Two hundred years ago, when an ageing monarch was about to be crowned and there was dispute over which members of his immediate family he would allow to attend the ceremony at the Abbey, it was not all sweetness and light at a Croydon Coronation party.
By our royal affairs correspondent, JOANNA PLUMLEY
Not invited: just like Queen Caroline 200 years ago, Meghan Markle doesn’t have a ticket for the Abbey
Meghan Markle’s not turning up tomorrow, right?
And even if she did roll up, without a ticket, you don’t think she would be greeted by prizefighters as bouncers, have the Abbey doors slammed in her face (more than once), and finally sent away with a flea in her ear, do you?
But that’s exactly what happened 200 years ago at the coronation of one of King Charles’s ancestors, when George IV had his own wife sent away from the ceremonials.
Bitter disputes among members of the royal family are nothing new.
The reason this comes with some Croydon relevance is that the dispute between George and Caroline of Brunswick, his estranged and exiled wife, was so bitter that not only did it cause the postponement of the coronation by a year, but when the big day finally came around, it led to uproar and fighting at what was supposed to be a celebration party held on Duppas Hill.
STEVE WHITESIDE with an update on how the council’s planners and planning enforcement teams continue to fail the borough’s residents, while turning a blind eye to developers ignoring conditions
Going…: 158 Purley Downs has been demolished despite planning conditions laid down by the council not being met
Last month, I wrote about the sad saga of 158 Purley Downs Road in Sanderstead, where the demolition of a family house by a developer keen to replace it with seven money-spinning new homes has gone ahead without key conditions laid down by the borough’s planning committee being met – or even close to being met.
It is a prime example of how the council’s professional planners seem to go out of their way to assist some development firms.
In the past few days, the applicant – which was originally developers New Place Associates and HTA Design, both of whom have well-documented links to senior members of the Croydon Council planning staff – finally disclosed a topographical survey of the site, including levels to the land adjacent.
It is dated August 2021. Continue reading
If the pomp and circumstance and all the red, white and blue this weekend is not for you, perhaps a quieter, more reflective time with lots of just blue – bluebells – might be a better way to spend the Coronation weekend.
Bluebells are at their best now, blooming in woods across the south-east, and there couldn’t be a better time to witness a truly wonderful sight. The Woodland Trust has come up with a list of some of its top bluebell woods to visit over the bank holiday weekend.
Many of the country’s largest woodland conservation charity’s 1,000 woods are a lavender haze of delicate bluebells at this time of year, and the Trust’s citizen science database Nature’s Calendar shows that this weekend could well be prime bluebell time in your local wood. Continue reading
Elaine Clancy, the Chief Nurse at Croydon’s NHS Trust, working across Mayday and Purley hospitals, has been promoted to become the Chief Nursing Officer for the NHS across south-west London.
Promoted: Elaine Clancy is now CNO for NHS South West London
As Chief Nursing Officer, NHS South West London announced, Clancy “will have an integral role in developing plans to improve health and care services and be responsible for ensuring they become a reality for local people”.
“I have been part of the NHS in south-west London for 22 years and although we can be proud of our achievements to date, there is still much more we can do to support our local services deliver the best care possible,” said Clancy, who has worked in the NHS for 30 years.
“I am delighted to take on this new role and look forward to working with organisations, teams and individuals to drive forward plans for the benefit of our local people. Continue reading
Across the country, outside London, people have been going to the polls in local elections today, often voting for the same tribe just as they always do, or voting on national issues over which the councillors they are voting for have no say.
But now there could be a new way of assessing the effectiveness of our local representatives – as WALTER CRONXITE has been crunching official figures to discover which Croydon councillors have been working hardest for their residents
Inside Croydon can today reveal that, according to official figures obtained via a Freedom of Information request, for the civic year 2022 to 2023, after having logged just three pieces of casework in the 10 months between last May and February, the Town Hall’s laziest councillor is none other than… [drum roll]…
Taking the piss: Clive Fraser
Unfortunately for the good people of Addiscombe West, Fraser is a Labour councillor for their ward.
He only got elected there last May because the Labour members in his home ward, South Norwood, where he was a councillor from 2018, had worked him out, marked his card and de-selected him.
Fraser is an unrepentant, unreformed Newman Numpty.
As Labour chief whip, the Town Hall enforcer under the discredited former council leader Tony Newman for almost four years, Fraser played a key part in silencing any opposition about the way the council was being run, and was involved in the unlawful distribution of data hacked from this website, actions which were an important factor in Tory Jason Perry eventually winning the mayoral election. Continue reading
Expansion: ULEZ has helped to improve air quality in central London. The Tories oppose it
The Evening Standard, not a newspaper which regularly supports London’s Labour Mayor, nor is it known for its fervent support of environmental issues, has come out on the side of Sadiq Khan and plans to extend the Ultra Low Emission Zone – ULEZ – to outer London.
That ULEZ expansion will include Croydon, where air quality monitors regularly show levels of pollutants to be three or four times greater than supposedly legal limits.
And a leader column in the London evening paper last night asserted: “Sadiq Khan is right to put air quality at the heart of his mayoralty.” Continue reading
Trinity School has two alumni – one a former pupil, the other currently in the Sixth Form – playing for Great Britain’s senior women’s team in the water polo World Cup in Berlin this week.
World Cup players: Kathy Rodgers, the GB women’s team captain (right), and Lucy Bullock in Berlin this week
Lucy Bullock and team captain Kathy Rodgers were both called up for the squad for the two-day tournament which will determine Britain’s standings ahead of the European championship qualifiers next month.
Water polo’s a tough old game, and Britain’s had a tough couple of days, losing all three of their group games, with a 15-12 defeat to hosts Germany last night probably their best display.
They face a lunchtime game today against Ukraine to decide seventh and eighth place in the tournament (click here for live feed webcast from 1pm UK time). Continue reading
A team of highly paid lawyers representing cash-strapped Croydon Council returned to the Supreme Court this morning for an appeal hearing that the authority has brought against a disabled woman and her three children. Yes…
“Despite going bankrupt, Croydon Council are happy to use public money for a legal challenge to harm the most vulnerable in their borough and beyond,” said a member of Housing Action Southwark and Lambeth, an organisation which together with some pro bono legal firms has been providing support for Ruba Imam, the woman at the centre of the case.
The homelessness charity, Crisis, has acted as the intervener on behalf of Imam, a mother and wheelchair user, who won their appeal case against Croydon, as local housing authority, for keeping them in temporary and unsuitable accommodation for longer than the legal limits.
The council decided that Imam’s temporary accommodation was unsuitable as long ago as June 2015. She was still stuck in the same unsuitable accommodation 12 months ago, almost seven years later, when her case reached the Appeal Court.
CROYDON IN CRISIS: Not a single fine has been raised on one Healthy School Street after four months of a six-month trial, all because the council has failed to instal any ANPR cameras, leaving the cash-strapped authority missing out on huge sums of income.
EXCLUSIVE by STEVEN DOWNES
Zoned out: Healthy School Street signs are pointless when the council does not activate its cameras
There is mounting evidence that, under the pro-pollution Tory Mayor Jason Perry, Croydon Council is deliberately undermining, even sabotaging, its own clean air and motor traffic reduction schemes.
Inside Croydon has received reports of missing ANPR cameras – Automatic Number Plate Recognition – from outside a handful of schools in the borough, and we have seen the official response to a Freedom of Information request that confirms that at one designated Healthy School Street there has not been a single penalty charge notice raised after four months of a six-month trial – all because the council has failed to instal the cameras to check the registrations of cars driving past the school.
“The scheme is clearly not active and a total white elephant,” a concerned parent of a pupil at the affected school told Inside Croydon.
“It’s an absolute scandal.”
Motorists who drive down designated school streets without proper permits could face fines of up to £130 a time. Unless, that is, the council has failed to instal or switch on the cameras intended to police the use of the road. Continue reading
With clampdowns on even the most modest protests and security alerts over shot-gun cartridges found in the grounds of Buck House (someone been taking potshots at the ducks again?), the operation for this weekend’s Coronation of King Charles III is likely to be more police state than Dixon of Dock Green.
Here, South Norwood political activist IAN BONE (pictured left), once dubbed ‘The most dangerous man in Britain’, recalls a gentler age, when he was prevented from disrupting a visit by the Prince of Wales
(Warning: may contain some Anglo-Saxon terms that won’t be used in the medieval ceremony at the Abbey on Saturday)
I walked across the green to Swansea Guildhall, where Prince Charles was visiting.
It was July 1969, and the English-born eldest son of Elizabeth Windsor had just been through his fairytale investiture to become “Prince of Wales”. Which is all very well if you’re daft enough to believe in fairies or the monarchy.
Fairytale: 1969 and Charles Windsor was made Prince of Wales by his mother
I’d been sitting with a couple of mates in Joe’s Ice Cream Bar on St Helen’s Road as we grumbled into our coffees about The German Oaf (a common Welsh insult for HRH), repeating the often used phrase “a fanfare for a prince is a fart in the face for the people”.
As part of his Wales tour and the ceremonials after the investiture, Charles was at the Guildhall where he’d very generously declared Swansea to be a city.
Then suddenly I was windmilling, my legs in midair as I was being well and truly lifted by a couple of burly cops and shoved in the back of their patrol car and was back outside Joe’s Ice Cream Parlour.
“Am I nicked?” I asked. Continue reading
One in the Eye again: Croydon’s a source of endless amusement
No sooner had the nation’s best-selling satirical magazine had a good laugh (again) at Croydon’s expense after featuring the latest example of the council’s bungled handling of vast amounts of public money, than the borough has popped up again in the pages of Lord Gnome’s fine organ for another thorough-going bit of ridicule.
Two weeks ago, on Private Eye’s regular Rotten Boroughs page, posters that supposedly promote Croydon as London’s 2023 Borough of Culture were derided as baffling, “pathetic” and “meaningless”, as they took centre stage in what the Eye called its “Quiz of the Week”.
The former public schoolboys in their Soho offices had stumbled across some of the posters at a “sarf London” railway station. Continue reading
Ahead of the opening of Harris Academy Beulah Hill in September, the school – currently part of Harris South Norwood – has launched its own eco centre, based in part of the ancient North Wood, with an eco classroom, a pond, beehives and dense areas of woodland with plenty of nesting and foraging opportunities for the local wildlife.
Eco tour: guests and staff were guided around the school’s new eco centre by prefects and pupils
“In the heart of the city, this area is an untouched portion of natural beauty- a fantastic resource that will not only be beneficial to the school and its pupils, but also to the local community and wider Harris Federation community,” a spokesperson for the school said.
At a ceremony to mark the opening of the eco centre, guests included Rebecca Hickey, the Harris Federations’ secondary director; Lee Malin, assistant secondary director; Karen Haward, geography consultant; Anna Orridge, Harris’s green coordinator; and Dill Anstey the vice-principal of the Sixth Form. Continue reading
After four very tall towers have recently been erected opposite East Croydon Station, residents are questioning whether three more will be too many, reports BARRATT HOLMES, housing correspondent
Quid pro quo: the provision of an NHS centre and £20m on engineering the site may reduce the developers’ community contributions
The developers of the latest 775-flat residential scheme proposed for Croydon town centre, on the College Green site, will need to spend at least £20million to reinforce the podium on which their three blocks are to stand between the Fairfield Halls and Croydon College.
The cost of the massive engineering project, effectively under-pinning the residential blocks that are to be built in part over a closed underground car park, emerged at a public consultation session staged on behalf of the developers last night. Continue reading
Damage and wanton vandalism has caused massive distress to the gardeners and plot-holders at Pampisford Road Allotments in South Croydon, with the break-ins, with veg plots wrecked and greenhouses smashed, being blamed on a group of travellers camped on Purley Way Playing Fields.
Smashed: one of the allotment greenhouses, damaged by ‘visitors’ camped on the Purley Way Playing Fields
The allotments are owned by Croydon Council, and rented out to green-fingered residents who take great pride in what they are able to produce each year.
But many of those hopes for this spring and summer growing seasons have already been dashed by what one plot-holder described as “absolutely terrible” damage.
In an email from the council to the allotments committee, sent last week and seen by Inside Croydon, it was acknowledged that the travellers had been responsible for the damage. Continue reading
Top performers: the Estonian National Symphony Orchestra, performing in Croydon later this month
Inside Croydon subscribers can win a pair of tickets – worth almost £90 – for the next big international concert being staged at the Fairfield Halls’ world-renowned Concert Hall, by the Estonian National Symphony Orchestra on Thursday, May 25.
The Estonian National Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Olari Elts, will be performing the third concert in the Fairfield Halls’ International Orchestra Series, with world-renowned pianist Barry Douglas headlining with Rachmaninov’s Piano Concerto No2.
And Inside Croydon is giving away THREE pairs of tickets for this gala performance in a simple competition exclusively for paid-up patrons to this website, who will be given the VIP treatment on the night, with a chilled glass of fizz for each winner and their guest upon arrival.
Detectives are appealing for witnesses to a knife attack at Sanderstead Station on Saturday night.
Railway stop: police are seeking witnesses who were near Sanderstead Station just before 11pm on Saturday
A 27-year-old man was stabbed in the back, but is in a stable condition and his injuries are not thought to be life-changing.
The British Transport Police is handling the investigation.
Today, they told Inside Croydon: “Officers were called to Sanderstead railway station at 10.54pm on April 29 to reports of a stabbing.
“Paramedics also attended, and a 27-year-old man was taken to hospital for treatment to a single stab wound on his back. Continue reading
Proposals for another 775 flats, including a 38-storey tower, on a two-acre site next to the Fairfield Halls are being laid out for public consultation tomorrow.
Rising high: Delta’s 775 flats will be in addition to the 2,400 homes planned or already built in a cluster around Park Lane
The scheme is being brought forward by asset managers Delta Properties, who acquired the College Green site at a massive discount in Croydon Council’s fire sale just over a year ago.
The site was supposed to be developed by Brick by Brick, the council-owned house-builders, with the profits from the sale of flats helping to defray the cost of the Fairfield Halls refurbishment. But Brick by Brick, under managing director Colm Lacey, made a hash of the scheme from hubristic beginning to its sorry end, costing Council Tax-payers tens of millions in the process. Continue reading
Four men have been charged with the murder of Tyrese Miller, who was shot dead near Mitcham Common in the early hours of April 4.
Murder victim: Tyrese Miller
Detectives from the Metropolitan Police made the arrests last Wednesday.
The four charged are Manuel Paulo, 19, of Garrett Lane SW17; Kavaun Morrison, 18, of Swain Close SW16; Armani McClymont, 20, of Camden Way, Thornton Heath; and Denzel Kwateng, 20, of Parkway, New Addington.
All four have been charged with murder and possession of a firearm with intent to endanger life. Continue reading
Towering concerns: Bellway said that they’d keep the listed diving board – largely because they have to – but their application for blocks of flats off the Purley Way has been rejected
Housing correspondent BARRATT HOLMES on how things have not gone swimmingly for one of the country’s biggest housebuilders as its plans for 180 homes by Purley Way playing fields have gone down the plughole
Croydon Council’s professional planners, after encouraging a major house-builder to increase the scale and height of a development for the site of the former Purley Way Lido, and to include a 10-storey tower, have now refused the project planning permission because it includes a too-tall, 10-storey tower.
The plans for 89 Waddon Way, submitted to the council in March 2022 by builders Bellway, set out how they wanted to redevelop the former Wyevale Garden Centre site to build 180 homes plus the usual “retail opportunities”. The lido that was originally on the site was closed in 1979 and the pool filled in, after which the garden centre operated there until late 2018.
Bellway named their project “The Platform”, recognising the former lido’s Grade II-listed art deco diving board, which still overlooks the site. On the basis that the diving board is a listed structure that cannot be meddled with by the developers, Bellway decided to make a feature of it, with the homes built around it.
Not that the diving board was to be the tallest aspect of the project. As part of its scheme, and after advice from Croydon’s planners, Bellway included an overbearing and ugly 10-storey block of flats. Continue reading
Up, up and away: balloon festivals are a common sight today, but 200 years ago such flights were laden with deadly risk for pilots and crew
SUNDAY SUPPLEMENT: Croydon’s association with pioneering aviation is focused on the former airport. But DAVID MORGAN has found evidence of an historic flight over the town that took place almost 100 years before Britain’s first international airport was opened
The importance of Croydon Airport to the history of British aviation is (relatively) well known, but few of those even with a deep knowledge of the history of Croydon will know about a pioneering balloon flight that took place over the town in 1824, and which ended in tragedy.
The flight was some 40 years after the Montgolfier brothers had first taken passengers up in their balloon, watched by Marie Antionette, in 1783. The English Channel was first crossed in a balloon flight by Jean-Pierre Blanchard and Dr John Jeffries a year later. Continue reading
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