onionbagblog

Somewhere in the middle I suspect (hope) is the truth.

Now read on…

Essex Road, N1, The Way We See It.

“One day soon we’ll have a pretty location - but this week we’re off to what should be a nice posh area, but the road is anything but. Essex Road is in Islington, but whereas most of the borough has been gentrified and made beyond the means of most of us mortals, Essex Road still seems to have retained some of the original charm of the area.

Sure the top end near Islington Green has it’s fair share of trendy pubs and the lovely S & M cafe. But the further you get down, the more the shops become local, with fruit and veg and a fishmongers.

However, far and above my favorite inhabitant of Essex Road is at 105. The aptly named Get Stuffed has been in all sorts of trouble in the past over dodgy suppliers, and whatever your feelings are for stuffed animals, it’s a place you find you can’t just pass by without taking a little peek.

Further down there’s the ubiquitous bingo hall. This is a Grade II listed affair in wonderful mock Egyptian Style, formerly the Carlton Cinema. You can’t miss it.

There is also the usual mix of new developments, council flats and a somewhat incongruous semi-circle of Georgian houses. More shops, garages etc finish the road off.

There’s so much to see here, so much of interest that I’m sure you’ll have no problems finding thirty shots, let alone just three.”

First Chuka, now Tally Hoey.

Falling out with the local Lambeth Labour party over leisure seems to be something of a recurring theme for prospective parliamentary candidates around my little patch of South London. You can’t really argue against the cause.

Fresh through the letterbox on Sunday lunchtime, and I read with interest:

Kate fights for local pool facility.

Kate has always championed sport and exercise for everyone, particularly children since long before she was an MP.

When she was Sports Minister, and now as the Mayor’ advisor on grassroots sport, she is committed to giving everyone access to decent sports facilities.

The community hub at the old Lilian Baylis School in Kennington is now being used for a wide range of sports and recreational activities, and Kate is supporting its becoming a Community Trust.

Well - who wouldn’t support such fine ideals?

To be fair, Kate Hoey did speak out about the demolishing of the pool at Stockwell Park High, after her local party on the ground ruled out the re-building of the pool as part of their prestigous new school build project.

Yet in my own area of London, Stockwell Park School, which already has a 25 metre swimming pool, is going to be totally rebuilt with money from the Building Schools for the Future fund – minus its pool. To the surprise of the community Lambeth Council says the government guidelines don’t specify a swimming pool as being necessary and there isn’t enough money. Schools Minister Jim Knight in a written answer to me said that it is up to the local authority to decide whether to replace the pool.

So here is a classic example of where all the fine words about tackling obesity fall down at the first hurdle. A school in one of the most deprived areas of inner city London with a swimming pool is losing it. The extra cost would be around £750,000 – a small amount when just a few miles away billions are being spent on the Olympics.

There’s no mention in the election literature of Kate’s fight for other local pool facilities at Streatham, Clapham and Brixton. One would presume that if a Lego pool is worth fighting over, then so are the three main closed pools in the Rotten Borough?

And as for “the Mayor’s advisor on grassroots sport” - I wonder what exactly Kate advises Boris about when it comes to closing three swimming pools in your home constituency? It all must get slightly embarrassing when talks turns to 2012, and all that.

Still, there’s always the 12m Lambeth Lego Pool at Lillian Baylis to boast about, which Kate so kindly poses in front of for the cameras. But only until April. @se11_lurker provides some background commentary on the botched attempt to open up Lillian Baylis as as a genuine cooperative (geddin there!) community hub (urgh.)

Streatham and Vauxhall *should* be safe Labour seats come polling day for the general election. The Chuka ‘n Kate roadshow will be hoping that the little spot of local bother over leisure doesn’t derail them.

Ah, so this is the <irony>real</irony> reason that are friends from @lambeth_council are so busy closing leisure centres all around the Rotten Borough: to fleece customers for the joining fee each time they are forced to become a swimming refugee elsewhere.

You may remember how I was asked to pay a £10 hidden cost when I tried to transfer my GLL Lambeth membership to a wider Swim London membership. I could see that the leisure policy of Lambeth Labour was in meltdown, and for the same monthly £26 payment, I wanted other options.

A bit of behind the scenes work from the lovely GLL management, and my £10 online membership was refunded. Rightly so, seeing as though I had already paid to join (join what?) when I first purchased my GLL Lambeth membership.

Fast forward to this week, and for the first time since the privatisation of leisure in Lambeth, I was able to see the nice man from the GLL membership office during the daytime at Brixton Rec.

We were reassured at the Clap’ham Users Forum to signal the end of swimming in SW4 that all memberships would be automatically transferred over. I wasn’t too concerned at the time. My Swim London membership is valid at all GLL pools throughout London, and I had indeed used it up at Oasis and London Fields.

But then once I became a Clap’ham refugee, my card failed to swipe early each morning. It was a mild irritant at first, but then given the 7am opening time, the lovely smiling receptionist and I came to an agreement.

That agreement was to take up the issue in the membership office at The Rec. Seeing as though kicking out time for public swimming in SW9 is 9am, and the membership office isn’t open until 9:30, this wasn’t exactly practical.

Until half term week that is, where I took the opportunity to sort out my non-swipeable card.

“Your membership has expired,” said the GLL membership chap. “You’ll have to pay £10 to renew it.”

Eh? Where the chuffers did that one come from?

There was more…

“You’ll only be able to swim at Brixton.”

Overlooking the minor issue that there isn’t actually anywhere else in the Rotten Borough where I can swim right now, I would rather like the option of swimming up at Oasis or London Fields. My membership is called Swim London, not Swim Brixton (But Only Between the Hours of 7-9am.)

I was extremely confused, and so it seems was yer man from GLL. It turns out that my original Swim London membership was linked to Clap’ham Pool. For some unknown reason, the swimmers of SW4 were given the status to be able to swim anywhere. Maybe GLL knew what was coming all along with the Streatham and Clap’ham closures?

Highly unlikely. A more sensible analysis is simply the confusion that crept in at GLL, following the pimping out of leisure by our friends at @lambeth_council. No one is entirely sure right now which particular swimming packages exist, and exactly where and when you can use them.

It’s all about the swimming, isn’t it?

I can’t get angry with the lovely smiling GLL receptionist at 7am each morning (she really is rather lovely.) Likewise I can’t get angry with the other GLL staff on the ground at the Rec, who always stop and make a point of filling me in with the political pressures they are operating under. GLL management are also rather decent, and go out of their way to contact me over any woes I have with my membership.

The real reason for the complete meltdown of leisure in the Rotten Borough comes when the party in powers allows *anyone* but itself to take responsibility for leisure provision.

Tesco, the Cathedral Group, GLL - *anyone* but @lambeth_council itself. I think this is called a *shhh* cooperative form of local government.

Once again it took some online intervention from the lovely GLL management to resolve the issue. I have very kindly been given a free month of membership to make up for the inconvenience, which makes for all of the above moaning seem slightly over the top.

GLL is proving to be very decent at managing a near on impossible situation that it has inherited with the provision of leisure in Lambeth. Staff from the shop floor up to the management have made the most out of a very difficult situation.

To be fair, the Cabinet Member for Culture and Communities was also rather helpful in offering assistance (and apologies) online.

I was peeved though at being asked to pay a joining fee that I have already paid twice. Imagine if the 5,000 daily users at The Rec are also peeved? That’s a lot of political muscle to exercise out there.

Saturday morning, and a further example of how the proposed John Lewis style of local government is just pure pre-election fantasy, rather than a serious approach to address the problems that we are facing in Lambeth.

Local Labour Councillors @cllr_robbins and @cllrstevereed, leader of Lambeth Labour, have been out doing the #labourdoorstep thing around my little patch of South London.

Good work - it’s rare that we get the knock knock treatment from *any* politicians around here. The presence of the good Councillors on the mean streets of SW8 has to be applauded and encouraged.

In particular, the door knockers were keen to support a petition by local residents to put pressure on Presentation, the company that manages the Bolney Meadow housing stock on behalf of @lambeth_council:

Ten of us out in Stockwell collecting a petition for security doors. #labourdoorstep

With Bolney Meadow recently becoming part of the Police Dispersal Zone, tenants are campaigning for Presentation to fit security doors on their property.

When asked about where the John Lewis model fits into all of this, the good @cllr_robbins reported:

@Jason_Cobb did get positive feedback from a couple of residents, but more support for campaign to get security doors fitted.

Hang on - so here we have a situation where having voted to transfer their stock out of local authority management, the tenants are now being encouraged by electioneering politicians to petition Presentation to make improvements to council owned stock.

Failing that, then there’s always the DIY approach of the proposed John Lewis style of the management of council owned facilities – take control of the property (and repair bills) yourself, all in the name of a cooperative.

So who is ultimately responsible for the state of disrepair that council owned property has been allowed to fall into? The housing association? The tenants who have been encouraged to set up a cooperative?

It certainly doesn’t sound like the electioneering politicians and their petitions want to be accountable for the fitting of security doors around the council stock of the Bolney Meadow estate.

Nu Labour talk about opening up the market and empowering residents, but it seems that the only empowering being done is for the democratically elected officials losing all accountability. Let the housing association manage your property, or manage it yourself under a re-branding exercise - anyone but us.

Actually, that sounds like more of an anarchist bookshop model, rather than a fancy John Lewis department store system of local government. It may just appeal to me.

And so what price on the privatisation of leisure by Labour led @lambeth_council? Apart from the inconvenience of the nearest GLL swimming pool that is open during the daytime being up in Camden, my calculations make it just under £177, 000 per annum..

I filed a Freedom of Information request a few weeks ago, asking how many Greenwich Leisure Limited memberships have been cancelled in Lambeth between 1st December 2009 and the 31st January 2010.

This timeframe corresponds with the closure of Streatham Leisure Centre at the end of November 2009, the closure of Clapham Leisure in mid-January 2010 and the reduced opening hours at Brixton Rec at the end of January 2010.

The £177, 000 figure is calculated by multiplying the £26 basic GLL monthly membership price with the 567 cancellations as stated in the FOI request. This gives a monthly figure of £14, 742. Multiply this figure by twelve, and you get the annual revenue loss of £176, 904.

The £177, 000 in lost revenue only relates to leisure users in Lambeth that had signed up to become GLL members. The figure doesn’t take into account the number of lost swimming sessions by pay as you go users, who also now have nowhere to swim in Lambeth.

The reduction of monthly cash flow becomes something of a convenient self-fulfilling prophecy for local politicians. Streatham was closed because it needed investment. With nowhere to swim in SW16, the users cancelled their memberships. The council is then left with a reduced money pot in which to justify making the necessary repairs.

The FOI request also states that 308 cancellations took place in the corresponding timeframe twelve months previous. I accept that this suggests that there may be a seasonal trend happening here. Losing 259 further members in a calendar year is still a pretty heavy loss in income.

A combined figure of 875 cancelled memberships over a two year period indicates that something is pretty rotten to the core in the way that leisure is currently managed in Lambeth.

It is interesting to view this £177, 000 shortfall in the context of the John Lewis cooperative style of government that Lambeth Labour proposed this week. GLL was name checked as a success story in this style of local governance.

The John Lewis model is a social experiment imposed on the people living in the Lambeth Petri dish direct response to the Tories up in Barnet and their Easy Jet two-tier system of local government:

“The Tories in Barnet have come up with a plan to offer no-frills public services along the lines of budget airlines like Ryan air. What that means is minimal or sub-standard services offered to most people with better services only available to people wealthy enough to pay more for them.

Looking at the options open to leisure users in Lambeth, and there is little to choose between the two main parties and their high street branding attempts to become electable.

Leisure is already run as a two-tier service in the Rotten Borough. If you want to swim, then you have to go down the private route of paying up to join Fitness First. The standard no thrills service offered by @lambeth_council is a closed Streatham Leisure Centre, a Clapham Leisure Centre that is in the hands of private capital and a bonkers opening timetable at Brixton Rec.

But it’s not all about costings - what about the health benefits of leisure? The real price for the privatisation of leisure by Labour led @lambeth_council is the reduction in exercise taken by local people at facilities in the borough. You can’t even begin to put a costing on this

Newport Court, WC2, The Way We See It.

Deep breath…

And relax.

Time hopefully to return to some form of normality, and some half-decent pretty pictures.

Cripes.

“More of a challenge for you all this week and to celebrate the Chinese New Year we head to China Town. Newport Court runs from Charing Cross Road to Newport Place and it’s a really nice bustly street full of life.

Naturally the laterns are out for the New Year and if you make it on the 14th you’ll be in for all the fun there. I’m not sure if it’s still there but there was a great shop selling cheap CD’s [Steve's - long since gone...]

There’s not much history as you can imagine from such a small street, but there’s plenty going on to snap, and it’s nearly always full of people.”