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Negrini draws ridicule for her £81 On The Buses guided tour

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Hold very tight please! Our transport correspondent, JEREMY CLACKSON, is ready to be taken for a ride around Croydon town centre, all in the name of a good cause

Croydon’s beleaguered £220,000 per year chief executive has attracted yet more ridicule after it has emerged that she and some architect chums are planning to stage a guided bus tour around Croydon town centre next month.

All for a one-way ticket costing a cool £81.44.

The guided tour was posted on Eventbrite earlier this week, around the time that Jo Negrini, the self-proclaimed “regeneration practitioner” was avoiding fielding any questions about the apparent collapse of the £1.4billion Westfield-Hammerson regeneration scheme of Croydon town centre.

Ding ding: Olive

The developers have been “reviewing” their scheme for more than 12 months, and still they won’t reveal the outcome of their deliberations.

Nor has Negrini had much to say about the abrupt departure from the Fairfield Halls (26 per cent ticket sales and 3.5* on TripAdvisor) of that venue’s artistic director, less than six months after the place re-opened, late, unfinished and at least £12million over budget all thanks to the company she helped appoint to oversee the refurbishment, Brick by Brick.

But don’t despair, because Colm Lacey, Negrini’s sidekick, the local authority employee who has followed her around from council to council, from Lambeth, to Newham, to Croydon, before she promoted him beyond his capabilities to become “the chief executive and founding director” of Brick by Brick, will also be on board the bus for this magical mystery tour.

A sort of Arthur to Negrini’s Olive, those who remember the sitcom On The Buses might suggest.

Ding dong: Arthur

Perhaps Negrini is missing going to Cannes, to attend the annual springtime hooker and boozefest that is MIPIM, so she needs to compensate for it by spending more time with developers, architects and her other chums from the property sector?

As news of the tour began to circulate on social media, reactions from Croydon residents and action groups were a mix of ridicule and fury.

The sheer gall of this stunt, at a time when the town centre is run-down, increasingly derelict and decaying, in large part because of policies Negrini has overseen and implemented at the council over the past six years, has angered enough people who pay her very generous salary through their Council Tax that some are considering staging protests and disruptions of the bus tour, or the promised “networking reception” to be held at the Fairfield Halls after the tour.

The tour is due to begin outside East Croydon Station at 6pm on Wednesday, March 18, and is expected to last 90 minutes.

That ought to be plenty of time for Olive and Arthur… sorry… Negrini and Lacey to lead their guests through what’s left of Allders and the Whitgift Centre after eight years of development blight caused by Westfield and the council. Though the chances are that they decide to give that particular delight a miss.

Murray, left, and Hendy seem to think a bus tour around Croydon is a good idea

Co-ordinating the tour with Negrini is Sir Peter Hendy, the one-time commissioner of TfL and now chairman of Network Rail (is he laying on his own personal Routemaster?) and Peter Murray, the chairman of one of those organisations Negrini so enjoys rubbing shoulders with, New London Architecture.

Murray claims to be “a keen cyclist and campaigner for cycling issues”, so he might be in for a bit of a shock when from his seat on the top deck he encounters the non-existent cycling infrastructure in Croydon’s town centre, where the car remains king.

The blurb for Negrini’s bus tour might offer a bit of a clue into what her as yet unrevealed “Plan B” might be in the event of the widely expected withdrawal from Croydon of Westfield. If it is, then it will be typical of Negrini’s administration that she would unveil such a plan to her architect and developer chums before ever considering consulting the people she is supposed to work for, the people and businesses of Croydon.

The Eventbrite page begins: “Described by Boris Johnson as the ‘Economic Powerhouse of South London’, Croydon is one of London’s major office headquarter centres.” Might Negrini be looking to replace the Westfield void with offices, simply copying what the borough’s burghers did in the 1960s?

According to Eventbrite, on the Negrini bus tour, “Chief executive Jo Negrini will introduce our guides for this Sir Peter Hendy Routemaster Tour of Croydon. Supported by Councillor Paul Scott; director of planning, Heather Cheesbrough; James Cook, planning director, R&F Properties UK Ltd; Alex Hall, senior development manager, Square Stone Hub; and Paul Jess, development manager for Pocket Living as we navigate our way through key Croydon developments including:

With a bit of luck, Olive and Arthur’s bus tour will get snagged up in the latest Purley Way traffic jam at Fiveways, and may never return.

But hey, it’s all for charidee… “The tour will be raising money for greater diversity in the built environment professions.”

So that’s alright then. Hold very tight please…


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