Inside Croydon’s arboriculture correspondent DOUGLAS FIRBANK JR tries to see the wood for the struggling trees in the latest council lash-up
Spotlight: the official switching on of Croydon Minster’s new floodlighting is on Sunday evening
At a special choral evensong service at Croydon Minster this Sunday, the long-awaited landscaping improvements to Minster Green will be opened officially.
The service takes place at 5.30pm – almost an hour after dusk.
The timing will allow the Minster’s new floodlights to be shown off to best effect.
But the evening darkness will also help to disguise the sorry state of some of the planting that has taken place around Minster Green, following a publicly funded “Liveable Neighbourhoods” scheme which was originally allocated more than £17million of public money.
It’s a case of better late than never, as plans for the transformation of Croydon Old Town were formulated more than seven years ago by the previous Labour-run council, which won a £9.5million chunk of cash from the Greater London Authority. The council was supposed to provide £7.7million in match-funding from its “Growth Zone” fund.
But what has been delivered by Croydon’s Mr Toad-like motoring fan, Mayor Jason Perry, is markedly different in certain important aspects.
Perry will be on hand on Sunday evening to declare it all a great success. His success.
Yet instead of delivering Minster Green, there are worrying signs that Perry’s council has in fact handed over Minster Brown. Continue reading
Jason Perry’s “digital first” council bumbled into further troubles today, as staff working in Fisher’s Folly and around the borough found themselves struggling to perform even the simplest of online functions related to council services due to the global Microsoft outage.
Jeremy Corbyn, described (fondly) by one of his closest parliamentary friends as “crap” and “not the best”, will be speaking at a special meeting of the Croydon branch of Your Party at Ruskin House tomorrow night, Friday November 13.
CROYDON IN CRISIS: Companies House filings today mark the latest stage in winding up the council’s failed housing developer. But clearing the paperwork does not mean recovering the money. By STEVEN DOWNES
A report from a right-of-centre “think tank” calls on the government to revive plans to untangle the “Croydon bottleneck” – the junction at Selhurst that is notorious for holding up trains from London to the south coast. And it proposes
Labour has directed the party’s local councillors in town halls around the country to not work with the Green Party.
The call-outs include firefighters using breathing equipment when rescuing a dog from a burning house in Croydon last night, where the fire is thought to have started from a ceremonial candle.
Applications for the next series of The Great British Bake Off are now open, and the producers are seeking applications from the great bakers of Croydon for their 2027 series.
CROYDON CHRONICLES: When everyone was expected to ‘do their bit’ for the war effort, there was a brewing row at the Town Hall over payments of thousands of pounds to one of the richest families in the world.
