Croydon Tours
Croydon has, for many years, closely resembled downtown Kabul after a heavy night on the bombing. Driving a tram link through an already deeply unlovely environment left the place littered with the sort of water and twisted metal filled craters that one expects as the result of a laser-guided MK 12 'beardbuster' warhead, not the installation of a light rail link. Now that the dirt has settled and the tram is actually in place, Croydon still resembles downtown Kabul due to the large number of unemployed people milling about, the amputees (the tram link runs along the street and the locals have yet to learn how to dodge) and the violence, looting and burned-out buildings.
Tough to say when the rot set in, after all, the used to be an aerodrome here, the last word in glamour and being a target for the Luftwaffe, but even flying Nazis couldn't do as much damage as the council, who sealed the fate of the place when they removed all of the trees from the town centre and replaced them with a howling sense of hopeless desolation.
Put it this way, the crushing negative energy of Croydon is such that even M&S can't escape it's pull. Croydon is the home to rather a large M&S and, usually, such stores are a place to purchase a prawn sandwich and restore ones sense of equilibrium. If, on a shopping trip anywhere, one is feeling buffeted by the winds of fashion, typhoons of commerce or just struggling with the suspicion that the store has fitted a web cam in the changing cubicle to prevent shoplifting and provide the staff with hysterical footage of 'really I am a size twelve' women trying to struggle into a pair of size twelve jeans without the aid of thigh corsets, magic or being slathered in lard, then you can always pop into M&S to regulate your breathing while stocking up on sensible pants.
Not so in Croydon. The best way of describing the M&S in Croydon is to liken it to one of those KFC wannabe places, a fried chicken shop that can't quite meet the the exacting standards of KFC ('never more than 30% beak') but wants to attach itself to the idea of a brand (see also, any drink with the word 'cola' in it, and yes, I mean you Pepsi, you real deal wannabe you - the acid test: who ever asked for a rum and Pepsi?) so that drunk people will wander in by mistake. The M&S in Croydon is like a flagship experiment by a company that specialises in a homogenised brand dedicating at least 30% of their marketing, signage and shop floor look to reflect the locality, instead of the usual M&S shop design strategy (copy John Lewis). Unfortunately, the local look is 'Croydon', and so the store is shabby, crowded and overrun with morlocks.
H G Wells lived in South London and the influence of the area is plain to see in his works. Who has not returned from a trip to Croydon and not thought that it could really benefit from being levelled by a Martian heat ray? Croydon 2012 is pretty much all the evidence you need that H G Wells did actually possess a time machine, travelled forward in time to M&S, took one look at the creatures shambling around in the gloom, jumped back on his chrono-cycle, pedalled for home like Victoria Pendleton when she has forgotten to set the video to record 'come dine with me' (she's a massive fan, that's Victoria's secret) and started writing. It's a testament to his creative skill that after a visit to Croydon 2012 he wrote an entire novel and not just the word 'fffffuuuuuuuuuuuuuccccckkkk!' stretched over 200 pages.
That somebody is offering tours is heartening. After all, they do Jack the Ripper tours in the East End, and ghost tours in York (and why, if ghost tours are so bloody authentic, do they never go through walls?), why not tours of Croydon? Directions to the station where trains leave for London every twenty minutes must be worth eight quid of anyone's money.
Tough to say when the rot set in, after all, the used to be an aerodrome here, the last word in glamour and being a target for the Luftwaffe, but even flying Nazis couldn't do as much damage as the council, who sealed the fate of the place when they removed all of the trees from the town centre and replaced them with a howling sense of hopeless desolation.
Put it this way, the crushing negative energy of Croydon is such that even M&S can't escape it's pull. Croydon is the home to rather a large M&S and, usually, such stores are a place to purchase a prawn sandwich and restore ones sense of equilibrium. If, on a shopping trip anywhere, one is feeling buffeted by the winds of fashion, typhoons of commerce or just struggling with the suspicion that the store has fitted a web cam in the changing cubicle to prevent shoplifting and provide the staff with hysterical footage of 'really I am a size twelve' women trying to struggle into a pair of size twelve jeans without the aid of thigh corsets, magic or being slathered in lard, then you can always pop into M&S to regulate your breathing while stocking up on sensible pants.
Not so in Croydon. The best way of describing the M&S in Croydon is to liken it to one of those KFC wannabe places, a fried chicken shop that can't quite meet the the exacting standards of KFC ('never more than 30% beak') but wants to attach itself to the idea of a brand (see also, any drink with the word 'cola' in it, and yes, I mean you Pepsi, you real deal wannabe you - the acid test: who ever asked for a rum and Pepsi?) so that drunk people will wander in by mistake. The M&S in Croydon is like a flagship experiment by a company that specialises in a homogenised brand dedicating at least 30% of their marketing, signage and shop floor look to reflect the locality, instead of the usual M&S shop design strategy (copy John Lewis). Unfortunately, the local look is 'Croydon', and so the store is shabby, crowded and overrun with morlocks.
H G Wells lived in South London and the influence of the area is plain to see in his works. Who has not returned from a trip to Croydon and not thought that it could really benefit from being levelled by a Martian heat ray? Croydon 2012 is pretty much all the evidence you need that H G Wells did actually possess a time machine, travelled forward in time to M&S, took one look at the creatures shambling around in the gloom, jumped back on his chrono-cycle, pedalled for home like Victoria Pendleton when she has forgotten to set the video to record 'come dine with me' (she's a massive fan, that's Victoria's secret) and started writing. It's a testament to his creative skill that after a visit to Croydon 2012 he wrote an entire novel and not just the word 'fffffuuuuuuuuuuuuuccccckkkk!' stretched over 200 pages.
That somebody is offering tours is heartening. After all, they do Jack the Ripper tours in the East End, and ghost tours in York (and why, if ghost tours are so bloody authentic, do they never go through walls?), why not tours of Croydon? Directions to the station where trains leave for London every twenty minutes must be worth eight quid of anyone's money.
Labels: Guardian, London, Lucy mangan, Science fiction, Shopping, Tourism, Tourists
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