Dudley Mead: deputy leader of Croydon Council, and a big fan of Fairfield Halls
The Warehouse Theatre, stripped of its £30,000 annual grant from Croydon Council, is now facing closure.
There is an appeal to try to raise money from the theatre’s supporters in a bid to re-open the venue, but there is also a growing anger at Croydon Council for allowing this to happen.
Inside Croydon thinks there might be a good deal more anger when the people of Croydon and across south London who cherish the Warehouse Theatre discover how much money Croydon Council spent with the nearby Fairfield Halls in April 2012:
£226,900.20.
In one month alone. More than seven times the value of the Warehouse’s annual grant.
Chubby Brown: regular star turn at Fairfield Halls who has his audience rolling around with laughter
The Fairfield Halls, which has also received millions from the council for capital works, has on its governing board none other than Dudley Mead, the deputy leader of Croydon Council and the cabinet member responsible for finance in the borough.
This, our lawyer, Mr Ebenezer Grabbit, of Messrs Sue, Grabbit & Runne, advises us to point out, is all purely coincidental.
Anyone who, despite paying the same amount of Council Tax that they paid in 2009 but for a considerably reduced level of services, has some spare dosh that they want to donate to the Warehouse Theatre cause, should click here.
- Inside Croydon: The website that brings you real news about Croydon, rather than front-page stories about dogs stuck down badger holes. Post your comments on this article below. If you have a news story about life in or around Croydon, email us at inside.croydon@btinternet.com
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- Croydon Warehouse on brink of closure (guardian.co.uk)
- Croydon replaces £765 per day interim with… another interim (insidecroydon.com)
The Philistine lot, who paid for 5 security guards to protect Book Token at a library consultation meeting in Upper Norwood, who paid for ugly and defacing (plus useless) gates in the Town Hall, who are building a palatial HQ they might not enjoy in two years’ time, cannot afford a £30,000 grant to keep the Warehouse Theatre open.
Croydon is fast becoming cultural wasteland. Is it really what the people of Croydon want?
“All that’s necessary for the forces of evil to win in this world is for enough good people to do nothing”. I may do too much, but it is far better than doing nothing. Wake up, before all you know and hold dear is destroyed.
I see Barwell is now running the line that they stopped funding the Theatre because it was insolvent …or was it insolvent because they cut its funding?
All small-scale, “community”-based theatres are uneconomic and rely on subsidy.
If someone had a look at the Fairfield Halls’ books, and removed the multi-million capital grant from the council and the vast amounts of other payments the Halls receive from the Town Hall, they would probably determine that Dudley’s favourite theatre venue is not a thriving business as well.
So is Barwell proposing that the government should pull the financial plug from the Royal Opera House or National Theatre, or that Croydon should withdraw funding from the Fairfield Halls now, too?
Not everybody gets subsidised.
But many businesses are not technically solvent as they rely on banks and their service providers for credit. So it’s a silly argument. How much does the Theatre owe to its creditors?
Pear Shaped loses money some months and makes money others. If every time we lost a bit of money I looked in the piggy bank and said “we’re in the red so we’ll have to shut” we would very soon have to shut.
But promotion doesn’t work like that. You take risks and lose money some months then make money others.
If the council has made it clear that it is going to slash …not even gradually or partially cut … the Theatre’s funding then it’s little wonder that its creditors are knocking on the door.
Now they are in insolvency many other businesses down the food chain will presumably never recover their debts.