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Andrew Gilligan: What’s The Point Of The Greenwich Society?

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AS GREENWICH faces an unprecedented onslaught of simultaneous development, I am starting to wonder what is the point of the Greenwich Society.

One of its principal aims is “to protect the town’s heritage.” But on the two greatest threats of the moment to the town’s heritage – the redevelopment of the market, and the Olympics events in the park – the Greenwich Society is a supporter and apologist for the heritage abusers.

Its committee fought tooth and nail a substantial number of members who wanted it to oppose the Olympics in the Park, as the Friends of Greenwich Park and the Blackheath Society have done. (Interestingly, the Friends and the Blackheath Society committees were also in favour of the Olympics, until forced to reverse their position by their members.)

Now, we find the Greenwich Society’s spokesman, Ray Smith, actually appearing – complete with photo – in the PR material put out by the developers who would turn Greenwich Market from a bustling and vibrant part of the town’s heritage into a modern shopping precinct and hotel with stalls attached.

Greenwich Market

Mr Smith says he is “pleased that Greenwich Hospital is bringing forward this planning application, which will help revitalise Greenwich Town Centre.” In fact, it is the existing market which has already “revitalised Greenwich Town Centre” and the new one which threatens that revival.

Under the management of Urban Space, what was in the early 80s an almost derelict fruit and veg operation has been turned into space that is bursting with life five days a week. On Saturdays and Sundays, it is scarcely possible to move in the market, so dense are the crowds. How much more “revitalised” can you get?

The fact that the new market looks like an airport terminal is not the only problem with it. Tucked away in the minutes of the “key stakeholder consultation group” meeting for 26 November 2008 is the uncomfortable revelation that “it was confirmed that the scheme resulted in a net gain in retail space but possibly a decrease in the market stall space.” More shops, less market – how can that possibly be described as a “revitalisation?”

One of the Greenwich Society’s other “key objectives” is “effective traffic management.” It is hard to see how the construction of a 104-bedroom hotel with its traffic entrance right in the middle of the flow of the one-way system can accomplish this.

I rang Mr Smith last night and asked him whether he had found anyone in Greenwich who actually liked the new market scheme. There was a short pause. “The members of the executive committee of the Greenwich Society like it,” he said. Yes, but had they made any active effort to find out what anyone else in Greenwich thought? “We have a facility on our website which says ‘tell us your views,’ he says. “Nobody has said they like it and nobody has said they don’t like it.”

There’s other problem with this. The item on the Greenwich Society website asking for people’s views on the market was posted on 20 April – in other words, after the redevelopers’ PR material was produced quoting Mr Smith as a fan of the scheme. So even if anyone had expressed their views, it would have made no difference to the Greenwich Society.

The real key to the society’s acquiescence, I expect, is that “key stakeholder consultation group.” The idea of such groups is seldom really to consult people, but to co-opt them into whatever has already been decided, while perhaps allowing them to make a few minor adjustments along the way.

Mr Smith did indeed say that they’d secured some changes since the original 2007 proposal – but as far as I can see, the changes since then (a 39% increase in the size of the hotel, a new roof, the removal of the cobbles) have only made the plan worse, are indeed among the most objectionable things about it.

Over the issues threatening our town, the Greenwich Society have by their own admission spent far more time talking to the likes of LOCOG and the Market developers than they have in talking to the people of Greenwich. Enfolded into the cosy embrace of “key stakeholderdom,” the Greenwich Society have forgetten their actual purpose – to find out and represent the views of local residents – and have instead become adjuncts of, and advocates for, the developers.

They are providing PR cover for the forces seeking to mar Greenwich with unnecessary, unwanted and damaging development – which is, in fact, far worse than if they never even existed at all. We may not need to “revitalise” the town centre – but we certainly need to “revitalise,” or perhaps replace, the Greenwich Society.

Andrew Gilligan: Like Having the Builders Round… Forever

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I was struck by a comment from a reader called Paul on last week’s column about Greenwich Market, and think it deserves a wider circulation. He wrote of the danger that in the run-up to that longed-for event of which we all dream, the Olympics, Greenwich will become little more than a series of building sites.

As well as the market, there’s the Olympic development in Greenwich Park, the Ofer Wing of the Maritime Museum (which will also affect the park), the foot tunnel, the old Village Market site, the new pier, the Cutty Sark, Greenwich Reach. As Paul says, “no tourist will want to walk around a load of building sites for the next three years and it won’t be long before word gets out that Greenwich is closed. In the rush to celebrate the Olympics fortnight, it seems that a long-term overview has been thrown out of the window.”

There are plenty of places that are unattractive, provide inadequate public amenities and need lots of work doing to them. But Greenwich isn’t one of them. I think (I’m biased, of course) that it’s one of the nicest areas in London. It just doesn’t need “regeneration,” especially not the airport-terminal kind that awaits us in the market.

Naturally, there are grotty bits – in the town centre, I’d nominate that bland, faceless block which houses Somerfield. But those aren’t the bits they’ll be tearing down. Those are the bits they’ll be copying.

So why has everyone suddenly, it seems, decided that what Greenwich needs is a complete rebuild – all at once? As Paul suggests, the Olympics must have something to do with it. One of the worst things about the Games is the way that a single fortnight has come to dominate, even monopolise, official thinking, as if it is somehow more important than all the months and years which go before it and after it.

It isn’t, of course. The Olympics will be with us for two weeks. The new market could be with us for a century. But the way it’s looking, the priorities of the two weeks will mean that the project for the century is rushed through the planning process without proper scrutiny, then thrown up in months – and is, as a result, far worse than it should be.

We need to stop. We need to take our time. We need to tell ourselves that in the long run, the Olympics simply do not matter. Within months of the closing ceremony, they will be all but forgotten by almost everyone. The market, however, will be in our faces for decades. The short-term goal of a shiny Olympic fortnight is not remotely a good enough reason to compromise Greenwich’s long-term future.

We need to tell ourselves that even during the fortnight, the Greenwich end of the Olympics will not matter. The centre of attention will be on the athletics and the swimming, seven miles to the north. The horse events will get half an hour on TV. There won’t be many Olympic-related visitors to Greenwich – they’ll all be heading for Stratford. Greenwich Council may want to put on a show, but not many people will be coming.

Building white elephants at Stratford is bad enough. But at least some people will want to see them, and they will be safely out of sight of the rest of us. Building white elephants in the middle of a successful town centre is far worse – and the error is compounded by the fact that not many of the people the “improvements” are supposed to attract will even be interested.

PS: I forgot to give the address for objections to the market planning application last week. Emails should be sent to david.gittens@greenwich.gov.uk, quoting reference numbers 09/0829/F and 09/0830/C. Gittens’ postal address is Crown Building, 48 Woolwich New Roas, SE18 6HQ.

Act soon – you only have until 26 May.

Andrew Gilligan: Act Now To Save Greenwich Market

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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.

Andrew Gilligan: Greenwich Council Gets Into Another Hole

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LAST NIGHT, I stood at the entrance to a darkened, underground place and heard, drifting up from the depths, anguished panting and the heavy slap of rubber on metal.

No, it was not the debut of some new Greenwich sex dungeon. The inmates of this particular subterranean world do wear faintly kinky clothes – but lycra, rather than leather, and fluorescent yellow windcheaters, not dirty macs. They are cyclists, and I was listening to them heaving their bikes up the hundred steps at the southern end of the foot tunnel (the lift, as always these days, being out of action.)

“It doesn’t get any easier,” said one woman to her friend as she thankfully dumped her steed on the top landing. But though it may be rather a haul, it is definitely preferable to the alternative being planned by our dear friends at Greenwich Council – complete closure of the tunnel for up to eighteen months.

Greenwich Foot Tunnel

It is yet another Olympic-related blow to the area. As we know, the Games are already costing us substantial parts of our park (closed for ten months), historic trees (lopped) and a flower garden (taking on an exciting, dynamic and vibrant new role as a doormat for the Olympic cross-country course.) Now the foot tunnel is going too. In order to make it suitably shiny and modern for 2012, it is to be closed for what the council calls a “substantial refurbishment” costing £11.5 million.

I don’t think the tunnel even needs “refurbishing.” I like its Edwardian atmosphere, its white tiling and its wood-panelled lifts. Unlike some over-restored heritage structures, its unbuffed-up state still gives a real breath of the ordinary London of the past. Those lifts, though faithful copies of the original ones, are only 17 years old. The south lift may be broken, but could it not perhaps be, well, repaired?

After the redevelopment of the Market and the closure of the Village Market, this refurbishment could end up being just one more attack on the character of Greenwich. With our public spending deficit of £175 billion, it also strikes me as a prime example of the kind of unnecessary project that taxpayers ought to part company with.

But the real difficulty with the refurb is that the tunnel is a vital route which cannot be lost for any significant length of time. As the council’s deputy leader, Peter Brooks, admits, it is “still extremely popular, even since the arrival of the DLR offering an alternative crossing option.” With its sister at Woolwich, the foot tunnel is used by one and a half million people a year.

Since the DLR, the Greenwich tunnel’s clientele has fallen mainly into two groups, both of whom the council claims to view as important. There are tourists, who enjoy the walk through and the view from Island Gardens. If the tunnel follows the Cutty Sark, the markets, and (in 2011/12) the park into the unavailable zone it will be another stage in the diminution of Greenwich’s visitor “offer” and another blow to one of our principal industries, tourism.

The second important group is cyclists, who we are all supposed to be encouraging these days. (Declaration of interest: I am one.) The tunnel is the only way for cyclists to cross the river in the eight miles between Rotherhithe and Woolwich (or really in the ten miles between Tower Bridge and Woolwich, since the Rotherhithe Tunnel is not a pleasant or safe experience.) It is an absolutely essential link for cyclists commuting between Canary Wharf and a vast swathe of south London. And it is very heavily used. I counted.

In half an hour yesterday, between 5.55 and 6.25pm, the tunnel was used by 134 cyclists – an average of one every 13 seconds. It was used by 75 pedestrians, two and a half a minute. This would equate to around 250-300 cyclists an hour in the peak hours, so perhaps 1500- 2000 across the whole day. Many of the pedestrians, incidentally, were joggers or runners – so other fitness goals will also be damaged if we close the tunnel. And all that was without a working lift.

I spoke to some of the users. “I cycle every day from Catford to Canary Wharf,” said Max Elliot. “I am absolutely horrified to find out that the tunnel might close – there is literally no other way to do the bike journey.” Anthony Austin, chair of Greenwich Cyclists, told me: “There’s no point in closing the tunnel. It’s not clear they need to close the stairs when they are doing the lifts. We cyclists have come to use it as an absolutely essential link.”

Some are asking for a peak-hour ferry replacement, but that will greatly extend the crossing time and will not, in any case, help those who travel outside peak hours. The DLR, of course, bans bikes at all times, and Cutty Sark station is too deep for bikes anyway.

Greenwich Council wouldn’t deny to me last night that the tunnel will be closed. I’ve been trying for the last 24 hours to get an answer from them about exactly how long the closure will last – no joy so far. “I just know from experience that once Greenwich Council agrees to the closure of a footpath it will stay closed for a long time,” says Anthony Austin.

But the tunnel is, as the council admits, a statutory public highway. So there will have to be some sort of legal process to close it – which offers opportunities for a fightback. At the very least, it should be argued that even if the lifts have to close, the stairs should stay open.

We have only just got the A2 back after two months of largely unnecessary chaos. And I don’t know about you, but I am getting sick, sick, sick of councils and other public busybodies interfering with our town and our lives for their pointless vanity projects. This might be the one where the worm finally turns.

Andrew Gilligan: Sewage Meets Beauty

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THIS WEEKEND, once you have finished lining the streets on that finest of all Greenwich occasions, the Marathon, I strongly recommend travelling a few miles east for an event that is almost as rare, just as interesting and much less well known.

Sunday is one of only three days this year when you can see in action what is possibly London’s most spectacular piece of Victorian machinery: the Prince Consort Engine at Crossness, a stupendous, steam-driven beam engine that once sucked up all the sewage in London, then pumped it out into the Thames estuary.

I went last summer, and it was fantastic – especially, I suspect, if you are a man. The beam alone is 43 feet long; it rolls up and down like a vast armadillo, gently rooting around for food. It has a 27-foot flywheel, which spins around mesmerisingly. There is a gratifying smell of steam and grease. The whole thing lives in its own special Romanesque Grade I listed cathedral, four storeys high and decorated with – well, yes, industrial quantities of magnificent ornate ironwork. You can climb up and down staircases and see it from every possible angle.


The Prince Consort. Image by Alan Turner-Smith

Back in the day, the Prince Consort had three other equally-impressive beam-engine friends sitting alongside him to help – Victoria, Albert Edward (the Prince of Wales), and Alexandra (the Princess of Wales). They’re still there too, but not yet restored. It’s hard, these days, to imagine machinery with such an unglamorous task being named after the top four members of the Royal Family – but those were different, more serious times, they were not unglamorous machines, and they were of fundamental, transformative, life-saving importance to London.

In the mid-nineteenth century, all the sewers just emptied straight into their nearest bit of the Thames, effectively itself a giant open sewer. In summer, the river stank so badly with the waste of two million people that Parliament famously had to be suspended. The answer, from the famous engineer Joseph Bazalgette, was to build new main drains, one concealed under huge new embankments running along the north bank, collecting up the brown stuff before it got into the river and taking it all away to the unpopulated marshes in the city’s far south-east.

To Crossness, in fact, just north of Abbey Wood – which is where the beam engines and their cathedral still stand today. They went out of major use as early as 1913, replaced by diesels, but Prince Consort was returned to service between 1953 and 1956 to pump out floods in the Royal Arsenal. After that, the engines and their equally stunning building were left, for around thirty years, to the mercies of vandals and the weather.

Much remedial work has already been done, but the Crossness Engines Trust has just got a large National Lottery grant to build a proper visitor centre and access road, so 2009 might be your best chance to see the Prince Consort for a while. There are three steaming days this year – 26 April, 28 June and 23 August.

The day I went, they had various vintage vehicles there, including a steam-driven van, still licensed for the public roads, that had come (at about 10mph) all the way from somewhere in rural Kent. The site is still rather isolated, with terrific views of the river and marshland.

There’s an enjoyable exhibition with lots of loo handles and chains for the kiddies to pull, and an explanation of what happens to all the waste now. It still comes through Bazalgette’s main outfall sewers, and is still collected at Crossness – though now in the modern Thames Water sewerage works next door. It’s treated now, rather than being pumped out into the river – until very recently, it was put on special ships, taken out to sea and dumped.

You get to the heritage part of the site through the modern waterworks, on a slightly tricky-to-find road from somewhere north-east of Thamesmead. The Engines Trust website has a map here, click the “Visits” tab. It’s open from 10.30 until 4.30 and there is also a half-hourly minibus from Abbey Wood station.

And to the delicate question – is it smelly? – I can only answer: not when I was there. Perhaps I got lucky with the direction of the wind.

More information on Crossness is available at the website or by calling 0208 311-3711

Park Shenanigans (3)

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Horse on Greenwich ParkIT’S NOT in the same league as Downing Street’s smear emails on Opposition MPs, but damaging untruths are also being spread about the opposition to the London Olympics.

As readers of this column will know, that opposition is at its fiercest over highly controversial plans to hold the Games’ horse events in Greenwich Park. 2012 organisers admit that much of the park, a Unesco world heritage site, will be closed for around ten months and trees will have to be “pruned.” There will be no legacy.

The antis include the Friends of Greenwich Park, the Blackheath Society, the action group Nogoe – and, perhaps most importantly, opposition appears to be growing in the world of Olympic horse sport itself. Last month Zara Phillips, the former world champion, condemned the plans. Only three weeks ago, Clayton Fredericks, the current world champion, said: “I’m with Zara Phillips and many other riders – this site isn’t the right one.”

So it was surprising, last week, when the BBC’s influential London news reported that opponents of the horse events at Greenwich had called a “ceasefire.” The reporter, Adrian Warner, said that “after a year and a half of rowing,” there was now an outbreak of “peace and tranquility,” with opponents “realising that the games are probably going to come.” The BBC website proclaimed: “Horse events venue row resolved” and announced that Greenwich residents had “accepted concessions for hosting the horse events.”

This story has caused great anger in the Nogoe camp, and is now the subject of an official complaint to the BBC. “Nothing has changed,” said a spokesman for Nogoe. “We have not called a ceasefire and we continue to campaign against the horse events every bit as strongly as before. Adrian Warner did not even contact us before he announced to the people of London that we had ended our campaign.”

The campaigners are understandably concerned that their months of pounding the pavements, drumming up support, could have been torpedoed by a report which told tens of thousands of people in Greenwich and Blackheath, quite wrongly, that it was all settled. The supposed concessions, meanwhile, seem less than clear – amounting to little more than some minor re-routing in the flower garden.

Liz Coyle, chair of the Friends of Greenwich Park, was quoted in the BBC report as being “content that [the event] can be fitted in,” something which has always been her personal opinion, but is not the view of her organisation.

Mrs Coyle is on holiday and could not be contacted, but her colleague on the Friends, Clive Corlett, told me: “She certainly said [to the BBC] that the Friends’ position had not changed. We were a bit surprised to see the report. I’m not sure where they got that.”

I’m not sure either – Mr Warner says that since his report is now the subject of an official complaint, he cannot talk about it – but I understand that the BBC man did genuinely believe that the Friends, at least, had softened their position.

Even so, there’s also concern about what one local blogger – himself ex-BBC – called the “astoundingly one-sided” tone of the broadcast, complete with phrases such as “You can’t accuse 2012 of lacking ambition” and the assertion that the horse events will represent “a giant leap for equestrian-kind.”

The line that opposition over Greenwich is “fading” is, of course, one that Locog has been trying to push for months. But then it’s hardly the first time our Olympic masters have resorted to lying to get their own way. Remember when the budget for the Games was supposed to have been £2.4 billion?

The BBC (and Warner), by contrast, have a reasonably good track record of scrutinising Olympic spin. What a shame it would be if that started to change now.

Andrew Gilligan: Progress Report

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THIS COLUMN has been going for just under six months, and there’s already been a bit of progress on some of the topics I’ve been banging on about in that time. I definitely wouldn’t claim credit – but perhaps in one or two cases, the publicity helped push things along a little.

One of my very first pieces, in October, in Greenwich’s flagship shopping street, Nelson Road, with four shops empty and a general air of neglect. Three of the empty shops have now been filled, and not with chains either – not bad going in a recession – and the street has a perkier feel.

In February we pointed out the equally recession-salient fact that the , and offerered better quality food, than our main supermarket, Somerfield.

Now Dring’s the butchers in Royal Hill, one of the shops I mentioned, tells me that it has been shortlisted as “Best Local Shop” in the ITV London/ Smooth Radio Love London Awards. Congratulations, guys: thoroughly well deserved – I bought some chicken from Dring’s the other day and it was ace. Best of luck for the awards ceremony at the Cafe de Paris on 24 April.

Earlier this week, Boris Johnson announced that the Thames Clipper river service would take Oyster pay-as-you-go from November, something for which I campaigned in this space in February. Later this year, this column, my newspaper the Standard, a major think-tank and a number of key political figures in London will be making a great deal more noise about how to improve the riverbus: watch this space.

The biggest result against the forces of folly, though, has been in helping get TfL’s grotesque “Greenwich Waterfront Transit” completely cancelled, something which happened last week. As I wrote in November,  this scheme sounded impressive – but was in fact nothing more than the world’s most expensive bus route.

It would simply have replaced the existing 472 service from North Greenwich to Thamesmead, using the same sort of rubber-tyred diesel buses, running at the exactly same frequency, and along almost exactly the same route and roads. (There would have been a tiny amount of new bus-only road in the Woolwich Arsenal development and in Western Way, near Belmarsh.)

It was the rest of us who would have noticed the difference. The GWT was expected to cost £20 million – absurd enough for a scheme offering no real new benefits beyond a fancy name. By this year, however, the cost had risen to £46 million – more than the entire annual bus subsidy for the whole of Wales!

The cancellation caused some predictable gibbering from the kind of people who still can’t accept that they no longer live in the golden days of economic boom and Ken Livingstone, with great tides of dosh lapping around to be flung at any pointless vanity project that shines in the light.

GWT’s demise left the people of the east of the borough “again bereft of an adequate transport network,” stormed Chris Roberts, Labour leader of Greenwich Council. “At a time when the Government is quite rightly looking for infrastructure projects to support the economy and keep people in work, the Mayor of London is cancelling them.”

One person Roberts’ furious denunciations understandably neglected to mention was the local MP, Nick Raynsford – also Labour – who said last year that he was dropping his support for the scheme because “I no longer consider it justifying the substantial costs involved.”

Raynsford is right. The GWT was in fact a conscious and gigantic con-trick on the long-suffering people of Thamesmead – deceiving them that they were getting, in Roberts’ words, a new “transport network” or “infrastructure project” when in fact they were getting neither of those things.

It would actually have reduced the chances of Thamesmead getting the real transport “infrastructure project” it needs, a tram or rail link, because the bureaucrats would have been able to wave the existence of GWT in the faces of anyone who asked.

So for the sake not just of taxpayer value but of the transport needs of the east of the borough, we should celebrate GWT’s demise this week.

Andrew Gilligan: Is Greenwich Safe?

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AFTER a local man was murdered in the town centre last week, the question is inevitably being asked: is Greenwich safe?

25-year-old Paul Martin, from Blackheath, never got to see the first day of summer time. He died from loss of blood after being stabbed near St Alfege’s Church in the early hours of Sunday. Two men have been arrested.

Paul’s is among a number of recent stabbings in the area. Three weeks ago, a man named Sunny Eze was found knifed to death in his Shooters Hill flat. There were two non-fatal stabbings in the Westcombe Park area in January, and three at the 02 in November. Those were only the ones that made the news. A little beyond the borough, the high-profile murders of Jimmy Mizen in Lee and Rob Knox in Sidcup have just been through the courts.

“We are so afraid to go out,” said Nichola, one commenter on this site. “We really think the police should have more patrols around the area to show the public they are around…We are not safe any more.”

Are Nichola and others right to be afraid? Is central Greenwich a dangerous place? A first look at the crime statistics would suggest that, at least relatively, it is. In the year to February, in Greenwich West, the council ward that covers the town centre, there were 45.5 offences of violence against the person per thousand inhabitants.

That is 50 per cent higher than the average for the borough as a whole, and 94 per cent higher than the London average. The actual number of violent offences in this relatively small area last year was around 500, or ten a week.

But of course a statistic based on crimes per thousand residents can be misleading. One of the reasons why central Greenwich has higher numbers of violent crimes is that it has more visitors. It’s a tourist hub. It’s the main nightlife centre of the borough, with 26 pubs or bars within half a mile of the church where Paul was stabbed.

Many of the victims of those crimes of violence will be visitors. The high violent crime rate doesn’t necessarily mean that residents of central Greenwich are at greater risk than people in any other part of the borough. If all our visitors were added in, the violent crime rate per thousand people “present in central Greenwich” might well be closer to the borough average.

We can compare central Greenwich to other heavily-trafficked nightlife hubs – that’s a possibly fair comparison, because their figures will suffer the same distortion as ours (although even here the comparison may be skewed by differing numbers of visitors.) The comparison, as far as it goes, is relatively encouraging.

Kingston town centre’s rate of violence against the person is 87.6 per thousand, nearly double ours. Croydon town centre’s is 70.6. Romford’s is 63.3. Even Bromley’s, at 53 per thousand, is slightly higher than Greenwich. The ward covering the main West End nightlife area around Leicester Square has a rate of 241 violent crimes per thousand residents – though it does, of course, get far more visitors than any suburban town centre.

Violent crime in central Greenwich hasn’t increased over the last year; it is more or less exactly the same. Violence in the borough as a whole spiked dramatically in 2004. Since then, it has fallen gradually back to its pre-2004 level.

These are, I know, police reported crime figures – about which there is a great deal of scepticism, much of it justified. They will not reassure many people who feel scared. Nor, in any case, do they say that Greenwich is a demi-paradise of peace and order. Closing time on a Saturday night is probably a moment to avoid. I can’t recall ever seeing a police officer at that time, and we could certainly do with some. There’s what’s billed as a “police surgery” at West Greenwich House, on the High Road, at 6pm tonight where anyone is welcome to turn up and raise their concerns.

But on the evidence of the figures, at least, it doesn’t look like the problem has got any worse, whatever the recent spate of high-profile incidents may suggest.

Andrew Gilligan: Hellish Copters

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AS it finally starts to look like spring, our thoughts in SE10 turn to sunshine, weekends in the garden or the park, open windows… and helicopters.

Anyone who spends the summer in Greenwich will know that in recent years, these things have become a scourge. With the better weather, it’s started happening already: whenever we have a combination of sunshine and a weekend, we also have helicopters. In July and August, there will be maybe a couple of dozen to ruin the average Sunday afternoon, making it unpleasant to open our windows or sit outside.

Greenwich residents’ anger was clear in their responses to a London Assembly enquiry into helicopter noise three years ago. Caroline Welch said: “Just a few years ago helicopter overflights were rare. Nowadays at weekends when I am in my garden, one after the other passes over. Many of the helicopters circle around and around, and it is not at all uncommon to see three or four in the air at once.”

“Living in the same house in Greenwich since 1980, my neighbours and I have experienced an exponential increase in exposure to the growth in environmental noise,” said Kenneth May.

Derk Fordham, of the Greenwich Society, called them an “appalling nuisance” which “create very disturbing noise levels.”

Jeff Daley, who lives on the Isle of Dogs opposite Greenwich, said: “I seem to be on the flight path of all helicopter traffic in summer. When sitting in the garden it becomes unbearable. What used to be a nice day sitting reading and chatting to friends is now gone, thanks to the constant drone of the helicopters all day.”

So why us? Alas, Greenwich has two features which place it, more than almost any other part of London, in the target zone. As this map from the Civil Aviation Authority shows, we are at the far eastern end of the so-called Helicopter Route H4, which runs along the Thames from Barnes to a point north of Greenwich Pier.

H4 is the only route that single-engined helicopters are allowed to take through central London and to Battersea heliport. And Greenwich is the “compulsory reporting point” for the route, on which all choppers coming from the east, north-east or south-east must converge. Sometimes, when H4 is busy, or a fixed-wing flight is going into City Airport, the helicopters have to circle in the air over Greenwich before they can proceed.

But that is only a partial reason why we seem so particularly plagued with helicopters flying around and around over our heads. Nor does it explain why there seems to be such a heavy concentration of flights on weekends and sunny days.

For the major part of the explanation, we must look at one of the most pernicious London growth industries since the lap-dancing club: the helicopter sightseeing tour merchants.

Their rise and rise can be traced to a rule change in 2005, when the CAA decided to allow helicopters over London to fly lower. They used to be forced to keep above 1500 feet. Now they can come down to a thousand. You can see a lot more sights from a thousand feet. The change was manna from heaven for the helicopter tour folks, mayhem from heaven for the rest of us.

As I mentioned, central London – apart from the river – is off-limits to single-engine choppers. The exclusion zone, called R160, covers an area roughly equivalent to the Travelcard zones 1 and 2 – and Greenwich is just on the eastern edge of that, too.

So if you want to run a nice quick helicopter tour to somewhere that looks pretty and “iconic” – but don’t want to have to make costly detours around the twisting course of the Thames, then back again the same way, where do you go? Why, right here. The park, the observatory, Canary Wharf, the Dome: all the things which make Greenwich interesting to visit on the ground make it just as attractive from the air.

The difference, of course, is that by visiting from the air, five people in a chopper spoil it for all the other tens of thousands of visitors, not to mention shattering the peace and calm for 50,000 or so residents, over an area of about five square miles.

I’ve considered this quite hard, and I simply cannot think of a more contemptible and selfish way to sightsee. The C02 emissions, too, must be nothing short of horrific.

To those of you who say that helicopters are necessary for the police, the ambulance service, the military and even to get our beloved captains of industry around, I would agree, sometimes. (I wouldn’t agree always – the burden of being kept awake by the police helicopter for hours probably outweighs the benefit of catching whoever it is they are after.)

But statistics published by the CAA show that helicopter movements in London rise dramatically in the summer. That confirms that much of the traffic is not for any socially or economically useful purpose, but purely for pleasure trips and corporate jollies. You will notice the sharp rises in helicopter movements on the days of Wimbledon and Royal Ascot, for instance.

What can we do about it? For a start, there’s no-one to complain to, as you’ll find out if you try. The CAA only holds itself responsible for safety. The various official noise monitoring bodies seem only to concern themselves with fixed-wing flights. The local councils have opted out.

There are a few grounds for hope. The National Air Traffic Service (NATS) is thinking about extending route H4 further to the east – and moving the reporting point away from Greenwich. That could just dump the problem on the people of Woolwich or Bexley, however. NATS has, I might add, been considering this change since 2005, without any sign of action so far. And it won’t help with the sightseeing tours.

We may also hope that, with the recession, selfish behaviour in helicopters goes the way of all those other boom-economy manifestations of casual indulgence. But even if it does, it will probably return in the next upswing of the economic cycle.

The only permanent answer must be strict limitations on sightseeing flights – or perhaps even an outright ban. I can’t really agree that looking down on the Dome from a thousand feet constitutes a vital human right.

In the meantime, you might try a little telephone terrorism. Next time somebody in a chopper ruins your Sunday, get on to the nearest helicopter sightseeing tour operator and make some loud noise of your own.

Andrew Gilligan: Park Shenanigans (2)

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GREENWICH Council has just sent me a council tax bill for more than £1000. But after going to its councillors’ latest Olympic-related public meeting, I’ve come to think that, for the entertainment value alone, they’re worth every penny.

Last week’s gathering, at Mycenae House, was an altogether smaller affair than the grand event at the Dome in December. As greenwich.co.uk reported at the time, the council resorted to some fairly neat body-swerves to avoid being unduly troubled on that occasion. People living within feet of the park were refused admission to the meeting on the grounds that they lived in Lewisham; organisations funded by the council were given tickets and encouraged to make “positive contributions;” other residents were told that the meeting was “full,” even as the council continued to urge its own employees to attend.

Last week’s event, however, run by the local Labour Party, was much less smooth. It took the form of Greenwich’s cabinet member for culture and the Olympics, Councillor John Fahy, spinning what can only be described as a web of purest fantasy. Here is a selection, in his own words:

1. “The Olympics in the Park have universal support.”

2. “The Olympic organisers have addressed the ecology issue, and that’s well documented.”

3. “Locog have dealt with the points being raised [by objectors] and it is a done deal.”

4. “There will not be months of closures.”

5. “There will be long-term benefits for Greenwich – watch this space.”

Let us deal with these statements in order.

1. The Olympics in the park do not have universal support. The Friends of Greenwich Park oppose them. The Blackheath Society opposes them. The Olympic rider Zara Phillips opposes them. Large numbers of local people, judging by the membership lists and responses to the anti-equestrian event campaign, Nogoe, oppose them. (Fahy later amended his claim to say that the Greenwich Park plan has “majority support,” but was unable to say how he knew that – since, to my knowledge, no surveys or polls have been done.)

2. The Olympic organisers have not addressed the ecology issue. They have certainly claimed, often, that the park will not be damaged – but as with Fahy’s claim of public support, they seem to have no basis whatever for that claim. No detailed studies of any description have yet been done to show how the ecology of the park will, or will not, be affected by putting 23,000 spectators, a stadium, hundreds of buildings and a 4-mile cross-country course in it. The only truthful answer to the ecology question is that we do not know. That’s precisely the problem.

3. Locog have not dealt with the points raised by objectors, of which the ecology and environment are of course the main ones. They have simply brushed them aside. To recap: no objector accuses Locog, or the council, of deliberately intending to damage the park. But we cannot be confident that damage will not be caused. Our confidence is further reduced precisely by the organisers’ refusal to address any of the points we make.

4. As Locog’s director of sport, Debbie Jevans, confirmed in an Evening Standard interview with me last year, most of the bottom half of Greenwich Park will be closed for “two to three months” in summer 2011 for the Olympic test event and for a further seven to eight months in 2012: a total of around ten months. “We anticipate starting major building works in March 2012 and will hand back the park about six weeks after the end of the Paralympics,” she said. The Paralympics end on September 4 2012.

5. As London 2012 itself admits, “the facilities at Greenwich Park are temporary and nothing will remain after the Games.” No legacy is planned and no-one at Greenwich Council can specify what such a legacy might be. As one objector quietly pointed out, “Greenwich Park is the legacy – a legacy of previous generations.”

What the meeting showed me, again, was the utter absence of any serious argument for doing this. It is a policy based on, at best, head-in-the-sand denial – or, at worst, a set of straightforward lies. And when the objectors to the use of the Park at the meeting made their points, the quality of the responses made by the Olympics’ defenders was even more dismally bad.

“This is a Labour Party meeting, and if you’re fed up with it then leave,” said one. “Fifty-three million people haven’t signed your petition,” snapped another. The anti-equestrian contingent was “handled” by some of the worst, most crudely partisan chairing I’ve seen in a while: step forward Marjorie Nzerem, vice-chair of the Greenwich Labour Party, who simply didn’t want to hear from anyone not following the approved line.

Councillor Fahy’s statement that the Greenwich Park Olympics are a “done deal” was, to some extent, echoed by his colleague, Alex Grant, chair of the council’s planning board, which will soon have to consider London 2012’s planning application. “While the council has a policy of supporting Greenwich hosting the Olympics, we will not be a rubber stamp,” he told the meeting, adding that “we can attach conditions” to the planning permission. Asked whether there were any circumstances in which planning permission could actually be refused, Cllr Grant declined to answer. How “done” the deal actually is, the next few months will tell.