By contrast Nestlé have made a formal announcement with a target for completion by the end of this year. I know from recent experience that it can take a year to plan such a move (actually it can easily take a lot more than that) so this is going to happen. They must already be drawing up plans, starting staff consultations and ordering 18 miles of CAT-5 cables. So what does all this mean for the local economy of Crawley, or should that now be Crawlé?It would be easy to get swept away in a wave of hyperbole, in fact the Crawley News might already have done that. Their story talks about the company “bringing 1000 jobs to the town” though other sources like the Croydon papers, the BBC and Nestlé’s press release all refer to the move of 840 office-based staff.

Will that mean more jobs for local residents? In the short term it may not. With a move of only 22 miles between two locations joined by a straight road and an even straighter railway line in a time of recession I reckon most Croydon-based staff will make the move. Quite a few might even live here or in places closer to here than to Croydon, and for them it will be an easy choice.

Those living in Croydon have a slightly harder choice but I think they will make the move. During relocations a proportion of staff take the opportunity to take redundancy, especially if they are near retirement. With such a short move that might not even be on the table for them. My company moved a site of 200 people from London to Crawley the other year and quite a lot of them did move even though it was nowhere near as convenient. Some of them faced an extra hour or more travelling. From Croydon it is only about 15 minutes by train to Gatwick with dozens of rush hour trains.

Very few people will find the change in location a real struggle, except financially for those on low wages who would find an extra £50 a month a burden. Even then they might find it cheaper to move if they are renting in Croydon.

There will be some new jobs though. All those cleaners, security guards, and other support staff are probably contracted out and it is possible Nestlé will just enter into new contracts with local firms for the new premises. So initially there will be a slight boost for anybody local looking for lower-paid jobs.

There might be a bit of a boost for local shops, cafes, pubs and other places but nowhere near as much as the negative effect on Croydon. The current building is pretty close to lots of local places that will lose a lot of business but the new building is quite isolated up near the airport. True the staff could jump on a Fastway into town, but mostly they won’t. I work on Manor Royal and very few people from there go into the town centre at lunchtime.

In the longer term it means that anybody looking for a job in accounting, HR, IT and other areas will one more major employer they can apply to, one more chance to ply their trade without having to suffer the commute into London and that has to be good.

I don’t think the benefits will be as large or as quick as the out-and-out optimists or Crawley council’s economic development press releases will imply but it will be a positive impact. And it means that the next time they get involved in child labour controversies or buying milk from Mugabe’s wife the Crawley lefties will have a shorter distance to travel for protests. On the other hand, with so many PR disasters behind them the company may well go on a charm offensive with all sorts of local sponsorships.

The most significant impact could be on traffic around the airport, depending on how many of those 840 (or 1000) people intend to drive to work.

The big question is whether the signs at Gatwick station get changed. As any seasoned commuter knows, the station signs at East Croydon all proudly say “East Croydon – home of Nestlé”. Obviously that will have to change, but will they want to do the same here? Or will they see how it goes first?

I’d be interested to know what the staff think about it all. Are they looking forward to it? Dreading it? One word of comfort for them, it may be that the move to a modern building can offset some of the pain.

Road casualties in Crawley 200-2010 plotted onto a map

First of all I must heartily recommend this post from the As Easy As Riding A Bike blog. It is an analysis of road deaths and injuries in Horsham, based on information from the ITO website’s road casualty map. The rest of the blog is well worth a look too.

It would be interesting to see the same sort of interpretation for Crawley. If anybody does that, let me know and send me a link. If anybody wants to do the work and doesn’t have a website I’ll put it on here for them – I don’t have the inclination to do it myself at the moment.A couple of initial thoughts though. As with Horsham, the vehicle occupant deaths are predominantly on the larger roads like dual carriageways and the motorway and pedestrian deaths feature much older people. The mainjunctions of the A23 feature heavily as locations of fatal and non-fatal incidents. Cycle incidents have a couple of major hotspots at the flyover roundabout and at juntions around County Mall.

As you might expect, vehicle incidents cluster along the A23 although, to be honest, with all the reports in the local papers it would not have been surprising to see even more. Reading the locals you do sometimes get the impression that a teenager crashes their hatchback every week on the A23.

As ever, the data has been out there somewhere for ages, but it becomes so much easier to grasp visually. The map could be a useful tool for council planners to prioritise improvements, for the police to prioritise speed clampdowns and for pressure groups like the CTC to back up their cases. Just at a glance you can see that Martyrs Avenue is an accident hotspot (all those parked cars?) and that the Balcombe Road is one you want to be very careful crossing.

I am interested in the motorcycle incidents though. The ratio of fatal to non-fatal incidents is really low. For every fatal vehicle incident there are loads of non-fatal incidents. For cycle and pedestrian deaths are are fewer non-fatal incidents but for motorcycles there are relatively very few non-fatal incidents. I suspect this is down to reporting. Cycle and pedestrian incidents will get reported far less often than minor car incidents where you need a police report to help with insurance claims. As for the motorbikes, is itreally because there are very few incidents but a huge chance of an incident being fatal? It seems more likely that bikers just don’t want to report minor incidents.

I’m just glad I don’t cycle to Manor Royal from Tollgate Hill any more. The route I used to take is littered with green triangles!

Flyer for the Crawley Anthem project

On Thursday night I went along to the Hawth where there was a meeting about something called the Crawley Anthem.

This is a project which aims to write a song about the town, arrange it, record it and film it.

Anybody with first-hand experience of my musical abilities will be relieved to know that my contribution was to take some photos.

Anybody who thinks they can contribute to the project should get in touch with Sally, whose details are on the flyer which is scanned here.  If you are not musical then you can still contribute by suggesting a line to incorporate into the lyrics.

What a week for Crawley. First the FA Cup draw against Man Utd. and now a mention by Hopi Sen.  I may be overdoing the hyperbole a bit there, but I’m really pleased to see a new and younger voice coming onto the scene.

Note that I didn’t refer to the new blog as one from “Councillor Peter Lamb”.  He is a councillor, and a good one, but he seems to be writing in a more personal capacity which I think is a good thing for several reasons.  The main one is that he is not defining himself by what he does.   One reason I have been reluctant to return to that sort of thing is the great temptation to see ‘councillor’ as something you are rather than something you do, often alongside a day job that occupies far more of your time.

Hopi Sen may find he regrets ever endorsing Pete, who has the potential to be an even bigger political anorak and policy wonk than him.   Having got himself to the (admittedly self-proclaimed) position of being the Central Committee of the People’s Best Left Wing Blog through nobbling opponents left, centre-left and far-left, like a socialist Dick Dastardly, Hopi may find some stiff new competition in the Total Politics best political blog awards in 2012, if not in 2011.

Having said that…  no pressure Pete!

Laura, flanked by husband Colin and ex-boss Alan Johnson

Last night Jayne and I went out to the Arora hotel to a party that was being thrown to thank Laura Moffatt for her work as Crawley’s MP before she retired last year.

It was supposed to be a surprise party, and if Laura did suspect anything she is not going to spoil anybody’s time by letting on.  She certainly appeared to be surprised.

Guest of honour was Alan Johnson, who had Laura as his PPS when he was a minister.  He spoke well of his high regard for her and her popularity in Westminster.

Various people from local organisations also spoke about how Laura had helped and supported her during her time as MP.  There were representatives from the Gurjar Hindu Union, the Neighbourhood Watch, Cadia, Crawley Open House, Crawley Campaign Against Racism, the Ahmidaya Muslims, Crawley Hospital League of Friends and others – even a Tory councillor.

A fair range of speakers, but really it was only scratching the surface.  I have sat in her MP surgeries before, spent some time in her office and been at quite a few official engagements so have an idea of how much time and effort she put into representing the town.  As an ex-neighbour I also had an idea of the ridiculous hours she kept doing everything.

The only shame is that it took so long to get round to organising the party but, as Brenda Smith said, there was a lot going on last year.

I even made a bit of progress on my resolution to drink more by having a pint of lager, but when I found that a pint and an orange juice cost nearly eight quid I knew I was unlikely to get drunk.

I think I may be turning shopophobic.  I don’t think there is anything I don’t have that I want badly enough to face that sort of chaos.

Earlier this year somebody put a slip of paper through all the doors in our street asking if we would be interested in exchanging house with them in Three Bridges.  We gave them a call as there was nothing to lose, and it turned out we all loved each other’s house.  We proceeded to fill out all the necessary forms and then it all got stopped because of a technicality.

By this time we had already got used to the idea of moving so when it fell through we started looking for somewhere else.

At the same time, the new government announced its intention to make council and housing association tenancies fixed-term for new tenants at some point, making it all a bit more urgent.  We didn’t want to find ourselves moving after then and facing another move after five years because all the kids had left home – far better to get it all sorted on the current tenancy basis, just in case.

We had a few people interested in exchanging house who then changed their minds for various reasons, and in the mean time we were still half-packed from the first prospect.  The problem was that I had a lot of shelves up for books and DVDs and we knew that our landlords would not let us move until the shelves were down and all the resulting holes in the walls filled in.  With well over a thousand books around the place this was quite a task.

It was getting to be a drag not having access to any of our books or DVDs, not to mention all the various files that were boxed up, and we got to the point where we decided to come off the home-swapping website and just re-settle here – but without fixing shelves to walls this time.   At that time we still had someone due to visit, so we said we would at least honour that appointment, not expecting much, and if nothing came of it we would take our lives off hold.

Of course, it turned out that the people who came here really liked our house, we really liked theirs, and there shouldn’t be the technical problems we had in the first case.  Even so, after so many false starts we were braced for disappointment again, but as each day passed it looked more likely to happen.

In fact the only problem was that we really wanted to move at the start of half-term so we would have time to settle in properly and that meant getting everything arranged very quickly.  Both landlords pulled out all the stops and that is going to happen after all.   The only practical problem was theat the other couple have a large marine fish tank, which takes a lot of moving, but they have moved a big vat of salt water and rocks here in preparation – making it very unlikely they will change their mind at the last minute.

After months of increasing stress it is all happening very suddenly and this was the last weekend to run car loads of stuff to the recycling centre, sort out clothes and dispose of furniture we are not taking – most of which has gone to the sister-in-law.  It has been a hectic weekend, but at least it now feels like ther will be an outcome at the end of it and the uncertaintly has been falling away.

The new house is slightly smaller than this one, but it has fewer stairs.  The only slight drawback is the location in relation to my workplace: it is about 100 metres away.  I had been hoping for something a little closer to work and not at the top of a hill to encourage me to use the bike again, but end up so close it is not worth cycling at all.  I shall just have to use the bike at weekends instead, and not being on top of a hill should encourage that.

Next weekend will be a bit fraught, getting all the gas, electric, phones and everything else swapped over, but it looks like we will only be without broadband for less than 24 hours if all goes to plan, which seems too good to be true.  The unsolicited testimonials to Virgin Media will be profuse and manifold if that happens.  I am already chuffed that, as a result of the move, we will get exactly the same services for abotu thirteen pounds a month less.

There is still a lot of stress associated with moving house but it is positive stress, if you know what I mean.  The stress of uncertainty has been negative, paralysing stress, leaving me feeling like a rabbit in the headlinghts, seeing a pile of things to do just building up but unable to actually do them.  I haven’t even brought myself to review any of the Amazon books I finished, let alone share my thoughts with an uninterested world about the new Labour leader and his cabinet, the recent Crawley by election results or anything else.

Maybe that will all change soon, though there is an awful lot of shelf-building to do first…

Rick Wakeman signing stuff for the faithful after the show

Last night I went out to see Rick Wakeman and Jon Anderson playing at the Hawth theatre in Crawley.   Rick Wakeman. Jon Anderson.  In Crawley!

This was the second date on their 20-date ‘Anderson-Wakeman Project 360′ tour, coming to a provincial town near you soon, and the ticket was a birthday present from Chrystal which makes her position as favourite daughter pretty nigh unassailable.There was a strange emotional resonance to this.  The first concert I ever went to featured Wakeman and Anderson – when they played with Yes at the Wembley Arena on the Tormato tour.  Or, as it was billed: the Tormatour.

This was a very different evening for all sorts of reasons: the scale, the volume, the crowds and the atmosphere.  And the average age of the audience of course.  The crowd was a veritable symphony of male-pattern baldness though there were a surprising number of females and even teenagers there.  Living with Jayne’s almost pathological dislike of Yes it is easy to forget that some women actually like prog rock.

Knowing what a full-blown Yes concert is like, it was a little depressing to see just two keyboards and an acoustic guitar on the stage, surrounded by loads of little candles that must have given the fire inspectors a heart attack.  Of course I knew what to expect from the publicity and from watching some Youtube clips of an earlier tour so I wasn’t too disappointed.

The show alternated between new songs from Jon and Rick’s forthcoming album and old Yes songs.  You knew whether the next song was going to be old or new by whether Jon picked his guitar up.  All the new songs were just keyboard and voice, but the old songs had guitar too.

I can’t remember much about the new songs.  One was about a tree and another about gardens, and they were all nice enough.  They must be OK because nobody minded that they were getting about an hour of totally unheard music.  Concert crowds are normally quite resistant to ‘a bit of new’.

The old songs were mostly from the earlier Yes albums: Time & A Word, Starship Trooper, Yours Is No Disgrace, And You & I, Soon for example.  There were a couple of tracks from Going for the One, one from the AWBH album and, surprisingly, Owner of a Lonely Heart.  And Roundabout. Obviously.

Maybe I shouldn’t be surprised that Yes’ most commercially successful single was played, but this is the song that Rick (who wasn’t in the band at the time) has been known to refer to as ‘Owner of a horse & cart’.

Inbetween the songs was plenty of banter.  We all know what Rick Wakeman is like from his appearances on Grumpy Old Men and other TV programmes, but it was a revelation to see Jon having a lark about.   Normally you just see him introducing the odd song in spiritual, hippy mode.

The overwhelming atmosphere of the show was one of affection.  You could sense the affection that the audience had for the performers, which suited the intimacy of the venue compared to places like the Wembley Arena.  The performances were on a more human scale and the between-song banter was more conversational that is possible in a massive venue.

I can’t pretend that I missed the extra dimension that Chris Squire’s extra vocals would have added (and Steve Howe’s to a lesser extent), not to mention his bass, as well as the electric guitars and – of course – the drums.  I am fairly unsophisticated and for me the more drummers the better.  I also missed the Wakeman extravagance at the keyboards.  Most of the arrangements involved just piano and string sounds and a blast of the old full orchestra effects and Moog noises would have been nice – but we all knew that was never going to happen.

What we did get was Jon Anderson’s remarkable voice.  One or two people said afterwards that they thought his voice had gone, but most, including me, thought it was still great.  A lot of the time it was deeper and more gravelly than it used to be, but he showed at times that he could still sing pure high notes: it is just that the arrangement of the songs wasn’t calling for it.  The instrumental side was totally rearranged, so why not the vocals?

About the arrangements.  Sometimes it is frustrating when a band make changes to an old favourite song, altering the tune or tempo.  I can understand that, and feel it a bit myself, particularly when there is some small detail of a song that you really, really like and that has been removed.  I think it is only human to feel that to an extent, but really there is no point in somebody doing a perfect imitation of their record: you might as well just stay at home and listen to the record!

Remember also that this was two-fifths of the classic line-up of Yes and Yes were supposed to be a progressive rock band.  Surely that implies that they should always be striving to experiment and change things?  It resulted in a brilliant reggae-tinged version of Time & a Word.

Perhaps the hardest thing was getting used to seeing the pair of them looking quite normal.  No more skin-tight spangly jumpsuit and cape for Rick – just a long black overcoat.  No billowing kaftan for Jon – trainers, jeans and jacket, albeit one with a bit of a Jackson Pollock theme to it.  Jon actually had a bit of a Back to the Future look to him.  Also it was quite amusing seeing them walk on together because although he is no giant, Rick is taller than average and Jon , although no dwarf, is a bit shorter than average.  Rick may not have the waist-length hair of old, but it is still quite long.  The combined effect of hair, long coat, and size difference did give a momentary impression of a wizard walking on with a hobbit – but I say that in an affectionate way.

Overall, it was an honour to see these two grace the stage in Crawley. Rick’s hands still flow effortlessly across the keyboards, and Jon still has a voice that a colleague tells me he could listen to if he just sung the phone book.  OK it may not have had any drums but even so it was music for the mind, heart and soul.

There was lots of merchandise on sale in the foyer, and Rick came out afterwards to sign anything that anybody put in front of him and pose for photos.  The queue was huge and Rick was being very friendly and approachable, spending time chatting to everybody so it must have been very late by the time the last person was seen to.

I bumped into a couple of people from work who I didn’t know were going, and compared notes afterwards.  The verdict was that it was a bloody good show.  It was certainly well-attended, despite surely being one of the most expensive ticket prices ever at the Hawth.

My only quibble about the evening was an annoying high-pressure hiss from the sound system.  I don’t know if this was a fault or just something badly set up, but once you notice it you can’t un-hear it.  Apart from that, the sound was fantastic as you would expect from a place designed for acoustics – miles better than the harsh edge to the system at K2 when Paul Weller played there.

The programme includes Diego Garcian food, Sega songs and music, Afro Caribbean music, gospel, film projections, fashion show, keepy uppies.

There will be stalls for different cuisines, African crafts, fishing, souvenirs and stalls for local and national organisations and charities.

Not only does it sound like fun, but it will be good to go along and show some support for the town’s growing Chagossian community.   We may not be able to reverse the terrible injustice done to them on our behalf but at least we can go along, make them feel welcome, and investigate this new facet to the town’s culture.

It runs from 1000 to 1600 on Sunday. Worth going just to find out what the ‘fishing’ means. And for the keepy uppies.

When I turned up at the Hawth I was looking at the posters of forthcoming attractions and amidst all the details of musicals, tribute bands, and musicals based on tribute bands that seem to constitute modern middlebrow theatre fare, there was a poster for something called “The Anderson Wakeman Project 360″ which turns out to be a 20-date  tour by Jon Anderson and Rick Wakeman (i.e. 20% of the classic line-up of Yes) with Crawley the second date on the tour.

I know I won’t be able to resist it, and yet the tickets are £32.50 each. Eek.  Don’t suppose I can persuade the local papers to hire me for a day as a reviewer, so it looks like I’ll have to treat myself as a slightly belated birthday present.  Brilliant to have two performers of such stature playing in Crawley though.

Everything else was going to be an anti-climax after seeing that, but the meeting went very well.  It was an unusual hustings in that none of the candidates was there, but four of them sent advocates to speak for them.  David Miliband had Ivan Lewis MP, Ed Balls had Sarah McCarthy-Fry, Andy Burnham had Cllr Keith Dibble from Hampshire and Ed Miliband had Tom Simons.

Not sure exactly who Tom is.  He is either a party worker or an ex-party worker who has joined Ed’s team.  Nice enough bloke though and he did a good job considering he is not as accustomed to public speaking as an MP an ex-MP or a councillor.

It really is a shame that nobody from Diane Abbott’s team was available, but some of the other surrogates did actually make some points in her favour.  Specifically when discussing the past, one of the speakers did point out that Diane Abbott is the only candidate totally free to criticise past mistakes, having not been part of the cabinets that went to war with Iraq, messed up the 10% tax etc. etc.

For me that summed up the spirit of the event and the whole contest so far.  There was a lot of respect and civility from all sides: none of the surrogates attacked each other or the other candidates.  The candidates themselves seem to have refrained from personal attacks and this can only be a good thing – they will all have to work together when it is all over after all.  The personal relationship between Blair and Brown and their followers really poisoned the party for a decade so I’m glad to see a more constructive atmosphere with this lot and I hope it continues.

What we do not need is a competition like they have in the US for presidential candidates where the front runners spend months providing ammunition for their opponents to use in the actual election.

All the speakers who were there did a difficult job well.  It can’t be easy having to speak on somebody else’s behalf, making sure you don’t misrepresent them, and making it clear where you are offering a personal opinion or something that you know your preferred candidate believes.  They also all made good points in favour of their candidates, making it really hard to know who to prefer.

This should mean that whoever wins we will end up not only with a capable leader, but one with a good team around them – as long as they can see this through to the end on good terms.

The result?  David Miliband got the nomination on the third round of counting preferences, with his brother coming second.  I think I would have been happy to see any of them nominated though.