Greenwich Market articles

“You pig,” said the text message on my phone. “You are such a low life. You kill Dr Kelly again, you putzer.”

As you might guess from the somewhat obscure nature of the deadly insult (whatever is a “putzer?” Even the OED can’t tell me) it was another billet-doux from Greenwich’s Favourite Restaurateur, Frank Dowling, showing all the courtesy we have come to expect from his much-loved industrial catering empire.

Frank often reacts badly to criticism. Last year, after I pointed out that some of his most expensive outlets had failed their hygiene inspections, he rang me up to call me a “c***.” My report of this conversation is still the top item when anyone Googles you, Frank!

Let’s wait to see if anyone from Greenwich Hospital sends a rude text after this week’s column. I’ve been looking in detail at the changes submitted to the planning inspector as part of the Hospital’s appeal against the refusal of planning permission last year.

The Hospital – no doubt hoping to head off inconvenient calls for the whole application to be re-run – itself describes its changes as “minor alterations.” They are indeed relatively minor, and therefore change few of the objectionable features of the scheme which led to its unanimous rejection by councillors.

The most significant change is that the existing market roof will be kept, certainly an improvement on the Bluewater/ Stratford Bus Station combo we were promised before. However, the shops at the sides will still be demolished and a large new hotel, rising to four storeys, will still be built. The number of rooms in the hotel has been reduced fractionally (but is still “approximately 100”) and its roofscape profile has been slightly changed by removing louvres from part of the central block.

The overall effect of the changes is to reduce the built footprint of the hotel by just 2.6 per cent – from 5625 square metres to 5477 sq m. The overall built footprint of the scheme will fall by 4 per cent. This still represents a more than doubling of the footprint on the site, an increase in density which lay at the heart of the council’s reasons for rejecting the scheme.
As the council’s decision notice stated, the new build would have “an unbalanced and detrimental relationship with the established urban fabric of the area;” would be “visually obtrusive…to the detriment of the adjacent Grade II listed buildings;” would be “out of keeping with its historic surroundings;” would have “an adverse effect on the Maritime Greenwich World Heritage site in which it is located;” would cause “the overdevelopment of the site and…adversely affect the existing patterns of development;” would “lead to ‘town cramming’;” would “impact on the free flow of traffic;” and would “result in additional congestion and obstruction on the local highway to the detriment of pedestrian and highway safety.”

All these objections are related to the height and density of the hotel, which would poke visibly up above the existing buildings, and none has been significantly changed by the Hospital’s “minor alterations.”

The Hospital continues to make the ridiculous claim that its redevelopment will create only 18 extra person movements per hour, 16 of them by public transport, a proposition rejected by councillors. The proposed hotel alone will accommodate around 200 guests, with the vast majority (since they are carrying luggage) likely to arrive by car, taxi or coach. The hotel’s main entrance is in the middle of the one-way system and will almost certainly cause significant congestion.

Do not for one moment imagine that the retention of the roof should end objections to this scheme. The eviction of traders during the construction period (without enough space in the temporary market for many of them) will drive many out of business. The mix of shops and traders in any new market/ shopping centre is likely to change fundamentally, since higher rents will need to be charged to recoup the cost of the redevelopment. Whatever the Hospital says now, a redeveloped market has a Hays Galleria and Starbucks future.

The law says that the appeal ought to be decided on whether the council properly applied its planning policy, the Unitary Development Plan, and national planning policy guidance. It seems clear that it did. The council said the original market proposals contravened the UDP in ten places, and also breaches national planning policy guidance twice. The amended plans are still in breach of PPG and of at least nine policies of the UDP.

The public inquiry into the proposals will be held on 7 September. You have until 30 July to object to the Planning Inspectorate. The address is: Alan Ridley, Planning Inspectorate, Room 4/02, Temple Quay, Bristol, BS1 6PN.

GREENWICH Hospital’s issuing the food stalls in the market with notice to quit has prompted an outcry. But it may be only the first part of the Hospital’s plan to undermine the market in order to clear the way for its redevelopment.

Traders believe that the Hospital’s new managing agents, Nelson Bakewell, are considering adopting a proposal with which they did considerable damage to another market they managed, Covent Garden. After the food stalls go, this website has been told, the Hospital is considering getting rid of all stalls which sell “manufactured” goods. In other words, only people who make their own wares will be allowed to remain. (The second-hand day won’t be affected.)

Between 20 and 40 permanent stalls – out of around 90 – would go, and a similar proportion of the casual traders. A committee may be drawn up to decide which traders are “creative” enough to remain and which need to be ejected.

You can see a sort of purist, idealist logic in this – making it a truly “craft” market. It’s true that there’s a certain amount of tourist-targeted tat in the place at the moment. But in the end it displays a fundamental misunderstanding of the mix that is needed to make a market successful. It also risks quite a seriously large number of empty spaces if the hoped-for creative geniuses do not materialise.

The Hospital has dropped Urban Space, the manager which revived the market to its present pitch of success. Nelson Bakewell, the new agents, have decided, in the words of one source, that what they want from the market is greater “predictability” – of income and takings, which of course also equates to greater predictability of content. Hay’s Galleria, here we come!

“They say they can predict the shops, but not the stalls,” said one source. “They want to look at a spreadsheet and know what’s going to happen, but successful markets don’t work like that. You’ve got to be more flexible and more creative.”

The Hospital and Nelson Bakewell have also parted company with two key people running the market – Shaun Hose, a consultant engaged to draw up a “creative vision” for it after councillors rejected the redevelopment plan last year, and Patrycja Nowak, the market manager inherited from Urban Space. Both resigned over what other sources say was their concern about the direction in which the new management was taking the market.

“I simply do not believe they know what they are doing,” said one person closely involved with the market. “We have been waiting for months for them to tell us what their vision is for the stalls part of the market and we still don’t know. I think the problem is that they don’t know themselves.”

The Hospital not knowing what it is doing would be one possibility. But the other possibility is that they know exactly what they’re doing. I’ll cover the Hospital’s new, revised plans for the redevelopment – now being considered by the Planning Appeals Inspectorate – in more detail in next week’s column. But, just as in the plan that was rejected, it appears – and our sources confirm – the floorspace available for the market stalls and their associated storage will be less than it is now, even without the demands the proposed new hotel is likely to impose on that same, limited floorspace.

Less space implies, of course, fewer stalls. But if lots of the stalls have already been chucked off, they won’t be in a position to complain about the redevelopment. And the quieter the market becomes, the less justification there is for not redeveloping it.

The eviction of the food stalls is blamed by all our sources on Greenwich’s second least-favourite institution, after the Hospital, Frank Dowling’s Inc Group. Dowling – all our sources say – demanded that the food stalls be removed because they were damaging the trade of his pubs and restaurants.

I can quite understand the deadly peril for Frank’s third-rate catering empire of having to compete for business with outlets that might be quite good – though Frank, it should be said, last night denied to me that he’d made any such demand over the food stalls and “didn’t even know” they were going.

But whatever motivated it, the moves on the market appears to be part of a wider agenda. Just as I described in my previous column with the shops, Greenwich Hospital appears to be hollowing out the retail core of the town to reduce resistance to its still overbearing and inappropriate redevelopment plans. As I’ll explain next week, I have a feeling it’s not going to work.

PS – Sorry about the long gap since the last column. I’ve been on holiday – back regularly now!

WE THINK of Greenwich Council as secretive and unhelpful, but compared to the Planning Inspectorate it’s a beacon of openness.

The deadline is already approaching for comments on Greenwich Hospital’s brazen planning appeal to be allowed to knock down the Market after all. According to an advert in this week’s Greenwich Time, it is March 22nd, less than three weeks away.

But go to the website of the inspectorate, which is handling the appeal, and you find the message: “We regret we are not currently publishing documents for this appeal.” So I can’t tell you if anything has changed about the plans or if any new dodgy claims have been put forward by the developers. A perfect example of what happens when democracy gives way to the quango state.

What I have found, however, is an encouraging decision on another Greenwich Town Centre and Greenwich Hospital planning appeal – and another minor PR own goal by the Hospital.

To start with the latter: they have engaged a new consultancy firm, the accurately-named Sensitive Projects, to get the appeal through. Sensitive Projects (“we advise on projects which are often controversial and unpopular”) consists of David McFarlane, who was the Hospital’s previous PR at another firm, and a woman called Harriet Kerr, who was a director of PPS, another outfit which specialises in getting unpopular developments through. PPS is a very interesting company.

In 2007, in an investigation for my then newspaper, the Standard, and Channel 4’s Dispatches, 17 minutes in, PPS was accused of using forgery, impersonation and even bugging to manipulate the planning process.

I found that fake letters of support for a highly-controversial planning application had been dispatched to councillors – the people whose names appeared on the letters had never written them; and that people posing as PhD students had visited councillors, pumping them for inside information about their views. I was leaked an internal PPS document boasting of how they managed to “create” favourable letters for projects, including that one. I was also leaked, from within PPS, a verbatim, 20-page transcript of a private meeting of councillors

I found mysterious new people who had joined a residents’ association which had opposed the development – then turned the association neutral, and then as soon as the development was approved, had vanished from the scene without trace. It’s a funny old game, the property business.

Harriet Kerr was not involved in the projects I investigated at PPS and there is no suggestion that she acted in any way improperly while at the company, or since. But these lobbyists will still be worth keeping an eye on, I feel.

My second piece of news about the market appeal is that if precedent means anything at all, we might be all right. This is not, it turns out, the first time in recent months that the Hospital have been refused planning permission by Greenwich Council, then taken it to appeal. Last year, the council turned down their bid to put new shop fronts on 2, 3 and 4 College Approach (currently laid out as house fronts) and a remodelled shop front on 5 College Approach.

Last summer Greenwich Hospital appealed – but the appeal was largely refused (they did get permission for the remodelled shop front at No 5.) The inspector, Christine Thorby, said the plan would be “to the detriment of the character and appearance of the… wider historic area,” conflicting with the same council planning policies as the market proposal.

Now it’s true that the College Approach properties are listed buildings, described by the inspector as of “very high quality,” and the market buildings proposed for demolition aren’t. But the decision is one more little thing weighing in the balance against the Hospital getting its ghastly Bluewater scheme past the goalie in injury time.