Bad gateway: the message that anyone trying to access information on the council website got this morning. Croydon is spending £42m over four years for this digital-first ‘transformation’
By STEVEN DOWNES, Editor, Inside Croydon
Poet Brian Bilston was on stage at the Ashcroft Theatre last night*.
In between frequent references to Clare Grogan, his cat and the seemingly unstoppable onward march of AI, Bilston read from his poem Message to the 14-year-old Me.
Given time
and with a little luck on your side –
you can achieve a basic level of competence
in a limited number of simple, unremarkable things
Bilston might have been writing about Croydon Council when he came up with those lines. Continue reading
WALTER CRONXITE, Political Editor, on the grim budget report from the borough’s failed Mayor
The Purley Literary Society was set up in 1901 by the Congregational Church as a mechanism to “improve” agricultural workers #, and give them an alternative to visiting the pubs and fleshpots of Purley during the winter months. The Purley Lit has continued ever autumn and winter ever since, just losing a few years due to world wars, and more recently, covid. 
CROYDON IN CRISIS: In 2018, Daniel Cox blew the whistle when he discovered that a contractor was charging the council almost double what he was being paid for his work. Cox was dismissed, and the council has spent the past eight years working with the same contractor to gag him.
CROYDON CHRONICLES: Much has changed around the town centre over the last 50 years, not least in the area of accessibility to public buildings and spaces. Some of the pioneering work was catalogued by a woman with cerebral palsy, whose scrapbook is now part of the Minster archives, as DAVID MORGAN explains
Jason Perry, Croydon’s self-important but impotent Mayor, continues to spend hundreds of thousands of pounds of tax-payers’ money on personal publicity stunts and political appointees.
