Croydon Korfball Club secured a third straight season in the England Korfball League next year, following victory in the Champions Trophy over the Bank Holiday.
Korfball is a dynamic mixed team sport, originally from Holland. It’s a great way to keep fit, and since korfball teams need men and women, it is both sociable and competitive. Continue reading
Having a laugh in Croydon: Ava Vidal
It’s a good job Ken Livingstone says he will not seek elected office again, because he would never again be able to refute suggestions that he’s a right comedian after this Friday night in Croydon.
The former Mayor of London – more droll than his successor, and far less of a buffoon – is one of the headline “acts” at a Stand Up for Labour comedy night being staged at Ruskin House on Coombe Road on May 17.
And just to ensure that there are some real laughs to be had, the line-up for the evening also includes Joe Wells, impro from two Comedy Store players, and the biting humour of former London prison warden-turned-TV comedienne Ava Vidal.
Vidal said, “I am honoured to share the stage with Ken Livingstone – London’s original and best Mayor.” And she was not joking. We think. Continue reading
A senior Conservative councillor in Croydon has refused to answer questions about why he spent much of Saturday distributing leaflets in his ward, apparently as an overpaid delivery boy on behalf of multi-billion rubbish burners Viridor.
Delivery boy: Simon Hoar
Simon Hoar, councillor in Waddon ward and the £43,339 a year member of Mike Fisher’s inner cabinet responsible for “community safety and public protection” (yes, the man who did such a bang-up job on the day of the riots in 2011), went door to door in his ward, pushing 12-page newsletters from Viridor through his residents’ letter boxes.
This leaflet drop comes just days before Viridor’s application to build a waste incinerator at Beddington Lane goes before Sutton Council on Wednesday evening, for the second time in a matter of weeks. Sutton councillors were split at the meeting last month and deferred the decision. The civil servants at Sutton Council are clearly very keen to push through the Viridor proposals, despite widespread, cross-party opposition in Sutton and Croydon. Continue reading
Code Club, the scheme to bring practical knowledge about digital technology into primary school classrooms, has another local volunteer in Neil Spellings, a past contributor to this website.
Spellings has worked for more than 18 years in the IT industry, so will offer some special expertise and insight once he begins his sessions at Oval Primary.
He makes a compelling argument for the scheme, and its practical approach.
As Spellings observes, there’s been a rapid growth in the importance of software, much of it in the form of apps, many of which have been written in someone’s bedroom somewhere. “The ability to write software [is] going to be crucial for our economy if we’re to keep up with demand,” Spelling writes. Continue reading
Local comedian ANTHONY MILLER says that the success of Purley comedy couple Terry and June was no joke
A running gag of this website is a reference to the borough’s first couple as Terry and June.
Terry Scott and June Whitfield: their sitcom was staged in Purley 30 years ago, when Croydon was a byword for sophisticated suburbia
There is something of a fad at the moment for plays based on old sitcoms. Some fondly remembered TV situation comedies such as Rising Damp, of course, started out as stage plays, so reverse engineering them for the theatre is actually not that hard.
So in one article this week, Inside Croydon’s editor joked that one day soon, the Fairfield Halls will stage a revival of the Croydon-based sitcom Terry and June, whether watched or even featuring the Town Hall’s first couple, a stereotypical late-middle aged couple whose children have left home and are now trying to fill the existential void in their lives.
This, though, is impossible. There will never be a stage play of Terry and June because while you can recast the Steptoes and you can redo ‘Allo ‘Allo and you can find another actor to play the role of Jim Hacker, there was only one Terry Scott, and there is only one June Whitfield.
While Whitfield lives and works on, one of south London’s resident national treasures, Scott died nearly 20 years ago. Trying to recast Terry Scott would be like trying to recast Oliver Hardy. Cannot be done. A one-off. Continue reading
In truth, Eliza Rebeiro could be Inside Croydon’s hero of every week.
A real hero: Eliza Rebeiro
Since her mid-teens, this 20-year-old from South Croydon has exhibited considerable leadership, imagination and courage, establishing the inspirational Lives Not Knives campaign.
Later this month, all to try to raise a bit of dough for LNK’s projects, Rebeiro, together with her mother, Monique, will be jumping out of an aeroplane from a great height, in a sponsored sky dive.
The things some people do for a bit of publicity.
Any money raised will be spent on anti-violence roadshows to tour local schools.
With a sponsorship target of £3,000, LNK has just a week to reach that goal. You can help them by visiting their web page here and making a donation. Continue reading
The “family homes” built by Barratt Homes can’t be very good: according to the house-builder, few of those that it will be building at Cane Hill in Coulsdon will accommodate any children.
The child-catcher: Barratt Homes’ newest employee?
Apparently to avoid having to provide a school on the site, Barratt appears to be taking the expression “family planning” to new levels.
Another lip-service exercise in public consultation is taking place today and tomorrow in Coulsdon, where Barratt together with subsidiary brand Ward Homes is laying out its development plans for the former site of the old Cane Hill Hospital.
Under a scheme announced by London Mayor Boris Johnson last year, Barratt effectively gets to develop a publicly owned site, valued at around £250 million, without having to pay much until after the houses are built and sold off.
And now it has emerged that, with connivance from Croydon Council and Boris, Barratt do not intend making provision for the schooling of any of the children living in this large new housing estate. Sorry, “community”.
The public relations and publicity for the Cane Hill project is being handled by the ubiquitous White Label PR company, who got round to launching the website for the multi-million pound development on Tuesday this week. So that’ll give the public plenty of notice of the consultation, then, won’t it?
“Residents are being encouraged to have their say on plans to develop Cane Hill at a consultation event being held at Coulsdon Methodist Church on Friday, May 10 (10am to 7pm) and Saturday, May 11 (10am to 3pm),” the official website states. Continue reading
For a second year, South Croydon’s Earl of Eldon pub is staging a music festival, on Sunday May 26.
Promising 12 bands in 12 hours, the South Croydon Music Festival will run from noon in the pub grounds on the corner of the Brighton Road and Junction Road.
Proceeds raised from the day will go towards Help for Heroes.
The pub often has live music acts performing on Saturday evenings, as well as staging open mic nights and karaoke, and the day-long festival will be an extension of this, with an all-day barbecue on the go, plus charity raffles and auctions, and activities for all the family. Continue reading
Having seen Inside Croydon’s report last night about the many interesting interests of Dudley and Margaret Mead, Croydon Council’s very own Terry and June, loyal reader John Gass got in touch.
Margaret Mead: half of Croydon Council’s “first couple”, banking £90,000 a year between them in allowances
Our report was about the various charities, businesses and committees which the Meads are involved with, but which they had forgotten to declare on Croydon Council’s register of interests. Or which they had deliberately left off their declarations.
According to Gass, Margaret Mead, the £43,339-a-year Croydon cabinet member for adult services and health has been forgetful on other matters, too, such as getting around to writing to local residents on questions involving her council responsibilities.
“If, by any chance,” Gass wrote, “Margaret Mead agrees to speak with you regarding these issues, can you please remind her that she still hasn’t provided an answer to my question, which she promised she’d give by mid-December 2012?”
The Croydon Ecology Centre at Heathfield on Coombe Lane is staging a plant, seed and seedling sale this Sunday, May 12, from noon to 4.30pm.
Admission is free.
“If you’re looking for something pretty to plant in your garden or maybe grow a few vegetables, then this Bring & Buy plant sale is the place to be,” the organisers say.
“If you have any pot plants or surplus trays of seedlings, please bring them along and donate them to our Ecology Centre Plant Stand. All money raised on this stand goes to our Wildlife Rescue Fund and directly benefits local wildlife.” Continue reading
This year’s Crystal Palace Underground Festival is taking place between Thursday 27 and Sunday 30 June. And the organisers are looking for volunteers.
The free four-day community arts festival, now in its seventh year, will start with “fringe” events around Crystal Palace on the Thursday and Friday, in anticipation of the big festival weekend.
Westow Park will be the main festival hub on Saturday 29, with Sunday 30 focusing around the Upper Norwood Triangle.
“Our festival is special and helps our community come together as one so it’s important that it continues,” the organisers say. “If you can help with fundraising, grants or would like to sponsor or advertise with the festival, then do get in touch and help make the festival even bigger and better in 2013.” Continue reading
The move by Croydon Council to take over the running of the Fairfield Halls has thrown a supertrouper spotlight on some of the interests, and potential conflicts of interest, of leading members of the borough’s Establishment.
Margaret Mead: councillor for Heathfield ward, and one half of Croydon’s First Couple
After all, with senior members of Croydon Council deciding to spend millions of pounds of public money on a particular project or venue, it would be good to know that the decisions are being reached in the best interests of all the people of the borough.
The Favoured Halls’ tired schedule of professional wrestling, old-wave comics, trite tribute acts and stale spin-offs from second-rate television shows may not yet have managed to include a stage play version of the 1970s sit-com Terry and June.
Were they to do so, the casting director would have to look no further for the show’s stars than the Town Hall front bench of the Conservatives who run our council: Ladies and Gennelmen! We give you … Dudley and Margaret Mead.
Both are former Mayors of Croydon. Dudley has been on the council since 1980, is a former leader of the Conservative group on the council, and today is Mike Fisher’s deputy leader.
Both Dudley and Margaret are in the cabinet in Croydon’s Tory-run council (Dudley with the key role in charge of “capital budget”). With both of them in the cabinet, their household receives more than £90,000 a year in councillor allowances. It also means that when, last week, the cabinet met in secret to discuss the future of the Fairfield Halls, the Meads between them held one-fifth of the votes available when it came to decide whether Croydon Council should bail out the arts centre with millions of pounds of public cash.
The Meads appear to have a finger-in-all-the-pies approach to public life. Let’s have a look at what the Meads declare officially as their “interests”.
And then compare that with what they have failed to declare. Continue reading
LAST NIGHT’S TELLY: DAVID CALLAM, the former local newspaper business editor, reviews the opening episode of Mary Queen of the High Street, the Channel 4 series that spawned £2.7 million-worth of public grants, and poses an important question about her business involvements in Croydon
Lights, cameras, inaction: Mary Portas filming in a street market, though not Croydon’s Surrey Street
She came, she saw, and frankly, she had very little new to offer.
Mary Portas walked up and down Roman Road in east London not saying very much of note and repeating herself after every ad break, presumably to fill time. The stuff about better presentation and a wider variety of street food have both been tried in Surrey Street in Croydon, without any game-changing success.
And Portas’s destination shopping solution – turn an overstuffed junk shop into an overpriced junk shop – is hardly what we might expect from one of the country’s foremost authorities on retailing. Continue reading
The Crystal Palace Transition Town group is inviting residents from near and far to join them tonight for their annual meeting and celebration tonight at The Salvation Army Building, 58-60 Westow Street, SE19 3AF from 7.30pm.
“It’s been a very exciting year for us and we would like you to come along and hear about what we have been up to,” according to CPTT co-chair Sarah Hathaway.
In the last 12 months, CPTT’s projects have seen five local community food growing sites, including the prize-winning “Edible Garden” in Westow Park; the “Bugs Club” for Kids; Palace Pick-Ups: our community clean-ups; Palace Pints; Palace Preserves; Patchwork Farm; Palace Power, our community solar energy project; our “Local and Fair” group supporting Fairtrade and local businesses; our new transport group.
And it does not stop there. From this Saturday, May 11, there will be a weekly Crystal Palace Food Market, which will launch on Saturday May 11. The brainchild of CPTT steering group member Karen Jones, it promises to have at least a dozen food stalls of hand-picked ethically sourced food of the highest standards but within a price range that competes with the local supermarkets. Continue reading
Ten years ago, Croydon became the first London borough to become officially recognised as a Fairtrade borough, committed to boosting awareness and understanding of trade issues and promoting the purchase of Fairtrade products.
It is World Fairtrade Day on May 11.
And on Saturday May 18, to mark the borough’s anniversary Croydon Fairtrade Network (CFTN) is hosting a celebration event in the Clock Tower Café Foyer from 11am to 1pm. Continue reading
Croydon received a £100,000 government grant last year after programme makers involved with tonight’s new Mary Portas Channel 4 series had named Surrey Street on a list of markets that they wanted included in the scheme.
Mary Portas “Queen of the High Street”, visiting Croydon last year: there’s been little progress since
Mary Queen of the High Street starts its three-part series tonight, although while Croydon was among the towns chosen by the local government department to receive the six-figure grant for the Portas Pilot, aimed at reviving ailing high streets, Surrey Street will not feature strongly in the programmes.
According to a report in The Guardian, television producers involved with the new Portas TV series sent a list of their favourite locations to the Department for Communities and Local Government when it was picking key locations – including Croydon – to receive more than £2.5 million of public grants. Continue reading
TONY NEWMAN, the leader of the Labour opposition group on Croydon Council, says that he will use every legal power available to stop a £1 billion Viridor incinerator project being developed on the borders of the borough at Beddington Lane
Croydon Labour leader Tony Newman: opposed to incinerator
Just a few weeks after the planning committee in Sutton refused to pass council officials’ strong recommendation to inflict an incinerator upon us all, with the backing of Croydon’s Tory-run council, they are shamelessly bringing it straight back to the same committee next week, on May 15.
Bringing the matter back so swiftly, with no answers as to how the traffic pollution will be addressed or how the risks to public health will be answered, could deliver a decision that will blight the lives of tens of thousands of residents for the next quarter of a century, without the matter ever being put before the people.
Let me be crystal clear: an incoming Labour council in Croydon next May will use every legal power at our disposal to stop this incinerator being inflicted upon us, and we will work with politicians of any other political party, and none, to achieve our shared ends. Continue reading
Croydon’s Tory leadership, Mike Fisher and Gavin “I’m just a bag man” Barwell, have come in for a withering attack – from their own political party’s high command.
Blogged: Iain Dale – Tory party opinion-former
Iain Dale, the noted Conservative blogger, used his weekly diary on ConservativeHome.com, the website owned by none other than Lord Cashcroft, to slaughter Croydon Tories for “sitting on their fat arses” instead of getting out campaigning in support of their colleagues in Surrey ahead of last week’s less-than-successful county council elections.
Dale was fiercely critical of Croydon Conservatives for staging a cosy manifesto get-together fronted by Fisher, the rarely sighted leader of the Tory group at Croydon Town Hall, and Croydon Central MP Barwell.
Dale felt that the timing of the Croydon Conservatives’ event, so close to the county elections, was extremely poor judgement.
But Inside Croydon has also been contacted by Conservative figures in Sutton who are angry at their Croydon party colleagues for their equally slap-dash approach over the issue of the Beddington Lane waste incinerator. Continue reading
Bit by bit, some things are coming together. Thus, opening on London Road, West Croydon, in the past couple of weeks, is easyGym, where £1.5 million has been spent on refurbishment and equipment at the site of the Fitness First which was closed by the 8/8 riots in 2011.
West Croydon’s newest facility: £17.99 per month for easyGym
The business model is a low-cost gym based on the easyJet concept of Stelios Haji-Ioannou, and has an opening offer of no joining fee, flexible membership arrangements with no fixed contracts, charging from just £17.99 per month.
That’s considerably less than half of the basic £44 a month charges at the recently opened, council-owned Waddon Leisure Centre. Continue reading
What hope for Croydon’s future when so little interest is shown in its past? Local author BRIAN MELICAN on how the area’s links with one of the outstanding novelists of the 20th Century have been ignored, forgotten and … re-developed into a Tesco Express
DH Lawrence: the young author’s took a teaching job at a then new elementary school, Davidson Road, between 1908 and 1911, on an annual salary of £100
With the Red Deer pub under threat from conversion into (yet another) supermarket, there’s a sense of déjà vu: landmark pub, architecturally significant, on a sharp corner off of the Brighton Road, facing into the town centre… Swan and Sugarloaf, anyone?
You might muse on Croydon’s congenital lack of interest for its own history, especially when you learn that the Swan and Sugarloaf was a pub of literary pedigree, mentioned in a short story by DH Lawrence.
Granted, that side of things may have been hard to imagine during this particular watering hole’s latter years, what with the blaring big-screen TVs and mid-morning drinkers with toddlers in tow. But in its halcyon days, this was a pub of renown.
So how did the Swan and Sugarloaf soar to the lofty heights of English literature? And what was the notoriously elitist Lawrence doing in one of Croydon’s less salubrious establishments? In fact, scratch that: what was DH Lawrence doing in Croydon? Continue reading
With Croydon Council in recess, Addiscombe councillor Mark Watson is off on his latest charity trek.
Councillor Watson: ready for the long haul
This latest vertiginous effort will take him to north Africa’s highest peak, the 13,671ft Jebeel Toubkal in the Atlas Mountains in Morocco.
Watson is raising money to help end exploitation in tourism and to support a local community project sustained by tourism – the Education for All project, which provides schooling for girls in the area, and which Watson and his fellow climbers will be visiting. Few girls from remote, rural communities in the high Atlas Mountains get the chance to continue their education after primary school.
To help tackle this, Education for All has constructed the first girls’ boarding house for 24 girls, which was opened in 2008.
“It is important in international development for women to have the opportunity to be educated,” Watson said. Continue reading
Another week, another old pub (site), another supermarket.
Another super market: residents are being lobbied by Aldi about its plans for Coulsdon High Street
This time, it is the Red Lion site on Coulsdon High Street, long used as a car park, with plans put forward by German supermarket chain Aldi.
Aldi has distributed a leaflet in Coulsdon with a questionnaire seeking views on a proposal to build a foodstore with a “regional training facility” and 30 car park spaces on the Red Lion site, promising to create 30 jobs. Continue reading
There will be a bluebell and spring flower walk around Coulsdon’s Dollypers Hill, including In Wood (a noted ancient woodland area) with Malcolm Jennings, the Surrey Wildlife Trust‘s volunteer warden, and Jane McLauchlin on Bank Holiday Monday, May 6.
To start at 2pm, the walk should last for about two hours, it covers less than two miles. The Surrey Wildlife Trust suggests a donation of £2 for adults, £1 for children. Continue reading
CROYDON COMMENTARY: If UKIP can gain Godstone in neighbouring Surrey, then what damage might they do to the Tories in Coulsdon or Purley, especially when 2014’s Town Hall elections are held along with European ballots? ANDREW PELLING has been crunching the numbers
This week’s local elections outside London saw national media coverage concentrate on UKIP, Nigel Farage and the social media postings of some of his candidates.
UKIP polled well yesterday but even then only made limited actual seat gains. If repeated in Croydon’s Town Hall elections next year, it could mean the first UKIP councillor being elected in our borough.
Today’s results have shown that UKIP has the ability to draw voters unhappy with the government, and those disenchanted with “real” politicians. Voters who in the past might swing from one major party to the other have this time voted UKIP.
UKIP is poison for Tory fortunes in Croydon, especially with next year’s elections coinciding with the European elections. However the diversion of voters to UKIP, rather than Labour, might yet derail the current Croydon opposition party’s hopes of taking control of the Town Hall next year. Continue reading
Not a typical Croydon Tory: John Cartwright in his Loony Party outfit
Inside Croydon puts great store in “doing the right thing”, and our local hero (cue Knopfler guitar music) for the past week is therefore John Cartwright.
A relatively new member of the Croydon Conservative party, Cartwright did the right thing this week when in a comment posted on this site, he accused the Mayor of Croydon, Ashburton councillor Eddy Arram, of bullying a member of the public in the gallery during a Town Hall meeting.
It was, Cartwright said, “the most outrageous and contemptible thing I have ever witnessed in 15 years of attending council meetings”.
By speaking out, Cartwright broke the cosy consensus within the Croydon Tories which through inaction had condoned Mayor Arram’s petulant and boorish public conduct over the previous 12 months. Maybe the Tories’ collective silence had something to do with the fact that during his mayoralty, Arram continued to work as Gavin’s gofer, a constituency worker for Gavin Barwell MP. Or maybe they were all just too cowed to act. Continue reading
