49 thoughts on “Goodbye 2012”

  1. Ana, you are liked on this Faceblog. Welcome to Wellcomewell! Well done, Peter. Well done Camberwell! Bring on the new year! We are once more ready!

  2. Wow. I came 4th in the numbers of comments on this blog in 2012 (76 in total), just one behind Monkeycat. That makes me internet famous, I think.

  3. Given I use my real name, I’m a bit suprised (but also a bit relieved) that I don’t meet people out and about that link me via this blog. Probably I should get out more. Definetly, in fact, I should get out more.

  4. Wow! It’s 2013.

    Today is the first that I’ve felt something like not very ill since well before Christmas. I’ve been in bed for mostly every day since 23 December. This is the worst illness I can recall since Tonsillitis with oral thrush in 1976 when could eat nothing solid for two weeks, lost two stone and almost vanished, just prior to going to the Arctic Circle for two months… I’ve had Pneumonia since then. This virus that’s been doing the rounds — LOADS of people I know have had it, from the length and breadth of Britain to Japan and the ‘States, might not have been as serious as Pneumonia that but it certainly hurt more.

    Thanks to friends and family without whom I’d still be really ill. And for analgesics, central heating and great bedding… without which a disease like that would probably be life threatening.

    Happy New Year to ALL.

  5. Also I’ve heard that Hartnell’s is being taken on by Amphlett Lissimore Solicitors.

    That should be interesting, as they have hired a marketing company to help the move.

    More here some other time.

    What should we do about Hoopers?

  6. The first locomotive of 2013 spotted passing through Camberwell by our girl with the anorak, leaky biro and Murray Mints was the Class 66 (obviously) 66540 “Ruby”.

    Now.

    Some readers may think that this is one of those diesels named in 2004 after the ladies in the office of freight company GBRf, like “Janice” and “Jeanette”.

    Not so!

    “Ruby” was named in January 2006 for the 40th anniversary of rival company Freightliner.

    A hum may issue from within the anorak of the railfan on the platform at Denmark Hill or Peckham Rye. Flies may buzz round the hunched, stationary figure. A tip-up of the hood may reveal a grinning skull whilst a boney claw clutches the long-inert biro.

    But the train of life rambles on, I mean rumbles on.

  7. Good luck to the KK. Can’t make brunch but I feel it’s your year. Keep on collaborating.

    Glad you are feeling better MkD. Tough living vicariously the past two weeks.

    That’s really you Gabe?! Consider yourself recognised. You are alright by me.

    New year was another belter. Anyone do owt good?

  8. Good luck Keston Kitchen — will try to be there. Alan D: I was in bed on NYE and spoke too soon above. Have relapsed. Now with back complications brought on through incessant coughing fits. Hehehe; in the Wars.

  9. Does anyone know what’s happening to the Prince of Wales pub on Myatt’s Field? There’s been an eviction notice outside for a few months but I can’t find any information on the web. It’s certainly not trading.

  10. The Prince of Wales was bought by a property developer from Punch Pubco and they have got planning permission to convert the upper to private residential and they are marketing the ground floor and ‘basement’ to let as a lock up pub. Fully tied lease on £40K rent. They are totally, totally, taking the piss.

    No one will take it on — (it was let by Punch at £24K for the whole building) and if anyone is stupid enough to take it on they will fail.

    In time the new ‘Landlord’ freeholder ‘developer’ will apply for change of use on the grounds that it is not viable as a business and they will convert it to private residential.

    There. That is what is happening to the Prince of Wales. Another pub bites the dust of eternity.

    Exactly the same is happening to other pubs in the area.

  11. I’ve had an invite to ‘The Palace of Varieties’ on Feb 2nd on Facebook. Has anyone else heard of this? Can’t find a non-fb website for it but it sounds intriguing.
    Some kind of reconstituted variety show.

  12. Dagmar, I think you should get up on stage at this here Music Hall and read a selection of your finest posts from this fine forum.

    Especially your eulogising of the various heavy Mabels, Margarets and 8 wheeled bogies.

    I’d pay for that.

  13. Thanks, Mark, interesting — though I hope your prognosis turns out to be too pessimistic. Myatts Field needs a pub. The nearest are the Bear and your old pub the Sun and they’re too far for a true local. The Prince of Wales hardly ever had anyone in it and was manifestly badly run. But it’s got a much better pitch than the Paulet Arms, which, from what I can gather, has been seeking a tenant for its downstairs area for years.

  14. unfortunately Stephen I’m not in the least bit pessimistic. It’s just a straightforward delivery of reality.

    I know about these things because I have been campaigning about the scandal of the British pub sector, hard, for almost a decade and before that I was being shafted by a pub company — a shafting which led to my going down with almost half a million worth of debts happily, mostly to the pubco who own the Sun of Camberwell. And the Tiger.

    You are right about The Prince of Wales at Myatt’s Fields and its potential. But that potential will not be realised. It’s always been an interesting possibility and if it had been available I would have seriously considered taking it on — so I found out about it. It is not available other than nominally. The rent is ridiculous for a lock up. And to make sure that it will never work the new developer landlord has slapped a beer tie on the lease as well. If anyone takes it on they will go out of business within months.

    That pub, unless its current tenure changes radically, will never be a pub again. Not pessimism. Fact.

    And the same for Hoopers. And the former Enterprise, latterly a Brazilian restaurant, on Coldharbour Lane, the Green Man, the Crown, the Warrior the Angel all of them also on Coldharbour Lane up to Brixton — any one of them would be viable and very successful now if properly run and without tie.

    I’ve accurately predicted most of what’s happened to all of Camberwell’s pubs for well over a decade. I’ve not mentioned even a tenth of what I know in public because when I have made my predictions based on being well informed and understanding the processes of the pub sector from being in the business, people have accused me of commenting negatively because of personal ‘sour grapes’, because I have been ‘scared of competition’ and all manner of other perverse accusations of nefarious ulterior motivation which they have just imagined and so I’ve mostly kept out of it and left them to think they know better than someone who’s in it up to their neck.

    People have short memories, know very little about what is happening around them and even less about what happens behind the scenes in the pub sector.

    Incidentally on Weds this week the govt announced that it will legislate agains
    the Tie.

  15. And THAT event in Parliament this week was solely, only, exclusively down to ME starting the Fair Pint Campaign by nagging other local publicans to get together and lobby government about the beer tie back in 2007.

    And that wouldn’t have happened if Nicky Francey, who agreed to run the Sun and Doves while I went off the rails to fight our rent review and network with other publicans, had not allowed me the time and energy to do all of that back then. And now this week the pub sector wouldn’t even had a meeting in Parliament let alone one which introduced the start real legislation coming in against the devastation that pubco’s have wrought on British society.

  16. Well I do hope Vince Cable’s attempts end in more than Labour’s — obviously there have been many false dawns on this one. Thanks for the enlightenment in any case.
    Stephen

  17. So this is what I want to cheer up my cinema going experiences in 2013. No more dull cinema seats for me. Camberwell Baths here we go

  18. @J Mark Dodds

    Happy New Year

    Maximum respect as regard to the pubco process…I take my hat off to you…well my flat cap Kangol anyway… 🙂

    If the residents of Myatt’s Field Park really want a community pub, then all is not lost…With a modicum of the energy you’ve put into the fair pint campaign, there is every chance they could lobby the council to deny change of use and force developer to charge a reasonable rate and do something interesting at The Prince of Wales site…from what I can tell that energy does exist in spades, it just depends whether they really want to apply it to saving a pub…perhaps a community co-op pub? The park does look truly impressive and welcoming these days…I never tire of going for a walk around there.

    Economics as we know it doesn’t have long left in it’s current form…things look bleak and hopeless at the moment but as the greatest quartet in the history of popular music once said…

    “If it keeps on rainin’ levee’s goin’ to break”

  19. The Lumineers will be playing at Brixton Academy in March, and I will be gently nodding my head to this tune…

  20. You have a ticket? Well done, this show has been sold out for a long time. But the show of the moment is surely the snow which is about to transform Camberwell and close its primary schools, or so the students hope.

  21. Listening to The Lumineers for the first time. Sound like American Mumford & Sons…

    … Now I’m listening to it, I realise I’ve heard a few of these tracks before. This has sold out the Academy you say?

  22. Yes indeed I have tickets, and yes indeed it has sold out at the Academy even though they put on an extra night. They are on tour though

  23. Looking at reports on the net, it looks as though there are two Antic companies: Antic Ltd and Antic London.
    Antic Ltd owns the Tiger; Antic London the Sun of Camberwell. It looks as though Antic Ltd is in administration — meaning that it’s the owner of the Tiger which has gone broke. It’s sad to hear that. I hope the Tiger can be rescued.

  24. Looks like they planned this one?
    anticlondon ltd does not yet exist on companies house *suggesting it’s new and the domain anticlondon.com was registered on in dec 2012.

    Can anyone confirm, didn’t all the pubs used to just be owned by antic ltd?

    Hope the tiger stays open!

  25. Don’t understand a couple of things.

    1) Your comment wasn’t there when I posted comment beginning Twitter … I would have pointed out that you are right. Something is a afoot and debt is being shed. A restructuring is what is happening. Mind you, my head is STILL spinning with viral detritus four whole weeks after I first went down with symptoms and maybe I just couldn’t see your post.

    2) When one embeds a Youtube video. HERE. On this blog. How does one do it?

    Eilean? euse? Peter? Ana?

  26. The piazza is a bit dismal at the moment. “Mug here and go straight to court!” should be its slogan. What are the minuses against the new library, Mark?

  27. “After a flurry of early chances for the home side,” Tranmere beat Brentford 1–2 yesterday. Let’s hear it for the two Tranmere fans who helped 150 Brentford fans to clear their pitch of snow before the game yesterday.

    Today, Camberwell is also a winter wonderland. All our problems have been covered over in a Kosset carpet of snow-white, soft, fairytale snow.

    Which just goes to show, that Jon’s Snow’s ties, designed by Victoria Richards right here, are a rainbow of beacon whom we should follow of in the global grind-down. Be lifted that these benighted days of dazed nights are mitigated, so they are, by nice days.

    http://www.clockworkstudios.co.uk/

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