Happy Halloween!

Ensconced at home in the warm this evening, recovering from a bad cold, BC has been extremely impressed at the quality of the neighbourhood's youth on display door-to-door while trick-or-treating this evening. Scary, no. But a better mannered, more pleasant bunch of kids you could not hope to meet. And the costumes were pretty good too.

We do feel rather guilty, though, that the best we had to offer was Bendick's Bittermints and a bag of tangerines. Sorry, kids - we promise to do better next year!

What's been your experience of Spooky Brockley?

£10,000 for Brockley Ward - How should it be spent?

Cllr Dean Walton has been in touch to promote this year's Localities Fund consultation for Brockley Ward. Once the ideas have been submitted, we'll be asking people for feedback on the suggestions, to help feed in to the decision-making process. But just as last year, we need to make it absolutely clear that Brockley Central's moderators and readers will not have the final say on who gets the money - it's just a good way to consult a wider audience.

You might also like to have a look at the Ladywell Village Improvement Group's discussion about that ward's fund. Let us hope that our conversation remains as civil.

Here's the letter from our Councillors:

Brockley Ward has been awarded £10,000 to spend on projects and activities that can improve the local area. Last year the Brockley Councillors allocated under a similar scheme to provide solar panels at Lucas Vale primary school, financial support for the Brockley Max Festival and the Brockley Fun Run and improved gardens on the Wickham Road estate and tree planting in Brockley Ward.

Earlier this year the new Brockley Assembly agreed to adopt four local priorities and so we are now looking for good ideas along the themes of:

- improving our streets, parks & open spaces
- better relations within our communities
- tackling crime & anti-social behaviour
- cleaning up the streets

However we will be more than happy to consider other good projects that will be of direct benefit to local residents. You may also be able to use money from the fund as a contribution to a larger project by putting it together with grants from charities, donations from other community groups or perhaps sponsorship from local people or businesses.

For instance £10,000 for solar panels last year was turned into £60,000 worth of panels on the schools by combining it with funding from other sources. We already have a number of ideas provided by local residents who have participated in the Brockley Assembly and also ideas from previous years.

If you have an idea for an activity or project you would like to receive funding for, please answer the questions on the next page and send them to:

Cllr Dean Walton by Friday 7 November 2008.

E-mail: cllr_dean.walton@lewisham.gov.uk

Write to: Cllr Dean Walton, Lewisham Town Hall, Catford, SE6 4RU

London: Land of the Rising Sun (Part 2)

One of our friends works at a major commercial art gallery in London. Like half of his colleagues, his long term ambition is to open his own gallery. A Lewisham native, we asked him whether he'd consider South East London. We weren't naive enough to think Brockley would be a goer, but Dulwich? Greenwich? Blackheath? Deptford?

"Nope. No-one will come to South East London. I could open a place in the grottiest part of Hackney or Tower Hamlets and have a chance of building a successful business. But the art-buying community won't go east of Bermondsey, south of the river. It's too cut off."

For the art world, you could substitute pretty much any other sector or industry. The nature of Brockley Central's job means that we work with virtually every type of organisation you could think of. Big companies, small ones, charities, government departments, quangoes, consultancies. Last week our diary took us to a design company in Camden, a hotel in Mayfair, a client in Chiswick and a media briefing in Kings Cross. In three and a half years of doing this job we have never been anywhere further south east than "More London Bridge" for work.

A city is the sum of its connections - the daily interactions of millions of people. Those interactions are the reason that businesses and communities cluster in certain locations. In our view, the low level of economic activity in South East London is in direct proportion to its limited connections. In part one, we wrote about the East London's economic ascendancy. But without better links, jobs and investment will remain north of the river.

The reopened East London Line and the DLR tunnel at Woolwich will undoubtedly help matters, but there are four other river crossings that are currently on the table: a pedestrian and cycle bridge to Canary Wharf from Rotherhithe, a crossing to Silvertown at Blackwall, the Thames Gateway bridge and a cable car at the Dome. All are needed. Except the cable car, but that would just be cool.

Traffic management experts make the point that if you build new capacity, it just fills up, creating more traffic. That's a key part of the argument against letting the needs of cars shape our city and one that we generally endorse. But South East London needs more cross-river journeys. It needs more business people jumping in taxis to get across the Thames. It needs more tourists strolling or catching a bus across the river from the north bank. It needs to be part of the same city as north east London. The fact that one of the key crossings is a ferry only strengthens the feeling that the two places are foreign countries to one another.

Our Green councillors oppose the Gateway Bridge but we think they're wrong. They wouldn't knock down any of the 31 London bridges west of Tower Bridge, so why do they think that one in Dartford is enough on the east side?

A few days ago, Mayor Boris announced that 50 infrastructure projects would be central to London's economic recovery plan. The details of the plan are due to be published before Christmas. He's already effectively mothballed the cross-river tram scheme that would have served Southwark but we hope that, when the list is unveiled, it includes a few more threads to stitch north and south together.

It's time to build bridges with our friends in the north.

Yong Xiang Chinese Takeaway, Mantle Road

BC review to follow. Please post your comments and reviews here.

Pavement fouling

Our one, vivid recollection of school French classes is the text books. They used "Deirdre's Photo Casebook"-style comic strips to tell stories. Only instead of "Le singe est dans l'arbre", they would be stories about young people going shopping. And instead of turning this material in to well-loved stand-up routines, kids in our school would mine comedy from them by drawing little poos coming out of every orifice in the photos. And often, penises going in to every orifice.

We found it quite nauseating. Which is perhaps why we had so few friends at secondary school.

Walking home from St John's station one night recently, we had a traumatic flashback to those French lessons. It was caused by this picture on the pavement (sorry about the quality):

We then realised that when the Council offered to run a "responsible dog day" in Brockley Cross, this is what they had in mind. Spray painting pictures of dogs taking a dump on our pavements.

Like the artists who defaced our old text books, the person who created this stencil clearly did so with some relish. The steam rising from the turd is a particularly delightful touch. Just in case the message was too subtle without them.

Well at the risk of seeming to you as twee and po-faced as we did to our former classmates, we'd like to say: please don't try and solve a problem by creating another one. Please don't debase the public realm to tackle a small minority of anti-social people who will ignore your signs anyway. Just prosecute those people who let their dogs crap in the street.

This is another attack of the BIG YELLOW SIGNS, with added stink lines.

Rivoli negotiations update

The impressively organised team hoping to organise a Rivoli Ballroom revival have provided another update on their progress:

"On Tuesday, a small core group met up to discuss the Rivoli and work out how best to proceed. We will be having a meeting with Bill, the owner next week to see if he is willing to cut a deal. We aim to see if he is willing to accept some sort of equity deal/ fundraising donation/ lease, to make the deal possible. We shall report back from this meeting, which will probably decide whether there is a project at all."

Critical issues include the condition of the building and its roof, the terms of its alcohol license, accessibility, potential partnership structures and fund raising.

While there are huge - possibly insurmountable - hurdles to be overcome, the detailed and lucid way in which the campaigners have set out their ideas and begun investigating options, is extremely encouraging.

We hope to bring you more on their progress in the coming weeks.

With thanks to Moira.

Brockley al dente

Official confirmation that the economy is shrinking seems as good a cue as any to grant Hugh his wish and create a thread for those who wish to discuss their fortunes in public.

So are you being forced to readjust or are you an artist now able to go on trolley dashes in Dandelion Blue thanks to the wave of money flowing in to fine art as a store of wealth for billionnaires?