And there it is.
East is West: another blunder by Croydon Council staff, who clearly haven’t checked the local conservation areas
In black and white.
“West India Estate Conservation Area”.
Except there is no such thing.
Mulberry Lane is in a part of Addiscombe where, in the 19th Century, the East India Company ran a military academy, training soldiers for its own private army that effectively annexed India.
Hence Croydon’s historic and well-known East India Estate Conservation Area.
Well, well-known to anyone with a decent copy of the A to Z or access to Google Maps.
But apparently not so well known to the people who work at Croydon Council.
Mayor Jason Perry, who is paid £82,000 per year, spent much of last night’s Town Hall budget meeting justifying £30million of cuts by defending the “hard work” of senior council officials – yet we have recently had more council executives on salaries of more than £100,000 per year than there ever was even when spendthrift Jo “Negreedy” Negrini was in charge.
Sign of incompetence: one of the ‘Thorton’ Heath PSPO signs
Yet despite presiding over such a top-heavy organisation at the cash-strapped council, basic jobs – like getting street signs right – seem to be beyond some of the council managers who are supposed to be in charge of these matters.
Last month, we reported how Croydon has put in place public signage that is… well, plain wrong. Last time, they managed to spell “Thornton Heath” wrong on legally-required warning signs, which had to be removed, rendering the council’s expensively assembled Public Safety Protection Area powerless, at least for a few days.
Over the “Thorton Heath” signs, the council tried to pass the buck to their contractor. Yet the council had still gone ahead and put dozens of signs in place – having failed to proof-read them before distribution, or simply failed to notice that anything was wrong at all. Getting something like this right at the second time of asking ends up costing more.
This latest example is incompetence allied with ignorance, a potentially dangerous combination. No one at the council noticed the “West India Conservation Area” gaffe before the roadsigns were cemented into place. It’s entirely possible that no one at the council even knew about the East India Conservation Area.
Whatever next? Issuing £190 penalty notices to motorists without first sending them the 65-quid warning letter…? Oh…
Our elected representatives, councillors, always adopt the position in which they say that council staff are beyond reproach and cannot be criticised. Until it is far too late, and then they do nothing about it anyway.
The councillors appear to forget that they are elected for exactly the purpose of keeping close check on what the paid staff are getting up to.
So it is that Mayor Perry and his fellow apologists for council incompetents and bunglers will wave away this mistake and doubtless express their deep trust and confidence in the council staff who, as each day helps to demonstrate, actually have no real idea what they are doing… Which in many respects is what got Croydon into the mess it is in in the first place.
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I looked up Mulberry Lane on Google Maps and found that the offending sign predates Perry’s promotion to his level of incompetence by 2 years. That means this error occurred under Newman and Negrini.
Not only that, but at the Outram Road of Mulberry Lane, between 2017 and October 2020, the sign read (or still reads) East India Conservation Area.
The same was true of the Havelock Road end up until October 2020. That’s right, they changed the sign from East to West. Maybe it was in recognition of the fact that the Havelock Road end is west of Outram Road.
The American word clusterfuck has fallen out of parlance of late, but it sums up Croydon council perfectly