Greenwich.co.uk

Greenwich news and information

Andrew Gilligan: Top Dog

By

I KNOW this site is called Greenwich.co.uk, but today I’m going to skip bail and write about the glory that is Deptford.

That is not, by the way, the heavy-handed sarcasm you sometimes find on lesser websites. Deptford really is a kind of miracle. Three fishmongers! No supermarkets! A thriving street market with knobbly vegetables! Surely there must be some plan to ruin it?

Oddly enough, this does not appear to be the case. True, a few years ago, leaflets with all the most dreaded danger words – “vibrant,” “Richard Rogers,” “continental-style piazza” – appeared, promising the “regeneration” of the Creekside area (that is, the construction of the usual crappy towers of “luxury apartments”.) The recession, thank God, seems to have killed that one off. Even bankers have their uses.

A redevelopment plan for the railway station and the area around it is, it transpires, going ahead. But in something unprecedented in the annals of “regeneration,” it may actually be better – or at least no worse – than what’s there now. I will miss the atmospheric old station, but suppose I may be in a minority. Most of the rest of Deptford High Street will be staying, and the buildings that are getting knocked down are mostly rubbish.

In the seventeenth century, Deptford gave us the diarist John Evelyn; in the sixteenth century it took away from us the playwright Christopher Marlowe (murdered in a local tavern – what a Deptford death); but in the twenty-first century, I think, what Deptford has given London is a potential model for subtle, non-destructive gentrification.

Nowhere can remain in a timewarp, and the area certainly needs more money in it. This is happening – there are, if you look carefully, quite a lot of bourgeois, Guardian-reading types in Deptford – but unlike in so many areas they seem to have arrived without overwhelming the existing residents.

Apart from a few fairly low-key outposts of the Converse-wearing classes – a couple of pubs, the railway carriage cafe, some arty things – the ordinary life of SE8 goes on without wall-to-wall estate agents, destination bars, cappucino shops, and all the other things that have spoiled Stoke Newington and Hoxton.

You can see this in places like my new favourite pub, the Dog and Bell in Prince Street. I have cycled past this place on my way home hundreds of times, but usually too late at night to go in. This week I happened to be passing at 9pm and what a find it was.

Time Out, London’s most reliably stupid magazine, describes the Dog and Bell as “Deptford’s best bar. That it’s dark, foreboding and located in no man’s land matters not a jot.” I suspect all this “matters not a jot” because none of it is actually true. The Dog and Bell is not “foreboding,” or even what they presumably meant to say, forbidding. It is not “dark.” It is not “located in no man’s land,” as if Prince Street was somehow West Belfast. Above all, of course, it is not a “bar.” It is a pub – a traditional backstreet pub – and one of the most perfect examples of the species I know.

There are wooden benches, yellow walls (would you say yellow was a “dark” colour? I wouldn’t), an open fire, mirrors with Fullers adverts. There are, I’m told, outstanding real ales (I wasn’t drinking). There is a warm welcome and decent food. There is even a skittles table (Time Out thinks it’s a billiards table) – which was, at the time I visited, being played on by a bloke in a flat cap and muffler and a bloke in a waistcoat.

Now our two players on the skittles were almost certainly middle-class: “aesthetically, it’s a very nice table,” one of them said. But it still felt right because the clientele was mixed and the place didn’t feel in the slightest bit ponced-up.

What’s Deptford’s secret? I think, perhaps, one reason it has not reached a critical mass of Guardianistas is that there’s very little period housing. Over the last twenty years, the London bourgeoisie have swarmed all over Zone Two in search of anything with sash windows. Not many of those in Deptford. Long may it stay scruffy and faintly rough, keeping to its path of gentle social change.

Andrew Gilligan: Don’t Buck The Market

By

A FEW years ago a vigorous campaign, in which I played a part, was mounted to save Greenwich Market. Though the battle is not definitively won, the new plans are better than the old ones, and the market continues to thrive.

Across the street, however, there is a market that has suffered a very different fate. Last Sunday, the Greenwich Village Market, which sprawls across a big site at the junction with Stockwell Street and Greenwich High Road, had a desolate air. Only about half the space was filled. Many of the lockups which used to disgorge intriguing piles of tat every Sunday were, well, locked up. This is a market that is about to die.

Almost without anyone noticing, something that has been a cornerstone of Greenwich’s weekends for the last twenty years has been destroyed. The market will close for ever on 22 March, to make way for a much-needed…er… much-needed patch of derelict wasteland.

It was going to be one of those hideous rabbit-hutch “housing and retail” developments – but as Greenwich.co.uk reported in January, the recession has put paid to that. The developers have pulled out. Now there is talk of Greenwich University buying the land to build an architecture school, though no deal yet appears to have been done.

I am very saddened about the Village Market’s demise. It was the best of our three weekend markets – cheaper, bigger and more random than the slightly chi-chi, scented candle stalls of Greenwich Market. It had the fleamarket atmosphere that so many markets have lost.

The desk I’m writing this piece on was bought secondhand from the Village Market. What could be greener than recycled furniture? A lot of the books in the shelves in front of me came from there, too. So did some of my clothes. Greenwich’s weekend markets are a major draw to the area – but the closure of the VM, by far the largest one, will reduce the size of the market area by more than half.

But more than sadness, I feel anger at the utter madness of throwing the stalls off now. Even if the university does indeed buy the land, even if it does have the money to build an architecture school, there is no planning permission for such a project. There isn’t even, as far as I can tell, a project design. It will be literally years before it gets through the design and planning process.

Why on earth not allow the Village Market to continue until at least the fate of the site is decided and the builders move in? Wouldn’t that be preferable to a gaping hole right in the heart of Greenwich for most of the next decade?

Part of the reason, it’s said, is that they need somewhere to put the stalls from Greenwich Market while that is redeveloped (assuming it ever happens – recession again.) But those stalls occupy a fraction of the space that the Village Market has. There ought to be plenty of room for them, even if most of the Village Market traders stay.

The Village Market is something that generates wealth, employment, character, interest, and even the odd bargain. It is being torn up for no reason that I can see, and yet another thing that makes Greenwich special is being lost for ever. What is the problem with the people who run this place? Why do they so often get it wrong?

Andrew Gilligan: Lost In The Machine

By

FOR A few kinds of simple customer transaction, machines are as good as people: taking out cash from a bank, buying a ticket to park your car. But for anything with any element of complication or choice, they are lousy.
 
Buying a ticket at the machine at the “Greenwich end” of Greenwich station takes four or five times as long as buying one at the ticket office.  Even for the simplest journey, to London, you have to go through two pages on the touchscreen; for most others, you have to press as many as ten buttons. God help you if you are using a railcard. Almost invariably, the machine will reject one or more of the coins you put in; you have to reinsert them, sometimes several times, and sometimes it will never accept them – a problem if you have no more change. Once you have fed in all the coins, there is then a pause before the ticket is grudgingly printed and delivered – a pause usually just long enough to allow you to miss your train.
 
Tourists and others not familiar with the machines take a long time over each step, further lengthening the process. None of the machines is the same – there are three different kinds at Greenwich alone, one involving an even more fiddly little wheel that you have to twiddle. And if there is more than one person in your party, you have to repeat the ticket-buying process all over again (unless you are quick enough to spot the multiple-tickets option on some machines.) 
 
If the ticket office ever happens to be closed during the day, a long and slow-moving queue quickly builds up at the “Greenwich end” machine. And none of the machines, so far as I know, can give directions, tell you what train to catch, or warn you, before you’ve paid over your money, that the service is a bit dodgy today and you might like to try another route.
 
Remember all this when our beloved local train operator, Southeastern, comes forward with proposals to close the ticket offices at our local stations, or reduce their opening hours, and replace them with machines. It hasn’t happened yet: plans a few years ago for ticket office closures were defeated, and have not so far returned. But it is happening now on other train companies, and it will almost certainly soon come to south-east London too.
 
Of course, if Southeastern would like publicly to pledge in the comments section that there will be no reductions in its ticket office hours, I’d be most happy to stand corrected. But I shan’t hold my breath.
 
The fact is that the privatised railways are in deep trouble. Their operating costs are exorbitant (public subsidy to the network is several times greater than it was under BR, and fares have risen far above inflation, for a service certainly no better and arguably worse than BR’s). During the boom years, the rail companies could get away with loading their extravagance and inefficiency on to the rest of us; passengers did seem prepared, if not exactly content, to suffer yearly above-inflation fare rises and rotten services.
 
But now, the recession has put whole financial model of railway privatisation at risk. Passenger numbers are likely to crash very soon, as more people lose their jobs. Fare rises are indexed to inflation in July each year, plus one per cent; inflation this July is likely to be pretty near zero. The train operators have already been pleading with the Government to drop the rule and allow them to raise fares by the usual larcenous amounts. Today, perhaps surprisingly, the transport minister, Lord Adonis, told the Commons that he would refuse those demands.
 
So a double whammy is in effect: fewer passengers, no fare increases. With any luck, some of the companies will be unable to meet their franchise commitments and will have to hand back the keys to the Government. We will start to achieve renationalisation, a sane and unified railway, by stealth, and for nothing. Bring it on, I say.
 
Some companies, however, may try an interim option, of trying to cut costs. Not, of course, cutting their own fat-cat salaries and bonuses; probably not cutting dividends to shareholders; not trying to squeeze out the enormous waste in the Balkanised system – some of it, to be fair, the fault of Network Rail and the train leasing companies rather than theirs.
 
No, as Keith Ludeman, the ultimate boss of Southeastern, says, the option they will be trying first is “going to the Department [for Transport] and asking to take services out.” Cutting actual trains is quite complicated – involving negotiations with other operators and Network Rail as well as the DfT – although train lengths can be shortened. The service most at risk of being “taken out” is staffing at stations. Already Southeastern’s website tells visitors that the weekday opening hours of Greenwich station are “unknown.” Not to me, they’re not – the ticket office is currently supposed to be open until at least 7.30pm every weeknight.
 
Even a staffing cut has to be approved by the DfT. So it is our task to bring pressure to bear to ensure that “unknown” does not turn into “unstaffed.”

Andrew Gilligan: No-Go Area

By

At the bottom of my road, where it meets Royal Hill, there is every few seconds a sad little tableau. An impatient car (how can a car look impatient, you ask? But it does) drives up to the junction from the London direction. The driver slows to turn into my street, then notices the big notice saying “Road closed – No access to Shooters Hill,” whereupon he speeds up again and heads for the permanant traffic jam that is now central Greenwich.

At the top of my road, where it meets the A2, there is an even more poignant sight: a constant parade of U-turning drivers who have ignored the sign at the bottom of the road (there’s so little trust in government these days, isn’t there?) and driven all the way up, bashing the road humps in their haste, only to find that the warning is in fact correct, and their path is blocked by a high fence and an orange wall of traffic cones. Like that BBC reporter in the Falklands, I sit in my study window, counting them all out, then counting them all back.

For forty-eight hours now, pretty much every side street in West Greenwich has been filled with probing, questing motor vehicles, desperately trying to find an eastbound route without a 45-minute queue – and failing every time. The main roads are just filled. During this evening’s rush-hour, traffic was completely solid on Greenwich High Road, with something like 250 crawling cars between the Deptford Broadway lights and St Alfege’s church. Much of Blackheath village, too, is at a standstill. The old buildings of both places shudder beneath a constant parade of heavy lorries. Horns and emergency service sirens wail into the night.

The cause, as we probably all know by now, is that TfL have closed the eastbound A2 between the bottom of Blackheath Hill (at the junction with Greenwich South Street) and Charlton Way/ Shooters Hill Road. For the next two months. To install a cycle lane.

I happened to be up very early on Sunday morning, when the closure first went into effect. From 5.30am on the quietest day of the week, there was a procession of dozens of cars down my street as the first stage of the diversions kicked in. That was when I knew that this was going to be bad.

Even most foot access has been blocked by the fence – there’s only one pedestrian gap in it between the tea hut and Dartmouth Hill. West Greenwich has been cut off from Blackheath by land, air and sea.

Now, I’m a cyclist – I’ve never driven or owned a car in my life – and I’ve spent years asking for more cycle lanes. But I really don’t think that essentially pouring a giant vat of glue over the whole of Greenwich and Blackheath for the next eight weeks is a price worth paying for this one.

For one thing, there are already three parallel, and far nicer, cycle routes to the A2 – along Dartmouth Hill, Hare and Billet Road, Mounts Pond Road and Long Pond Road; up through the park to Vanbrugh Park; and along the river and through the grounds of the naval college. That last one doesn’t even involve a hill.

Even the justification in TfL’s own press release is rather carefully worded: “This stretch of the A2 runs through Blackheath, an area that attracts many cyclists and pedestrians,” they say. The “area,” yes. The A2, not so much.

The other reason for the closure is so that TfL can “reconstruct the carriageway” and install new streetlights. But what exactly is wrong with the current streetlights? What does reconstruction mean – does it mean resurfacing? What was wrong with the previous surface? Why does it all have to take two months? (Why, for instance, aren’t they working at night on the stretch across the heath, since there are no residents to disturb?) And let us not forget that the Blackheath Hill stretch of the road was subject to “reconstruction” only five years ago following the Blackheath Hole collapse.

The cynic in me does wonder whether this is another part of “Transport for Livingstone’s” historic jihad against motorists. Perhaps closing down this main arterial route is another way of showing those despised creatures (many of whom, to compound their offence, are white, heterosexual men from the suburbs) the error of their ways.

The other historic Transport for Livingstone impulse that this closure clearly satisfies is the need to spend large amounts of money on projects which don’t seem of obvious or front-rank importance.

You may, of course, object that Ken is no longer in charge. But this was presumably planned when he still was; and in any case, for the most part, under the new regime, TfL has gone on pretty much as before. Recently, I described to an appreciative senior City Hall figure some of the more bonkers ways in which TfL has been wasting money, ways that need to be mended rather more urgently than the A2 if the organisation is to survive the downturn with its services intact.

For the next eight weeks, though, we appear to be stuck with this. Let’s hope it is just eight weeks, shall we? Let’s hope the works don’t overrun; let’s hope, above all, that they don’t open up the Blackheath Hill hole again and let us in for another two years of local traffic hell. They’re bound to have thought of that, aren’t they? Aren’t they?

Andrew Gilligan: Small Shops Are Cheaper

By

“BABY: nothing yet,” declared the blackboard outside Dring’s butchers in Royal Hill this afternoon. For me, it said it all about how local shops, local shopkeepers – and their families – give something to a community that supermarkets never can.
 
One of the most popular things my newspaper, the Standard, has ever done (apart from helping to stiff Ken Livingstone) is its campaign to save small shops – and Greenwich is amazingly lucky to have somehow held on to many of the sorts of shops that have been swept away elsewhere in London. They’re part of the lifeblood of the area. Their stock is more interesting, they do less damage to the environment and the money we spend in them goes back into our area, not into corporate shareholders’ pockets and tax shelters in the Cayman Islands.
 
Yet the one killer argument for small shops we never thought to make – the one we simply assumed wasn’t true – is in fact true. In Greenwich at least, small shops are often cheaper.
 
We’ve all been conditioned to believe that supermarkets offer value for money. That was, of course, their proposition when they started up: pile it high, sell it cheap. But now that they control three-quarters of the grocery market, things are a little different.
 
Yesterday and today, on your behalf, I spent a couple of hours comparing the prices for groceries at my nearest supermarket – Somerfield, in Greenwich High Road – with those in my nearest collection of small shops – those on Royal Hill. I admit to being surprised by the results.
 
The small shops, as you might expect, offered produce better or equal to the supermarket’s. But they were also remarkably competitive on price. In around half the cases, they were cheaper; most of the rest of the time, they were within a few pence.
 
On fish and meat, the quality and choice at Drings and the Fishmonger (round the corner in Circus Street) was far higher than at Somerfield, but the prices mostly lower. Free range lamb chops at Drings were £5.99 per pound. Non free-range lamb chops in a sad plastic box at Somerfield were £15.40 a kilo (£6.98 per pound.) Free-range pork chops were £2.99 per pound at Drings. At Somerfield: £4.89 per kilo (£2.21 per pound), for non free-range in a plastic box.
 
Somerfield barely seems to have any fish at all, but the one comparator I did find – mackerel, again in a little plastic box, was £9.84 a kilo at Somerfield against £6.99 a kilo for fresh mackerel at the Fishmonger.
 
Supermarkets have scored in the meat stakes with pre-prepared ready meals, but Drings caters for this market too. It has a rosemary and garlic chicken breast for £2.15 and a thyme and garlic chicken thigh for 75p – both substantially cheaper than their closest equivalents in Greenwich’s ready-meal king, M&S.
 
On fruit and vegetables, the Creaky Shed in Royal Hill charged 20p for an orange (Somerfield 32p), 25p for a lemon (36p), and 39p for a pound of cooking onions (Somerfield 45p). The small shop was more expensive on grapefruit (50p to 46p), apples (30p to 9p), and potatoes (88p/lb, Somerfield 45p).
 
On eggs and packaged groceries, the Royal Hill mini-market again beat Somerfield on most prices, and came very close on others. The list (compared yesterday):

  Mini Market Somerfield
Cheapest free range eggs x 6 £1.20 £1.59
Coke 2 litres £1.71 £1.86
Persil non-bio powder std box £2.89 £3.23
Head and Shoulders Classic Clean £3.99 for 500ml £2.26 for 200ml
Kellogg’s Cornflakes 500g £1.89 £1.89
Jaffa cake bars x 5 £1.49 £1.64
Cheapest white sliced bread 95p 76p
Pint of Milk 50p 46p
Fairy Liquid 500ml £1.49 £1.16

Now it is true that Somerfield, the only general supermarket in central Greenwich, may to some degree be exploiting its position. Most prices at my closest large store, Tesco in Lewisham, beat the local shops – though even then, not by very much at all, and there are still some goods that are cheaper in Royal Hill. When you add in the cost of petrol, parking and time, the difference amounts to very little indeed.
 
So the question arises: why do we blindly flock to supermarkets, with all their queues, when it would be quicker and often cheaper to use small shops? Partly that false perception that they are better value. Partly habit. Partly, perhaps, their general shininess. We are greater suckers than we’d like to admit for bright lights and polished metal surfaces. And it is true, too, that though the supermarkets fall down on the quality of their fresh foods, like fruit, meat and fish, they offer a much wider choice of enticingly-packaged snacks and junk.
 
All of these are simply terrible reasons for choosing supermarkets. But what my little survey suggests is that Greenwich customers aren’t, yet, as price-sensitive as they should be. People just chuck things into their trolleys or baskets without noticing what they cost. As the economy slides, however, more people will be looking at the ticket on the shelf.
 
The small shops could, I think, do more to woo us. They could take credit cards; not all do at present. With the honourable exception of the Royal Hill mini-market (daily till 10), they could open later – the butcher’s started putting away its stock today soon after 4.30. Some of them could do with a better range; the selection of goods in the minimarket is quite downmarket for this area, though to be fair the supermarkets have sweetheart deals to  monopolise some of the best brands.
 
Above all, though, they need to find some way of making us aware of the fact that they actually offer extremely good value for money.

Andrew Gilligan: We Are Sailing

By

Thames Clippers

IN THIS week’s absurd public transport meltdown, one of the very few links between Greenwich and the rest of the world which mostly kept going was also the least well-known, but arguably the best one, of all.

Even now, astonishingly few people seem to realise that there is a fast, regular and frequent riverbus service between two piers in Greenwich and central London – with rush-hour and evening service to Woolwich, too. It runs every 20 minutes for most of the day – see the timetable on the Thames Clippers website here – and on the fairly rare occasions when I don’t cycle into town, it’s my method of choice.

I several years ago largely gave up on mainstream public transport – a course of action I cannot recommend too highly. Buses and tube, in particular, are now exercises in low-level misery; until you stop using them, you just don’t realise quite how much they blight your life, how much time and mental energy they waste and how much money they screw out of you.

But there remain a few public transport options that are a genuine pleasure to use – and now, with the roads still a bit slippery for cycling and the Southeastern trains not back to a full service, is the time to discover one.

It’s time to liberate yourself from your cattle-truck carriages, your subterranean holes full of other people’s germs, your traffic jams and points failures; time to travel to work with the wind in your hair and the matchless spectacle of the world’s greatest city before your eyes.

As well as the views, you will find a seat, a good punctuality record and even a little counter selling tea and coffee.True, the single fare from Greenwich (£5) is about twice the train price – but if you buy a monthly season (£100) and work within walking distance of one of the central London piers (Tower, London Bridge, Blackfriars, Embankment or Waterloo) you will pay almost exactly the same.

The neglect of the river is one of London’s great transport scandals. We have spent the last twenty years – and will probably spend most of the next ten – tying ourselves in knots about Crossrail, with still a quite serious chance that it will not be built. But we already have a waterborne Crossrail, an almost unused six-lane highway through the middle of the city, which could be brought into the full embrace of the TfL system for a fraction of the cost.

Yet the existing service isn’t even integrated with the rest of the network – no Oyster pay-as-you-go (yet), no Travelcards (Travelcard holders do get a one-third discount).

Greenwich Pier

Greenwich council has recently started what it calls the “Clipper Campaign” calling for Oyster acceptance and a 10-minute peak-hour service. Very laudable aims, although I should point out that TfL had already promised to install Oyster readers for pay-as-you-go on the river service several months before the council started its campaign. Could Greenwich be trying to claim credit for achieving something that is going to happen anyway?

The council website says that “the Mayor of London has given no date for installing the Oystercard equipment on the boats.” That is perhaps a little misleading: I’m not sure what Boris himself has said, but his Transport Commissioner, Peter Hendy, told the last meeting of the TfL board that Oyster PAYG on the river was a “Mayoral priority” which “could be introduced by mid-2009.”

Answers last month to the Tory London Assembly member Gareth Bacon suggest that Greenwich’s “campaign” for the riverbus does not, so far, seem to have involved any contact with either the Mayor or TfL. As the local Tory leader, Councillor Spencer Drury, said: “I am curious what sort of campaign fails to contact the person or organisation which it is seeking to influence.”

It’s also worth pointing out the serious possibility that the Thames Clipper service will in fact contract, not increase, in the next few months. The extension from Greenwich to Woolwich is subsidised by TfL and the council, and was originally supposed to end this month, after the opening of the new DLR station. The subsidy has now been extended by another six months. It would be a shame if the next action of the leaders of the “Clipper Campaign” was to actually, well, clip the funding they give to the thing they’re trying to promote.

Still, let’s not bash the council spin-doctors too heavily this week. Their overall aim is good, and even once Oyster is available on the service, the real battle – for Underground-style fares and Underground-style frequencies – still needs to be waged.

In the meantime, take to the water. Even if it snows again, the Thames is most unlikely to freeze over.

Andrew Gilligan: Taxing Times

By

AM I SE10’s Max Mosley? Just to make clear, I do not live in a basement being whipped by whores – but I am surely the only person in the entire London Borough of Greenwich who actively seeks out our dear council’s ludicrous parody newspaper, Greenwich Time.

Most of us, of course, have as much choice about receiving this publication as we have about paying for it – it is thrust through our doors whether we want it or not, just as the money it costs is taken from us through the council tax. But my street isn’t assured of a reliable supply (it’s pretty rough down Hyde Vale, where even the milkmen fear to tread) – so most weeks, with a sick feeling of guilt, shame yet also secret, forbidden pleasure, I make the trip to West Greenwich library.

Furtively, hating myself, I enter the building, blow the dust off that week’s thick, virgin pile of Greenwich Times and – trying to ignore the staff’s incredulity and contempt at my actions – slip a copy, perhaps two, into a brown paper bag. I tell myself it doesn’t do any real harm – surely everyone involved must be over 18 – but that ignores the terrible price paid by all those vulnerable young trees, whose innocence has been quite literally pulped to print this ghastly perversion of natural, healthy journalism.

I get it to find out what the council wants us to believe it is doing – from which, through a simple formula (assuming exactly the opposite), you can usually work out what it is actually doing. It looks like a real newspaper. Quite intentionally, I’m sure, there’s no mention that it’s an official municipal propaganda sheet on the front cover. There are even bylines. Someone called “Peter Cordwell” seems to write most of the stories – surely this must be a pseudonym? Would anyone with any professional pride at all want to be associated with this stuff?

Because the front-page news story on the latest edition is just about the closest you can come to taxpayer-funded political propaganda without actually putting “Vote Labour” as the headline. “It’s not just freezing outside!” starts ‘Cordwell’ (who has a regrettable weakness for the exclamation mark – another sign that he cannot be a real person.) “Council leader Chris Roberts intends to bring the chill into the council chamber next month when he proposes to freeze the council tax.”

Goodness me – as recently as last October, Greenwich was one of 16 London councils which rejected a council-tax freeze proposed by the shadow chancellor, George Osborne. Could there possibly be an election coming up?

Anyway, back to Greenwich Time: “Chris told GT: ‘For the past ten years Greenwich has established a record which is all but unparalleled across London for rigorous and efficient management of its budgets. While continuing to levy what is almost the lowest cumulative Council Tax increase in London, we have seen Greenwich go from having the second-highest Council Tax in London to being 22nd of 32 boroughs.'”

Both these latter claims are in fact misleading, since they relate to council tax in the current financial year, 2008/9 – not next year, when the freeze Greenwich Time trumpets comes into effect. We don’t actually know how Greenwich will compare to other London councils next year yet, because not all have yet announced their 2009/10 council tax levels. It seems likely that many other boroughs will also freeze, or even reduce, their council tax, which might make Greenwich one of the more expensive authorities again.

And as for that “all but unparalleled” efficiency, the truth – which Greenwich Time somehow forgets to mention – is that our current council tax is in fact the fourth highest in inner London, the class of councils in which we are included, and almost precisely the average for London as a whole.

It’s true that the level of any authority’s council tax depends on factors other than its own efficiency – such as Government grants. But since the level of the council tax is the ground on which Greenwich Time has chosen to blow its PR bugles, a more accurate claim would therefore be that the council tax shows our efficiency is, at best, average.

No doubt the purpose of all this, and all the other Greenwich Time bullshit, is to persuade us to love the council, and to re-elect the wise and beneficient leader who features so constantly in its pages. But I feel increasingly sure that it is having precisely the opposite effect.

I never used to have all that many quarrels with the people who run Greenwich. I’ve even voted for some of them. It isn’t one of the more outrageously useless authorities – it was quite good over Greenwich Market, for instance.

But I, and other people I know, feel insulted by the sheer stupidity and relentlessness of Greenwich Time – now published, incredibly, every single week. We feel angry at the simply improper way that our money is being used to promote politically-motivated distortions. And with non-council related feature material alongside all the Town Hall happy-news, I feel concerned that the clear intention is to undermine independent local newspapers which can paint the full picture.

They no longer have a state-controlled press in East Germany, Poland or the Czech Republic. But below the radar, and in keeping with our new status as a country where freedom is being nibbled away, we are getting one in Britain.

House of Horror

By

JUST as it was once traditional to report on the first cuckoo of spring, some of Britain’s indefatigable estate agents have recently been claiming to hear the early chirp of returning buyers. “It is…clear that parts of the market are perhaps beginning to bottom out…Our members are starting to see enquries increase again, as people begin to believe they can find a bargain,” says Peter Bolton King, chief executive of the National Association of Estate Agents. Last month, the NAEA professed to discern “finally…glimmers of hope,” with autumn figures “not as bad as expected” and a rise in the percentage of first-time buyers in the market.

Away from the world of glimmers and expectations, however, the actual figures remain resolutely bad. This week, the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors reported that property transactions were at their lowest level since they started counting in 1978 – with London the hardest hit. According to the Halifax, UK prices fell by 15.9 per cent during 2008.

The borough of Greenwich took a smaller hit – 4.1 per cent down in the year to November, according to the Land Registry, and with actually a small rise in November itself. The number of transactions is now so small, however, that this last figure needs to be treated with considerable caution. Figures for SE10 alone show an annual reduction of almost 20 per cent – though the sample here is even smaller, and more fluctuating, and the figures even less certain.

So I thought I’d ask around myself to see whether any of the optimistic noises are matched by the reality of a better 2009. In one place, it seemed, they were. “We’re actually doing very well this year,” said Tony Usher, of King Sturge, formerly James Johnston. “Last weekend was incredibly busy. We’ve seen a pickup in applicants and viewers and we’ve had more investment buyers in the last 14 days than in the whole of the last year, roughly. We’ve tied up numerous sales, in Greenwich and Blackheath, and we’re about to deliver leaflets asking for more properties.”

Asked how many sales “numerous” meant, Mr Usher became rather more coy, declining even to discuss whether it meant single or double figures. He wasn’t allowed to tell me, he said, but promised someone would call me back, which they didn’t.

In all the other estate agents I asked, the only part of King Sturge’s good tidings they recognised was a rise in enquiries. “It’s better than it was before Christmas, which is something,” said Doug Norris of John Payne, probably the most important local agent and someone who can usually be trusted to tell it roughly as it is. “The number of viewings has increased substantially from almost next to nothing in the first three weeks of December. In the 15 days [since Christmas] we’ve been open we’ve arranged about 90 viewings at this branch. It has produced offers, some of which will go somewhere and some of which won’t.”

Mr Norris admitted, however, that the Greenwich branch of John Payne had not sold a single property since the first week of December and only 25 in the last six months – compared with a figure of about 15-20 a month at the 2007 peak. Two houses in West Greenwich are likely to be sold soon – on one of them, in Roan Street, there are three offers. Discounts on already depressed asking prices are around the 5 to per 10 per cent mark. “Buyers are still driving prices down and making random offers,” says Norris. “Vendors are coming to terms with [the falling market] now. Their expectation levels have come down and we can talk about prices sensibly.”

The trajectory is clear in the prices on local agents’ websites. A pretty three-storey end-of-terrace “needing upgrading” in King George Street, the heart of Greenwich’s nicest neighbourhood – the kind of house that might have fetched around £700,000 at the peak – came to the market at £599,995, is now down to £550,000 and is on the verge of finding a buyer at around the £500,000 mark.

A house in Peyton Place, nearby, started off, many months ago, at £710,000 and is still on the John Payne site, now at £599,995, with no offers shown. Many other properties have been for sale for over a year. And prices continue to be cut: a house “needing complete modernisation” in Calvert Road, East Greenwich, on at £395,000, is about to be reduced to £345,000 (the one next door sold last year for £475,000.) “I can’t be bullish about the market,” says Norris. “Not by any shape or form have we turned the corner.”

John Payne handles mainly period property, catering in many cases to established buyers with equity. At Oliver Bond, an agency with many of Greenwich’s large stock of new-build flats and a first-timer clientele, the picture is even worse. “Transactions of Victorian semis are going through with reductions of 10 to 15 per cent, but the newbuilds are being crucified,” says Bond’s Ryan Vella. “Valuers are predicting in some cases 40-45 per cent less than last year’s value. We are amazed at the level of enquiries, but we’re doing viewings but no offers. Once a purchase becomes a serious possibility, the buyers find out how difficult it is. The crucifying valuations combined with the difficulties getting mortgages are slowly killing us.”

Vella has, in fact, sold four properties already this year, although he says they are really hangovers from last year with buyers grimly perservering through all the difficulties. In the last six months, including those four, Oliver Bond has sold just eight properties. As with the other agents, rentals are keeping the shop going.

“I can’t for a moment believe that anyone is rushed off their feet selling,” he says. “Anyone who tells you different is insane.”

It’s easy to see why the NAEA is so keen to claim a bottoming out. No-one wants to buy a home for more than it will be worth in a few months’ time. No-one wants to buy a home that will immediately lose some of its value or (if a first-time buyer) put them into negative equity. The market, here and elsewhere, won’t recover until people feel that prices have reached their floor.

But on this evidence, that may not have happened yet.

Horse Manure

By

THE report we’ve all been waiting for is out. Quietly, just before the holidays, the much-trumpeted KPMG review into the Olympic use of Greenwich Park was published on the London 2012 website. And my goodness, it’s convincing.

It’s twelve pages long, of which precisely one page is about the Park. Including the headings and titles, this page contains 215 words. I’ve read more detailed analyses on the back of the average cornflakes packet.

KPMG’s conclusion amounts to all of 45 words, which I quote in full: “Based on the documentation and high-level costings provided by LOCOG, the costs of providing an alternative Modern Pentathlon facility together with temporary accommodation mean that it is unlikely that an alternative location could be delivered for a lower cost than the Greenwich Park option.”

Note the first part of that sentence: “Based on the documentation and high-level costings provided by LOCOG.” According to the preface, this study lasted from 12 August to 9 December. Can it really be true that in all that time, all they have accomplished is to read and repeat the claims made by LOCOG, a party with a clear vested interest in the status quo?

Yes, it can. The preface continues: “In preparing the report, our primary source has been internal management information and representations made to us by management of the ODA, LOCOG and the Government Olympic Executive. We do not accept responsibility for such information, which remains the responsibility of the respective management…We have not…sought to establish the reliability of the sources by reference to other evidence.

“This engagement is not…conducted in accordance with any generally accepted [accounting] assurance standards and consequently no assurance opinion is expressed. We draw your attention to the limitations in the information available to us. We have had limited access to the management of the alternative venues considered or to other third parties.

“We must emphasise that the realisation of the forecasts prepared by the ODA and LOCOG is dependent on the continuing validity of the assumptions on which they are based…We accept no responsibility for the realisation of the projections…we do not accept responsibility for the underlying data.”

I can’t think of many other occasions where an official report has been preceded by a warning that its contents are essentially worthless – a warning that lasts, moreover, about four times longer than the conclusions it pre-emptively dismisses. In their tortured, self-exculpatory prose, one can sense KPMG’s entirely justified sensitivity to criticisms by me and others that their work has no real independent or analytic value at all.

Let us quote from the part where the methods of the study are described. “KPMG’s approach principally comprised… considering internal documentation made available by ODA…[and] LOCOG…discussions with key personnel from the ODA, LOCOG and the Department of Culture, Media and Sport…discussions with a small number of third parties approved by the ODA, LOCOG and/or the DCMS.”

Costings used in the report – both to support the existing venues and dismiss their potential alternatives – were derived from “high-level cost estimates…developed by the ODA.” Incredibly, “several of the operational costs were derived from the Bid Book costings, as the best available source of operational cost estimates, inflated to 2012 prices.”

The Bid Book, as its name suggests, is the document prepared in 2005 to convince the IOC to award us the Olympics. You may remember that at that stage we were being assured that the Games could be delivered for £2.4 billion – roughly a quarter of the present figure. It is quite extraordinary that KPMG is still working on the basis of numbers – even if only for the operational expenses of the Games – from that era.

Any and all actual figures themselves, by the way, are blanked out from the published version of the report for reasons of “commercial confidentiality” – as is even, hilariously, the inflation multiplier used by KPMG to bring them up to 2012 prices. Each venue has a section headed “Cost Issues” which consists, in each case, of a large blacked-out blob, brilliantly expressing the sheer infantilism of British secrecy.

The whole KPMG saga reminds me a little of that scene in Blackadder Goes Forth when General Melchett is harrumphing with pleasure over a two-foot square piece of mud on a table in his office, representing territory gained by Britain at the Battle of the Somme. “What’s the scale?” asks Blackadder. “One-to-one,” replies Captain Darling.

What I mean by this is that the exercise is such an obvious travesty as to be entirely pointless. If they’d hoped it would convince anyone, they should have tried a little harder to make it look like a serious piece of work.

The report may be short, but it could have been even shorter. Forget 45 words, LOCOG could have cut it down to just 16: “We don’t care what you think, and we’re going to do exactly what we always wanted.”

Olympic Gridlock

By

NOT CONTENT with picking our pockets and lying to us about the amount, not content with making absurd promises that will never be kept, not content with putting at risk our priceless park, the people behind the London Olympics are also proposing to close down the rest of Greenwich as well.

Or at least, they’re taking the power to do so. They haven’t yet troubled to tell us how they’ll exercise it.

You may not have heard of the “Olympic Route Network.” I don’t blame you if you haven’t; it’s received mysteriously little press coverage. But you will. The ORN is the network of roads on which the Olympic Delivery Authority will be given the power to ban parking and stopping, restrict traffic, close lanes and indeed shut the roads down in their entirety.

Earlier this month, the Department for Transport launched a consultation document outlining which roads would be part of the ORN. In the borough of Greenwich alone, there are 44. They include:

  • the Blackwall Tunnel.
  • All approaches to the tunnel, including the entire A102 from the Greater London boundary to the tunnel and Blackwall Lane.
  • the whole of Greenwich town centre.
  • the entire length of Romney Road and Trafalgar Road.
  • Creek Road.
  • Deptford Church Street.
  • Blackheath Road, Blackheath Hill, Shooters Hill Road (as far as the old Shooters Hill Police Station) and Charlton Way.
  • Woolwich Road and Woolwich Church Street, between Blackwall Lane in Greenwich and Woolwich town centre.
  • Most of Woolwich town centre.
  • The A205 South Circular from Woolwich to the junction with Shooters Hill Road at the old police station.

As well as all the main roads, dozens of residential side streets in Greenwich will be part of the Olympic Route Network. They include:

  • Crooms Hill.
  • Stockwell Street.
  • Park Vista.
  • Nevada Street.
  • Maze Hill.
  • At GMV, West Parkside, John Harrison Way and Edmund Halley Way.
  • Charlton Park Lane.
  • All the Red Route side roads off the A102.

If you want to park a car, drive, cycle or travel on a bus on any of these streets come 2012, you might not be able to. (The bus routes involved, by the way, are the 47, 51, 53, 54, 89, 96, 99, 108, 129, 161, 177, 178, 180, 188, 199, 202, 244, 286, 291, 386, 422, 469, 472, 486, N1, N47 and N89.)

I say might, because exactly what the ODA will do with its draconian powers is still entirely unstated. Rather worrying, perhaps: if the planned restrictions are to be modest, short-term and benign, they’d surely be happy to tell us that.

If this year’s Games in Beijing are any guide, some roads will be closed entirely and others will have special Olympic vehicle-only lanes, the so-called “Zil lanes” in which only the “Olympic Family” can travel.

Most of Beijing’s main roads are multi-lane expressways – and of course half the traffic was banned every day – but even so, as I saw during the Games, the closure of just one lane caused enormous congestion for the unlucky drivers left with the rest of the road.

The only multi-lane roads in Greenwich’s Olympic Route Network are the Blackwall Tunnel itself, the A102 approach road, Woolwich Church Street, Deptford Church Street and a little bit of Shooters Hill Road. Even closing one lane of these would essentially double most drivers’ journey time, or worse.

And for Greenwich’s remaining single-lane roads, all are badly congested for much, if not most, of the working day. If the idea is to prevent the “Olympic family” from being caught in this congestion, there will be no option but to close these roads.

The final unknown about the Olympic Route Network is exactly how long it will last. Just for the duration of the Games? Oh no. The ODA is being given its powers by the middle of 2009, three years before the Olympics, for a reason – so that some restrictions can come in much earlier.

And even though most restrictions will only happen nearer to the Games, there will, the consultation document admits, be “some trials in summer 2011.” The Olympic period itself is surprisingly long; the document describes the Olympic Route Network as “primarily an operational measure for the 60 days of the Games.” Sixty days? But the Games themselves only last for 15 days.

My best guess is this. Outright road closures are likely to be for several hours at a time, perhaps more than once in the day, over a period of about two weeks. Lane closures, on the multi-lane roads, are likely to be full-time over the same period.

But some traffic management measures will start almost as soon as the ODA is granted the power to do them – around the middle of 2009. Greater parking and stopping restrictions will follow. Outright and draconian parking and stopping controls will be imposed for, at the very least, the entire 60-day period mentioned in the consultation document. And if you’re a shop dependent on passing trade – hard cheese.

The damage all this will do to the normal life of Greenwich, and the business of everyone not connected with the Olympics, is of course enormous. Another example of how the Games will do precisely the opposite of what the boosters claim.