This is Croydon: the poorly researched music trail has failed to excite residents or visitors. Watch out for a ‘re-launch’ in 2024
BOROUGH OF VULTURES: Fewer than 500 people have bothered to use the special app intended to guide them around the town centre’s historic music locations. EXCLUSIVE by STEVEN DOWNES
“Have we already fucked it up?”
According to official meeting minutes obtained from the Greater London Authority, that was the question posed by an arts professional at a meeting of Croydon’s Borough of Culture steering group meeting in July, after the first three months of the cobbled-together programme of mostly mismanaged and ill-considered events.
If the borough’s art professionals suspected that then, they must surely know it now.
Croydon’s Borough of Culture, using a £1.3million grant from the Mayor of London, is limping into its final three months with little to show for the exercise, and even less on the “Upcoming events” section of its promotional website. But while several genuine arts organisations were snubbed by the grant-awarding committees, business interests and PR firms have been raking in hundreds of thousands of pounds of public cash.
Money has been squandered at every turn, but surely nowhere more so than the £225,000 chucked at the “Music Heritage Trail”.
Crap app: the Heritage Trail app’s content is poorly written and badly edited
The Music Heritage Trail is one of the “Flagship” projects of Croydon’s year as the Borough of Culture. It received the largest single grant from the Mayor of London’s fund.
As Inside Croydon reported earlier this year, the project lead working on the Music Heritage Trail was budgeted to be paid £250 per day, while actively seeking unpaid volunteers to work as tour guides, “oral historians” and exhibition assistants.
The total budget for the Music Heritage Trail is £350,000, which includes additional money from the Greater London Authority.
And while the Borough of Culture was three months late in starting, the Heritage Music Trail was later still, not being “unveiled” until June.
What the public has got from all this is a badly researched and poorly devised scheme that asks members of the public to download an app to their smartphones and follow a series of pavement plaques, mostly laid around the town centre.
As we reported in August, “What’s been delivered is a mural… that is hidden away in a little-seen, unsignposted corner of what’s left of Queen’s Gardens, 25 paving slabs that look like drain hole covers, and a thrown-together app with content that is poorly written and edited, as well as being contradictory and incomplete.”
Inside Croydon has had it confirmed by the council that after six months, the Music Heritage Trail app has been downloaded a grand total of… 458 times.
The 458 figure was provided at Wednesday night’s Town Hall meeting of the council by Tory councillor Andy Stranack, the cabinet member responsible for arts and culture in the borough. Stranack was responding to a question posed by regular contributor, Ken Towl.
iC suspects even that number has been inflated, by willing council gofers under instruction to download the wretched app after the formal question was submitted. When we checked online last month, barely 100 eager culturistas had chosen to download the Music Heritage Trail app.
Bungled arts festival: Mayor Perry went ahead with the Borough of Culture, handing Andy Stranack (right) the task of delivering it
As Inside Croydon reported earlier this month, only 1,000 people downloaded the plastic giraffe app, for the anti-cultural trail around the town centre, for which business organisation Croydon BID was handed £50,000 of arts funding.
That, though, looks excellent value if compared to the Music Trail, which we now know has cost more than £750 for each and every download.
As Stranack told the Town Hall Chamber this week, “The app is part of a wider project celebrating Croydon’s Music Heritage including a new exhibition scheduled to open at Museum of Croydon in February 2024, walking tours, a programme of oral history collecting, a mural in Queens Gardens and an education programme including new learning resources for primary and secondary school children to learn more about Croydon’s music in school or through visits to the Museum.”
Stranack failed to mention paying for the “silent disco” event at the unveiling of the mural, which was so poorly attended that it saw staff from Grey Label, the PR company hired by the council to promote the Borough of Culture, having to make up the numbers and bobbing around in Queen’s Gardens with the expensively hired headphones on…
Drain on resources: the Music Heritage Trail plaques are easy to miss, even if equipped with the app
Perhaps prompted by the pathetically poor take-up of the app after six months, Stranack said, “Early 2024 will see a renewed focus on music heritage including further promotion of the app and the trail will take place as part of the music heritage programme alongside the exhibition launch.”
This latest Borough of Culture flop will pose renewed questions about how the year-long shambles was thrown together, and even raise again the misjudgement of Mayor Jason Perry in going ahead with the arts festival when the bankrupt borough is struggling to administer even basic, day-to-day functions.
It will also throw the spotlight on the steering committee, which comprises more than 40 representatives of the borough’s various cultural organisations, but also plenty of vested interests and businesses (for example Boozepark, that well-known cultural destination, and Croydon BID, the organisation representing some of the borough’s wealthiest firms), hanging around to see how they can profit from the public purse.
Officials have maintained that all funding decisions around the Borough of Culture have been made properly, with no steering committee members present when they have also been bidding for grants. Why any grant bidders were ever allowed on to the steering committee at all has never been answered.
And given the example of the £50,000 wasted on Croydon BID’s art-less plastic giraffes, and other, even more questionable funding decisions, it will become ever more difficult for the council, or the office of Mayor of London Sadiq Khan, to justify some of the grants made under 2023’s “Borough of Vultures”.
Read more: £250 per day fees paid to lead on borough’s Heritage Trail
Read more: It’s hard to find signs of the borough’s musical heritage trail
Read more: GLA has few checks on how £1.3m Culture grant is being spent
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Such a joke. Although I’m not surprised that this Borough of Culture has been a damp squib, it’s a real shame. Appears to have been zero engagement with communities and little to no advertising of the few events that occurred (had no idea about the app or launch event personally, although have seen some of the drain covers around the centre).
Wouldn’t have expected any better from a Mayor who makes a living from selling plastic tat to the tasteless.
Did expect better from Councillor Andy Stranack, the Cabinet Member for Communities and Culture. This was his chance to shine and he blew it, despite the extra £27,503 he gets for holding those additional responsibilities. He’s managed to make his Labour predecessor, Oily Lewis, look gifted
Where are our local “personalities” in all this mayhem of nothing?
I know on the concert circuit there have been many comments as to where are the likes of Croydon’s very own Ralph McTell, Captain Sensible, etc? Fairfield would have been ideal instead of the usual tribute artistes.
Ralph has been touring recently so we know he is still active, but I bet the organisers of this “Culture fiasco” didn’t even bother to follow up suggestions. They’ve had over a year to sort something out.
Cllr Stranack and staff… there is still time. Show us you care about live music and CULTURE, not expensive apps.
Maybe they have followed up but no one wants to be seen as complicit?
Ben in his comment at the start had it spot on. Zero engagement with the Community.
Giraffe’s, Digital App, Queens Gardens.
There is more Culture groing on the pavement of London Road courtesy of Croydon Councils ability to manage – well anything.
Croydon Council have created a lasting mockery of the year of Culture in a multitude of acts of vandelism masquerading as administration and none of them in the public interest.
Croydon must be the first Borough to actually reduce cultural opportunies in the Borough in celebration along with it’s reduction of access to library facilities.
But honestly, can the Council be blamed in isolation for its Cultural plans failing.
The answer does reside in the critical success factors of what makes a successful Borough.
The primary and most important factors along with a workable plan are
Knowledge
Competence.
Reputation (especially for honesty)
Communication
Inclusivity
And the most important – Trust.
The total absence of those Critical success factors would mean any organisation would struggle to deliver anything let alone inspire anyone to volunteer, assist, fund or support them in any way. In fact the more absent those factors are the more chance there will be be passive resistance by those in the Borough and increasing active protests.
Despite having many good people this Council and its leadership has by its own actions created an environment of failure and a lack of credibility to deliver anything.
It is also distrusted even within it’s own workforce.
If you had £2bn that would clear much of the debt and leave a working pot for improving the Borough.
Being honest ask yourself this.
Would you trust Mayor Perry, CEO Katherine Kerswell, Cheesebrough et al to spend that money well and deliver worable initiatives to improve this Borough for the long term for the good of ALL residents?
IC would you like to do a Yes/No vote for the new year?