CROYDON IN CRISIS: As the borough’s £1.5m year of culture is staggering to its conclusion, we reveal how the owners of a Surrey Street pub were handed £28,000 for… nothing. EXCLUSIVE by STEVEN DOWNES
Business support scheme: the owners of Surrey Street pub got £28,000 for a ‘carnival’ that has never taken place
As Croydon’s year as London’s Borough of Culture staggers into the final week of its delayed staging, this website has uncovered further worrying evidence of the incestuous nature of the council-appointed steering group that doled out more than £1million in grants, while leaving many of the borough’s established community arts groups out in the cold.
What was supposed to be 12 months of a Croydon “Culture Club” ended up being taken over by a business clique, who directed huge chunks of public money into their own pet schemes, many of which lacked any real artistic merit.
Croydon’s Borough of Culture managed to hand a £120,000 contract to a public relations firm closely connected with business groups Croydon BID and Develop Croydon to handle the publicity for the year’s events.
Business partners: Mayor Jason Perry and Matthew Sims (right) are on the board of Croydon BID. £50,000 of Borough of Culture cash went to BID for its giraffes
Mayor Jason Perry is a director of Croydon BID, the town centre business improvement district.
As Inside Croydon previously reported, Croydon BID, not known as an arts group, was also given £50,000 of culture funding to scatter a small herd of art-less plastic giraffes around the town centre for a few weeks, bringing further ridicule to Croydon.
Now it has emerged that a business run by Croydon BID’s deputy chair, Andrew Taylor, was handed £28,000 of public money to stage a “Surrey Street Carnival”.
In this case, though, the carnival’s not over: it never even began.
Businessman Taylor, despite not having any background in the arts, was also appointed to the council’s Borough of Culture steering group. This is the body which decided which projects were worthy of receiving thousands of pounds of public grants.
“The steering group act [sic] as a critical friend from the cultural sector and will ensure that the council are [sic] delivering an exciting, representative programme of events throughout the year,” according to Croydon Council.
“They will also be responsible for setting the criteria… and evaluating the bids. This will help to ensure that artists and organisations of all sizes are supported to participate in This is Croydon.”
“This is Croydon” being the deeply uninspired, slightly malevolent, threatening slogan for the Borough of Culture, dreamt up by White Label, the contracted PR company.
Well-connected: how Mr Fox’s Andrew Taylor figures within Croydon BID
Sources close to the bidding process have assured Inside Croydon that Andrew Taylor would not have been present when the decision was taken to approve the grant for the Surrey Street Carnival. Not that such a propriety really ever mattered much.
“Of course, no one who had an interest in getting a grant ever was present when their turn came round,” said one source. “But they still got the money, in a massive mutual back-scratching exercise.”
Well-connected: how Taylor pops up on the Borough of Culture steering group
The steering group has been chaired by Dan Winder, who is based at Stanley Halls, where many Borough of Culture events have been staged. Malti Patel is another steering group member, whose Apsara Arts – a private company that specialises in providing south Asian dance and music – just happens to feature prominently in this weekend’s Borough of Culture finale events.
It was Apsara Arts that was commissioned to conduct much of the work on the underwhelming and poorly researched Heritage Music Trail, as well as recruiting volunteer guides for the trail and a Museum of Croydon exhibit, for which they received £82,475 – almost one-quarter of the entire Music Heritage Trail budget provided through the National Lottery Heritage Fund.
According to official documents obtained from the National Lottery, this included funding for 8.5 days per month for 10 months for a “project lead” from Apsara Arts to a total of £21,250 – paid at a rate of £250 per day. Cushty.
Such a detailed breakdown of the spending for the Surrey Street Carnival has never been available. But according to the original pitch for funding, the Surrey Street Carnival would be staged outdoors, in September, on Surrey Street. A community arts organisation, Club Soda, was to help pull the project together.
Arts place: how the Borough of Culture listings showed the Surrey Street Festival
Taylor is managing director of Bart and Taylor, a pubs and hospitality company which operates the Fern bar at East Croydon, and the Mr Fox pub on Surrey Street.
So staging a Surrey Street music festival might have offered a bit of a boost for the pub’s business. What was actually being proposed for the borough-wide arts programme, though, all seemed a little hazy.
The planned date, September 17, came and went without any publicity for this publicly-funded event. Nothing happened.
Katharine Street sources suggested it was postponed because of a clash with other Borough of Culture events – which sounded more like a lame excuse or more poor planning.
Taylor, meanwhile, was busy, networking and making sure that his business colleagues were well topped-up… In November, when White Label was organising the Develop Croydon conference piss-up for property speculators, estate agents and Westfield, Taylor’s Fern bar was used as the venue for that evening’s reception. Nice.
As far as the Surrey Street Carnival was concerned, though, the alarm bells started ringing when Inside Croydon reached out to Club Soda.
Business to attend to: the Fern bar, run by Andrew Taylor, Croydon BID’s vice-chair, was at the centre of business in November
“We were asked about partnering with Mr Fox on a festival,” the community arts worker told us, “but a year has passed and we’ve heard nothing about this so I suspect it either isn’t happening any longer or it has been postponed.”
Other business owners based in Surrey Street expressed surprise when they were asked about the Surrey Street Carnival. They’d heard nothing about it, and certainly had not been involved in any of the planning and preparations for such a potentially significant event.
Later in November, we learned that the Surrey Street Carnival had morphed, and Taylor was now publicising a “music festival in central Croydon”. No matter that this maybe wasn’t exactly what had been pitched to his friends and colleagues on the Borough of Culture steering group that had persuaded them to part with £28,000 of public money.
According to the Bart and Taylor website, the music festival “will take place on the closing weekend after a fabulous year of events that have taken place across the borough to celebrate Croydon’s dynamic and diverse culture.” So they were at least “on-message” in respect of the Borough of Culture’s own bullshit.
Without specifying any venue, they gave Sunday, March 31, 2024 as the planned date for their re-arranged gig.
The fact that this date is Easter Sunday didn’t seem to matter to Mr Foxy Taylor.
“Croydon will come together to celebrate some of the incredible Croydon artists and sounds that have been exported globally for a free day festival. The festival will feature world-famous DJs, live artists, street food traders, entertainers, and more!” they promised.
Let’s parteee…: except it wasn’t Bart and Taylor who would be paying for the party that never happened. November’s announcement has now long gone
This event was being so well planned, their spiel was followed by a “call out for artists”. They seemed to want performers and DJs to do a turn for free…
Maybe no artists came forward to volunteer to perform for Mr Fox’s promotional carnival for which they were being paid £28,000 of public money?
Because now, there is to be no “Surrey Street Carnival” or free music festival at all.
Sources on the council’s steering group, one of the “critical friends” who were supposed to ensure the best use of the £1.3million grant from London Mayor Sadiq Khan, suggest that carnival fan Mr Fox will, quite properly, now be returning the money.
Not that that is any consolation to the dozens of genuine community arts groups, mostly managed by tireless volunteers who applied for some money and were turned down, and will never have a chance to show some real Croydon culture.
Read more: £1.5m being spent on our Borough of not-very-much Culture
Read more: GLA has few checks on how £1.3m Culture grant is being spent
Read more: It’s hard to find signs of the borough’s musical heritage trail
Read more: A town centre amble that goes from the sublime to ridiculous
Read more: £1.3m in Culture grants, but not a penny for Croydon Writers
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ROTTEN BOROUGH AWARDS: In January 2024, Croydon was named among the country’s rottenest boroughs for a SEVENTH successive year in the annual round-up of civic cock-ups in Private Eye magazine
Well. Who knew THIS would happen…
This is Croydon. And you’re welcome to it….
The Borough of Culture was Perry’s opportunity to shine, and to showcase the best of Croydon.
Instead it’s been piss-poor and piecemeal, and shows that the Conservatives have no real idea of how to make the Mayoral system work. Not only do we have a part-time overpaid Mayor, but his well-paid Cabinet have all got other jobs too.
That means instead of making things happen and doing them well, they’ve cut the council to ribbons and left a few inept / overstretched staff to try and paper over the cracks, while giving power and money to their mates.
Still, a £28k interest-free “loan” at our expense to Bart & Taylor Ltd is the proverbial ill-wind. It will have helped Mr T keep his 10 companies afloat
Another day and another huge waste of public money syphoned into private hands without producing any output. Along with the Giraffe fiasco shouldn’t this matter be referred to the GLA Audit Panel to pursue recovery of misallocated arts funding provided by the GLA Mayor. Always best to make sure it’s paid back without anyone forgetting. One small problem. Neil Garratt is the Chairman of it.
Put Garratt on the spot, Derek.
Write to him, highlighting the lack of any scrutiny over the use of £1.3m in GLA money going on in his own GLA constituency.
He might even do something useful for once…
The giraffes were shite
The Lottery should be held accountable to some extent. Isn’t part of its blurb that it donates to good causes? It has made gamblers out of most of us at some time or another, leading us in the belief that the money we lose will fund something worthwhile.
If that money wasn’t used for the carnival it should be demanded to be payed back.
Tired of paying taxes. This “” should be ashamed