A partnership between Britain’s biggest housing associations and Croydon businesses will be launched at the Fairfield Halls next Tuesday, with the ambition of creating hundreds of jobs.
Visitors to the South London Jobs Fair on October 21 will be able to have a job interview on the spot, check out vacancies and business openings, get advice on CV writing, as well as review training courses and other opportunities, including apprenticeships and work experience placements. Continue reading
Sebastian Coe, the chairman of the London 2012 Olympic organising committee which promised to create a sporting legacy for London and the whole of Britain, now heads up the company which has put forward plans to bulldoze the Crystal Palace athletics stadium.
Lord Coe and Tory party donor Lady Xuelin Bates at the London Olympic Games in 2012. She has since staged lobbying events on behalf of ZhongRong
A brief public consultation was announced last week and an exhibition is being held at what was formerly known as the National Sports Centre.
The consultation offers four pretty bleak options for what was the home of British athletics for half a century. The proposals have been described as “a disgrace” and “disastrous” by senior figures involved in the sport at Crystal Palace.
Double Olympic champion Coe himself set one of his world records on the Crystal Palace track. In 1989, it was at Crystal Palace that he made his farewell competitive appearance in Britain.
Now, the former Conservative MP’s business interests see him being paid £2 million per year as the executive chairman of the sports marketing and lobbying firm CSM Strategic, the company which is behind the plans to “re-develop” Crystal Palace stadium, drawn up on behalf of London Mayor Boris Johnson. The scheme would likely see the destruction of the athletics stadium, potentially to be replaced by a free school on the site.
CSM Strategic is part of the Chime group of public relations companies originally set-up by Tim Bell, Margaret Thatcher’s favourite spin-doctor. CSM Strategic works mainly with international sporting bodies and cities wanting to stage prestigious international events.
Lord Coe, who is a vice-president of track and field’s world body, the IAAF, as well as chairman of the British Olympic Association, began working with CSM Strategic soon after stepping down as chairman of London Games organisers, LOCOG.
Jo Negrini: Croydon’s head of planning will not meet counterparts from many other Labour-run councils at MIPIM this week
Australian-born Jo Negrini, who was appointed as Croydon’s head of planning soon after Australia-based developers Westfield rode into town with their £1 billion super-mall scheme, is likely to cut a lonely figure as the MIPIM UK international developers conference gets underway in London today.
Negrini will be a rarity at Olympia: she will be a senior executive from a Labour-run London council.
Three Labour councils in the capital have pulled out of MIPIM UK, where according to The Guardian, “major property developers, billionaire investors and officials of your local council…” will be discussing “…the sale of public real estate, prime land already owned by you and me, to the private sector.”
The Guardian continued: “The marketing people brand this a property trade show, but let’s drop the euphemisms and call it the sales fair to flog off Britain.”
CROYDON COMMENTARY: Yesterday, David Callam explained why Segas House is wholly inappropriate to be used for a primary school, while questioning the architectural merit of the listed building.
Segas House, as it was in its prime, around the 1960s, and before it became dominated by Croydon’s skyscrapers
Here, LEWIS WHITE, a chartered landscape architect from Coulsdon, champions its Art Deco design and offers a useful future for this landmark building
As a Croydon resident who remembers Segas House when it was a working building, I have been thinking for several years – decades perhaps – since its abandonment into the very questions raised by David Callam. And having thought long, hard and deeply, I say: David Callam, you are very wrong!
Here is why. Continue reading
Three children have gone missing in the past month while in the care of Croydon Council.
The news of the children’s disappearances came in a written answer from Alisa Flemming, the council cabinet member for children, families and learning, at last week’s Town Hall meeting. Few details about the missing children were provided, although Flemming did write that, “Two of the missing young people are in our care as unaccompanied asylum-seeking children.
“The police are actively searching for all three young people and all is being done to achieve their safe return,” Flemming said.
London Mayor Boris Johnson wants to bulldoze 120 years’ worth of south London’s proud sporting heritage, with proposals to demolish Crystal Palace Stadium which have been dismissed by senior sports figures as “a disgrace” and “disastrous”.
The days of world records being set in front of packed crowds at Crystal Palace are long gone
It is surely more than coincidental that Johnson is simultaneously trying to drive through a scheme to sell-off a nearby chunk of Crystal Palace Park to a Chinese billionaire as the proposals to demolish the stands, the indoor training area and, possibly, the track as well have been put forward.
For nearly half a century, until 2011, Crystal Palace stadium was the home of British athletics. It was the first in this country to have a Tartan all-weather track, installed so that Britain’s runners, jumpers and throwers – who until then had been used to the sodden cinders of the old White City – could get experience of the modern surface ahead of the 1968 Mexico City Olympics.
The Palace has since been the stage for dozens of world records and British all-comers’ records – 51 of which still stand today – as well as hosting the athletics World Cup, Modern Pentathlon world championships, being the home for a while of London’s rugby league and American football franchises, and even being used as a venue for a visit from the Pope.
But the neglected and under-funded facilities at what was once proudly “the National Sports Centre” have faced an uncertain future since the Lee Valley Stadium was opened north of the river and London staged the 2012 Olympics. Continue reading
Segas House, right in the town centre and on Wellesley Road’s six-lane urban motorway: was it ever really suitable for conversion to use as a primary school?
CROYDON COMMENTARY: According to senior sources at the Town Hall, the scheme to convert the Grade II-listed Segas House into a primary school, the brainchild during the previous Tory council of Tim Pollard, has been abandoned because the building would cost too much to convert.
DAVID CALLAM puts forward another idea for what he suggests is no more than “a useless carbuncle”
Segas House stands on the corner of Park Lane and Katharine Street in central Croydon. Is it an architectural gem, an outstanding example of the Art Deco movement? Or is it a useless carbuncle?
Any suggestion that it might not be one of Croydon’s treasures will immediately raise hackles among those who want to preserve any structure, no matter how unprepossessing, that pre-dates the 1950s town centre building boom.
The Write Thing & Fairweather Productions presents
IN CELEBRATION OF OUR CULTURE
A Black History Month Event
Hosted by Juliet Alexander BBC
A Special Tribute To The Inspirational
The Mayor’s Office for Policing And Crime (MOPAC) and the Metropolitan Police Service will be visiting Croydon on November 4 to talk about the progress made against the Police and Crime Plan and hear local people’s views on policing in the capital.
Stephen Greenhalgh, Boris Johnson’s deputy mayor for policing and crime, Assistant Commissioner Helen King and borough commanders will be at Croydon Conference Centre on Surrey Street for the event.
Doors open at 6pm, the event starts at 6.30pm. Continue reading
Canon Colin Boswell used Croydon’s annual civic service yesterday to call on the people of the borough ”to encourage heroic teachers”.
Croydon Minster: civic service with strong message
The Vicar of Croydon’s remarks came in a sermon to the congregation in Croydon Minster and to the many civic dignitaries in attendance.
Earlier in the week, Ofsted inspectors had carried out a further “raid” on the Parish Church junior school, where the vicar is the chair of the governing body.
The very early return of Ofsted to inspect the Church of England school, just a month after the publication of critical findings about the school’s performance, is judged by local Labour politicians as being part of the Michael Gove-instigated national campaign by the government department to use inspections to force as many schools as possible to become privatised academies.
Oval Primary, Roke School and Archbishop Lanfranc are among the local schools to have undergone forcible academisation in recent years, often against the wishes of the staff and parents. The handover at these schools has often been rushed and badly managed.
“To inspect within just a few weeks of the publication of the critical report has given insufficient time for the school’s new senior management to make an impact on performance,” said a Town Hall source attending yesterday’s service. “It is clearly calculated. It is a shame to see Ofsted debased for party political purposes.”
CROYDON COMMENTARY: Having worked to establish a community organisation for East Croydon, ROD DAVIES finds it disappointing to find developers planning to introduce divisive “Apartment Apartheid” locally, and suggests further inequalities in which parts of the borough fund other areas
This news of segregated entrances is a disappointing development just as the East Croydon Community Group (now to be called ECCO) has just held a very inclusive and positive first public meeting last week.
What developers Redrow call the “Morello Quarter”, their development at East Croydon which will have separate entrances for social housing and private residents
I can understand how it adds to the marketing to people abroad who have fixed ideas about social housing tenants, and who will never live in the properties themselves and want to ensure the best return on their investments.
But I find it disappointing because the last thing we need is any more division at a time when we are trying to come together and support each other to make the whole community better.
The problem is that land and property owners have a free hand to limit supply to the market by driving up asking prices and impeding development through planning consultation.
The freshly decorated gallery at Stanley Halls. Painted by 60 local teenagers from The Challenge Organisation, the paints use colours discovered to have been previously used in this room
The transfer of Stanley Halls to a local community group in South Norwood has been included as a case study in English Heritage’s latest edition of Pillars of the Community.
Stanley Halls is one of just two examples of “asset transfers” from London included in the report, the other being the long-established and well-renowned Battersea Arts Centre.
“We are incredibly proud to be included in Pillars of the Community, or as we think of it, the Bible for heritage asset transfer,” Carol Clapperton, the chair of the Stanley People’s Initiative charity. Continue reading
‘a complex journey through art and life’
Exhibition continues: 4 October 2014 – 5 January 2015
Monday – Sunday 9am – 7pm
Free entry – all welcome
The Long Gallery | Maudsley Hospital | Denmark Hill | London | SE5 8AZ |
Can you help to bring a Christmas festival to Coulsdon this year?
Yulefest is a self-funded group with no council funding, trying to make Coulsdon town a very memorable place this Christmas.
An open-air ice rink, a Santa’s grotto, fairground and an array of market stalls selling gourmet food and handcrafted gifts are all in the plans this year.
But Yulefest needs your help to fund these. Continue reading
If you want to see The Goon Show performed live on stage, you had better get along to the Spread Eagle Theatre tonight. It could be the last performance of the show, ever, warns BELLA BARTOCK
They said that with his epitaph, I told you I was ill, Spike Milligan was having the last laugh.
The original Goons in one of their later revivals: Peter Sellers, Spike Milligan and Harry Secombe
I doubt that the inveterate subversive would be laughing much now, though, if he knew that those left in charge of his catalogue of work were effectively blocking the live performance of a couple of his scripts from his halcyon days of the 1950s with The Goon Show.
For this Goon Show revival, actors Phil Hemming (as Wallace Greenslade, the continuity announcer and so, soooo much more), Robert Coletta (as Milligan), Richard Usher (Peter Sellers) and Jim Rennie (Harry Secombe) recreate two of Milligan’s 1954 scripts. What might have been a straightforward task took the producer, Dave Freak, more than a year to bring to the stage.
This was not because of any great complexities in the staging, or problems with the casting. It was because those left in charge of the estates of Milligan, Sellers and Secombe, and possibly the BBC, too, have been thorough-going pains when it has come to granting permission – or taking a licence fee – to permit the stage recreation.
Permission was given for no more than six stagings of the scripts. Just six! So after a couple of nights in Birmingham last month, and four nights here in Croydon at the Spread Eagle – the last being tonight – that’s it. No more Goon Show on stage, unless the various executors can agree to allow the Old Joint Stock Theatre Company to continue to perform the show. Continue reading
Amid the furore created this week around the publication of Kevin Pietersen’s “autobiography”, which he got someone else to write for him, one twist has been the 34-year-old former England batsman’s realisation that if he really does harbour serious ambitions of playing Test cricket again, then he needs to start playing four-day county matches.
Kevin Pietersen: admits he needs to play more county cricket
And with a vaccuum at the top of the Surrey hierarchy following the forced retirement through injury of skipper Graeme Smith, Pietersen may make himself an obvious choice as the new county captain.
Inside Croydon suggested Pietersen as a candidate for the captaincy last month. The South African-born batsman already has a working relationship with Surrey’s South African-based coach, Graham Ford, and The Oval’s delay in confirming any permanent appointment for stand-in skipper Gary Wilson suggests that they are still looking at the leadership issue. Continue reading
The unequal courtroom battle between local residents and Sutton Council together with their £1 billion industrial contractors over plans to build an incinerator on Beddington Lane continues at the Royal Courts of Justice today, with no expense spared – from public money – by the local authority to try to squash the wishes of people who don’t want to be forced to breathe polluted air for generations to come.
Justice Patterson: hearing the Viridor case
According to a courtroom wig-count conducted by Shasha Khan, the activist fronting the judicial review, the combined legal teams for Viridor and Sutton in court yesterday could have cost local ratepayers as much as £48,000 for just one day – and that was just in juicy fees to one of two senior “silks”, or Queen’s Counsel.
Khan and the Stop the Incinerator Campaigners who have brought the judicial review were forced to make a 11th-hour appeal for more money via Inside Croydon earlier this week to raise £5,000 just to be allowed to bring their case to court.
Croydon’s previous, Tory-led council administration – who have spent their first few months in opposition re-affirming their credentials for backing rich landlords over the interests of tenants’ rights – gave planning permission to a multi-millionaire developer to have “Poor Doors” in one of the most prestigious new builds in the borough.
How Redrow’s Morello development is being marketed, with 2-bed flats selling for £350,000. And no “riff-raff”
The Morello development on Cherry Orchard Road, next to East Croydon Station (what was formerly known as the Menta site), is being developed by Redrow and is already offering two-bedroom flats for sale for an eye-watering £359,000.
But to keep the owners of these Yuppie flats a comfortable distance away from those in the handful of affordable homes being included in the new blocks, Redrow have embarked on a policy of “apartment apartheid”, with separate entrances for the different “classes” of property.
Last Friday, one of Croydon’s hidden treasures, a work of art which had been kept hidden in the Town Hall vaults for too many years, was unveiled for public exhibition at St Andrew’s Church.
DAVID MATTHEWS, the headmaster of St Andrew’s School, delivered a fascinating talk about the background to “Out of Great Tribulation” by the acclaimed local artist Cicely Mary Barker, and we reproduce an edited version here
“Out of Great Tribulation” was commissioned by Harold Watson, a well-known Croydon businessman, to be hung as the main feature in the memorial chapel in the now demolished Norbury Methodist Church. It was donated in memory of his daughter, Peggy, who died while still in her teens.
Cicely Mary Barker finished it in 1949, four years after the end of the Second World War. With the changes to the siting of Norbury Methodist Church, the painting was acquired by Croydon Council. St Andrew’s is extremely grateful to the Council, and Sam Smith their archivist, for allowing it be to be hung, on loan, in St Andrew’s Church. I hope you will all agree that this is a far better place for it to reside than the vaults beneath the Clocktower.
