the best food of the bunch. It’s Argentinian, you might guess, but not perhaps quite as Argentinian as you might hope. The Argie pastries are fab but the savouries are a bit more Med than Latin America. Lots of my neighbours love the squashy leather sofas, but I have bad memories of trying not to spill hazardous hot drinks while sinking into them.

In all of these places you can, if I’m honest, get that slight, rather SE10, sense that they’re good without being absolutely outstanding. The long-established Italian deli in East Greenwich – which was closing, but may now not be – remains the local standard to beat for quality and variety. But with the arrival, now, of four newish places doing similar things, the magic of competition may raise everyone’s game. In the tough times ahead, they all deserve to survive. Let’s hope they all do.

Greenwich Market and Nelson Road Face Drift and Decay

By

LIKE the admiral it’s named for, Nelson Road is looking rather one-eyed these days. When Joseph Kay rebuilt the town centre for its owners, Greenwich Hospital, in 1829, he made it south London’s most elegant shopping street. Even a few years ago, it still rose some way above the general tat lining the three other sides of the one-way system.

Today, however, the Roman-lettered shop-signs have been ousted by corporate screamers in orange and pink. The art galleries, florists, antique dealers and second-hand bookshops of the 1990s have made way for noodle bars and a teen fashion store.

Bar Du Musee

Frank Dowling’s Inc Group has gobbled up half one side of the street, with three neighbouring Bar du Musee franchises (see right); a fitting symbol of the unstoppable spillage of Inc that is blotting our town. Most of all, there are the four empty shops – including both the two which bracket the passageway to the market. One of these has been vacant for around eighteen months.

Ah yes, you say – the market. Could all this have anything to do with Greenwich Hospital’s grand masterplan to redevelop the place, which was briefly “consulted on” last year in one of the empty shops? They said they would make their planning application by this summer. But just as the summer weather went missing this year, so did the application. Nothing, so far, has gone in.

So what actually is happening? Does Nelson Road’s decay mean that the masterplan is drifting? Or is it some devious scheme to make the new development look less bad by comparison?

Neither, says David McFarlane, the Hospital’s spokesman. “There is no intention to keep shops vacant,” he insists. And the planning application for the market redevelopment is “still very much full steam ahead.” It has, however, been delayed. “It is now more likely,” he says, “that the planning application will be submitted in spring 2009.” Sounds like a little bit of drift to me, David.

The reason for the delay, says Mr McFarlane, is that the scheme’s had to be revised “as a result of the consultation and trying to keep the cost base down.” In last year’s blueprint, they wanted to demolish the 1950s buildings immediately surrounding the market, replacing them with new shops and a “small hotel.” The roof over the stall area would be raised two storeys in height and made of glass, creating more of a shopping-mall experience.

In the revised scheme, the 50s buildings still go, the new shops still come, but the hotel becomes very far from “small.” It will now be around a hundred rooms, a very substantial size – with all the traffic, pickups and dropoffs that that implies. The roof over the market will no longer be glass, says Mr McFarlane, but a sort of translucent canvas, rather like that used in the National Tennis Centre at Roehampton. None of this is final, he says, but “a work in progress.”

Two other key issues have yet to be settled. Where do the market stallholders go for the two years the place is being rebuilt? It’s not yet clear. Cutty Sark Gardens, one option for a temporary site, appears to have been blocked by the council.

The application for the new market, and the application for the temporary one, were to have been submitted together. Now, it seems, they may be separate. Could that imply no temporary market? No, insists the Hospital. “If there isn’t a temporary market, there will be a question mark over the whole development. The Hospital can’t shut down the market for two years, lose the income and not make it up somewhere else.”

But the biggest unsettled issue of all, of course, is the banking meltdown and the credit crunch. Redevelopments are being cancelled all over London. And if shoppers stop shopping, which retailer will want to take space in the new, larger shops that are planned for Greenwich?

McFarlane is upbeat, saying the Hospital is unusually well-capitalised, with substantial reserves. But if that’s so, why rework the scheme to reduce costs? I have a feeling the tangled saga of the market could have another few twists to go. Nelson might not get his eye back any time soon.

2012: Council Should Remember Who They Represent

By

HERE’S an interesting news story you might have missed. According to papers just released under the Freedom of Information Act, Greenwich Council has been misleading us all about the cost of its officials’ recent ten-day jaunt, sorry vital fact-finding mission, to the Beijing Olympics.

They claimed to have spent £14,000; in fact, we now learn, they spent more than £25,000. Business-class flights all round, naturally. Newham, the borough where the vast majority of the London Games will actually be held, sent a third fewer people and spent only £9,000, by the way.

As the “consultation” on the deeply risky proposal to hold 2012’s equestrian events in Greenwich Park gets started, it’s tempting to see the council’s extravagance as all too symptomatic of the way it’s got the importance of the Olympics totally out of proportion.

No-one at the Town Hall has yet been able to explain how a fortnight of showjumping, behind security fences which no local will cross, can benefit the borough in any way. But that hasn’t stopped Chris Roberts, the council leader, claiming it as an historic breakthrough for SE10 on a par with the arrival of the Docklands Light Railway.

It’s tempting to see the council’s dishonesty about its China jolly in the same light as its bland assurances that the impact of the Games on the park will be “minimal.” How can they say that when, by their own admission, they have conducted no impact studies; when, in other words, they don’t know?

But look, let’s do what they ask for a minute. Let’s set aside our cynicism, our negativity, our moaning. Let’s admit that the Olympic equestrianism will bring us a superb spectacle. Or, rather, already is bringing us a superb spectacle. Not the showjumping – that can be rather boring – but the magnificent sight of various highly-paid PRs and officials desperately twisting in the wind as they face local residents’ questions.

You know, complicated stuff like: how can you claim the park’s flower garden will not be damaged if you’re going to run the Olympic cross-country course right through it? Or: where are you going to put the stables, the warm-up tracks, the staff accommodation, and the other 300-odd buildings they needed at this year’s Olympic cross-country event? Or: what about those 350-year-old sweet chestnuts in the park, planted by Charles II and among London’s oldest living things? Are they going to be among the trees that you will have to “prune?”

Such questions, or similar ones, came up last week at the annual meeting of the amenity group, the Greenwich Society, where officials from London 2012 were grilled for the first time by a local audience. Answers, however, were few, and colleagues of mine who were there say that it cannot have been pleasant for the officials concerned.

One interesting note about the local amenity societies is how unwilling they initially were to get involved in the growing local opposition to the Olympic use of Greenwich. Take, for instance, another organisation, the Friends of Greenwich Park. You’d think a body with that name would be single-mindedly against anything which threatens the place they were set up to befriend.

Not quite: the Friends’ committee had to be forced into opposing the Games by a special meeting of its ordinary membership, and even now it appears reluctant to follow through. Its chairman has pronounced herself somewhat reassured by the latest bromides from the Council and LOCOG. In this, she must be nearly alone in Greenwich. I’ve talked to a lot of people in the area about the Greenwich Park Olympics, and I’ve never met one, outside the ranks of officialdom and committeedom, who is actually enthusiastic about this aspect of the Games.

The fact is that councillors and committee members of amenity societies often have more in common with each other than with the citizens they’re supposed to represent. But they are supposed to represent us; and with a threat of this magnitude hanging over our precious park, it’s never been a better time for us all to insist that they remember that.