Here’s a bit of a worry. The sign says ‘Closed Until Further Notice,’ which if this means what it usually does, would be a real loss, not just to Blackheath Standard but to London’s Greasy-Spoonland in general.

This place was like stepping back in time – those fab chrome strips holding faux-marble wall panels and groovy 1960s swivel seats at the front, black & red shiny panels at the back, formica tables and ketchup bottles. What I liked about it was that it wasn’t self-consciously ‘retro’ – it wore its British-caff heritage lightly.

There always seemed to be “characters” in Gambardella. Builders, families, harmless fruitcakes, slumming toffs, all human life was there. The tea was pleasingly orange, the fried food pleasingly greasy and the atmosphere pleasingly unpretentious. The staff were friendly and up for a joke – often at their own expense. After reeling off all the different varieties of coffee they do, they’d admit it was all so much easier when all they did was instant – so much for the fantasy of the ancient Gaggia in the corner…

They already closed the more modern half of the shop – last year, if memory serves, which doesn’t bode well, but I thought one of the few things that were succeeding in this climate was cafes and coffee shops. Mind you, I guess the small independents have to actually pay tax unlike some of the non-profit-making big chains like poor Starbucks..

Perhaps it’s been closed for a refit, though I really hope not too much of one. It could so easily teeter – either with ill-advised modernisation or an equally dodgy trip down Theme Lane. Gambardella was a real caff, not a plastic imitation of what we might like to imagine 1950s coffee bars were.

If it is closed for good, it won’t just be the Phantom weeping into my PG Tips. Messrs Tilbrook, Holland and Difford, who met for the first time after his placing an ad in the window of Gambardella, will almost certainly join me in shedding a nostalgic tear. Maybe Jools might like to take it over himself. After all, it’s only a cough and a spit from the Holland Arms and everyone loves a nice cup of tea. As Mrs Doyle might say if she was actually relevant to this post, “ah, go on, go on, go on, go on…”

UPDATE: According to Mike, there has been a bereavement in the family. My thoughts and best wishes are with them. I hope that in time we will be able to visit again.

Have you had any weirdnesses with your Freeview yesterday? I meant to talk about this last week and – well, you know me at the moment…

Basically, boffins are testing 4G services at the moment to see, among other things, whether sending it out at 800MHz will disrupt Freeview, which runs in a very close bandwidth.

They’re concerned that aerials, amplifiers, digital tuners and TV signals might not be able to block out mobile phones and they’re using our area (Greenwich, Lewisham, Southwark and Tower Hamlets) as a guinea pig. Why these (pretty basic) tests weren’t done before they sold 4G is beyond me.

We were supposed to get information through the post. I don’t know about you but I haven’t had anything yet. So, if you’ve lost any of your Freeview channels (check your subscription on Adult XXXX before embarrassing yourself, eh…), sound (gasping on Adult XXXX isn’t an intermittent fault…) or got blocky images (pixilation on Adult XXXX doesn’t count…) here are the ways to contact people who can make it all better:

Facebook: www.facebook.com/at800tv

Twitter: www.twitter.com/at800tv

Google+: www.gplus.to/at800tv

Or just talk to a real human being at the call centre: 0333 31 31 800

You will have noticed that I’ve spent a lot of time in the past four months not posting – sorry about that. Truth is I’ve been totally out of the loop full stop – unusual for me, but hey, sometimes stuff happens.

So I failed to notice – and certainly failed to tell you – a small piece of good news. You may already know it, but I didn’t. Richard from the Greenwich Society tells me:

Remember the furore over the garish signs at the Pier building?

Phantom followers and Greenwich Society members objected when the operators put in planning applications, although only after they had installed lots of stuff without permission. Inexplicably planning officers recommended approval but after a pretty heated Planning Committee meeting, with a notably fiery contribution from Cllr Maureen O’Mara, the applications were turned down.

Zizzi and Byron appealed and now the Planning Inspector has dismissed those appeals making it very clear she thinks the signs are completely out of place in such an important setting, exactly what we said and what the councillors said.

Hopefully this will stiffen the resolve of the Council to wield some more muscle over the rest of the pending applications for signs, parasols and space heaters.

Indeed. We can’t do much about the unsuitable building design of the pier buildings – just because they’re by a famous architecture agency doesn’t make them work in the place they’re in – but there’s no reason whatsoever for those godawful signs.

Less welcome news is the sheer number of small shops that are biting the dust. Hide All and Compendia the latest victims I know of (though Mark tells me Compendia will return as a market stall), but I hardly dare visit the town in case there are more.  And the Morden Arms is now to be flats. I didn’t much like it as a pub, but with better (i.e. more friendly – it’s the only place where I’ve ever been told to go away as they didn’t feel like serving anyone) management it could have been a decent place. Now it won’t have the chance. Sigh.

Something that has occurred to me as I begin this week is that although the Phantom photo archives are large and labyrinthine, there are huge gaps in them, many of them being the normal, everyday stuff of Greenwich life – precisely the sort of thing I miss from archives of the past – the shops, restaurants, streets, houses, people that I pass every day and whom it never occurs to me that one of those every days they won’t be there any more.

Maybe I need to get out more with my camera, taking more pictures of ‘nothing in particular;’ maybe I need one of every shop in Greenwich.

I sort of realised this when Kum Luang closed – that I didn’t have a picture of it open. Years ago, I had the same thing with Goddards, and this morning I have done it again. I have no photo of Beachcomber seafood restaurant on the High Street corner of poor, doomed Durnford Street – nothing to remind me of the plastic lobsters, the moveable pot plants, the faded photos of Olde Greenwich, the trifle-topping walls, the life-ring shop sign, now that it’s gone.

At least that’s what I’m told by Mark, who went in there with Mrs Mark yesterday for a bite to eat and was told it was the last day. Apparently there’s been a change in the lease and it is going to retail. Perhaps that’s to make up for the presumable change in lease that allowed two retail shops to turn into the highly original and Greenwich-centric Costa Coffee a few doors down.

I liked Beachcomber. Not particularly for the food; there was always far too much on the menu for any of it to be superbly cooked, but for its character. I liked the faded decor, the tatty pictures, the dodgy tinsel Christmas decorations, the unpredictable service, the gingham tableclothness of it all.

Are we really seeing the final death throes of Greenwich’s independent restaurants now? I can tell you with a heavy heart that there are at least two more indies about to pop, even though they’re not announcing their death publicly yet.

I don’t know whether my mum, with whom the Beachcomber waiters always used to flirt shamelessly, will be relieved or rather sad that they’ve gone…

Since it seems to be ‘that sort of day’ on the blog, I’m sending this one out into the ether too.

Lindsey asks:

What’s happened to the statue of Nelson outside The Traf. Tavern?

I live near Greenwich and was walking passed the statue yesterday. As we approached, we could see all the taping and wooden struts holding him up. As we got nearer it was clear that all was not well and his feet had somehow been ripped of its base. Foul play we imagine.  We were joined by an Australian chap and his wife who said they had heard there had been an attempt to remove it for scrap purposes!! How very dare they! We love this statue and Nelson is one of our heroes. Have you heard anything?

The Phantom Replies:

I PROMISE that any attempts to remove Nelson were nothing to do with me, despite my hating it with a passion. Of course it could just be a Nelson-lover who can’t bear to see a statue that looks more like Kermit the frog than a national hero…

I haven’t heard that someone tried to nick it and melt it down, but it would be an ideal candidate for thieves since it’s at the end of a cul de sac, with easy vehicluar access and gets pretty quiet at night. This metal-theft thing is getting utterly ridiculous. Two of my three recent long railway journeys have been disrupted/re-routed/cancelled half way through for metal theft and we recently lost dear Alfred Salter a little further up the river.

I’ve never made any secret of my dislike of this statue but clearly there is at least one fan – and there is no excuse for metal theft – something really has to be done and so far the Government has been extremely slow and ineffective at putting in even simple precautions.

Folks – I hadn’t noticed this in Greenwich Time and I’m willing to bet few other people have either because it was in the middle of an article telling people to arrange their parking vouchers – and time-poor people who had already booked their vouchers probably just skimmed it.

But Stuart noticed it and it is a bit rubbish. Basically if you’ve received visitor vouchers that say ‘Existing CPZ’, they are not valid. This is because there was a printing error and each voucher should have the relevant area printed on it. Replacements were supposed to have arrived Wednesday (25th), but apparently the earliest they will arrive is tomorrow (Saturday).

Parking restrictions come into force today.

Stuart called Greenwich parking services. He says “they have told me that warnings only will be issued until Monday so Sat/Sun visitors should be OK. After Sun its penalty notices all round.”

I’ve just looked on the website and you can use the incorrectly-issued vouchers until Monday. Let’s hope everyone who received wrong tickets actually receives replacements tomorrow and doesn’t just assume that the ones they’ve got are okay…

 

So – for once, a siren on a Monday morning with an actual reason. Colin, Linda, Duncan, Steve, Zoe, Lizzie and Thomas were all with me and assumed that the siren that went off at Morden Wharf Road was just another example of the one that goes off every Monday when actually it had a proper reason to go off at 3.30 am – and went on for ages.

It was actually a real fire in a chemical processing plant and all over Twitter if I had been awake enough to be looking at it – Duncan got up and went to look for the source of the siren, and took this:

and, with my new-found, if intermittent ability to embed video, here’s one by a chap called Jason Connelly on YouTube, found by Darryl who had his windows open all night (as did we all, Darryl, as did we all…)I love the smell of unidentified chemical in the morning…

I know it’s a serious thing, but when Duncan first sent me the photo I couldn’t help thinking it looked like an old master painting of a harbour on a desert island; all it needed was a silhouetted tall ship and some yo-ho-ho-ing from the tavern and my sleep-deprived imagination would be living in a low-res haze of romance instead of reading the BBC News report…

Still at least we all know what that ‘air raid’ siren that we were hearing every Monday morning at 7.00am was – a test – and, it would seem, for good reason…

Here’s another rather beautiful photo of an unbeautiful thing, by Asibi:

A collection of bird-related stories –  in the loosest possible sense.

Crowe

First – in case you missed the earlier post, Stephen’s sent me a pic of the basic stage for Les Miserables which is coming for filming this week with Russell Crowe, Anne Hathaway etc etc. Looks like a big prod, so don’t expect much Easter access to ORNC, but plenty of star-gazing and singing along to do. Altogether now, I dreamed a dream in time gone by…

Raven

Secondly Stephen also told me about a rather odd story in the Times a few days ago. One of the ravens at the Tower went missing last year, after the Raven Master allowed some of her flight feathers (which are trimmed to prevent escape) to grow back again. He spent two days in Greenwich, ‘whistling at the trees’ after a Blue Badge Guide at the Observatory reported a ‘large bird’ in the trees outside. It’s is a wonderful image. I do hope he was in full Beefeater regalia. Munin, the bird concerned, flew off and was eventually lured back with a piece of chicken by a chap who’d spotted her in his back garden. It’s a lovely story and I’d give you a link, but I refuse to give Murdoch any cash so can’t actually get behind that pay wall.

Chicken

Ah yes. Continuing the Pier story, Matt from Beware of the Trees tells me ” I had a quick chat with one of the people organising the ferry queues, who told me that everything would be opening this coming Wednesday. Given Byron and F&B now have menus up by the doors, and F&B was full of staff in full uniform having what looked like a dress rehearsal, this seems very possible. It’s seems a bit less likely that Nando’s and Zizzi will be open, but who knows.

In the true spirit of investigative journalism, Matt looked at the relevant company websites, to see if they were offering any confirmation. You’ll be pleased to know that F&B’s claim to be opening in March, and Nando’s are under the impression that they are opening in Greenwich Village.

Nice to see they have aspirations in the Big Apple too…

A small fire in Greenwich Park yesterday, spotted by Matthew.  He tells me it was on the west side of the park, just up the steep hill from the King George St Gate.

The fire brigade, he says, “arrived about 2 minutes after I took this, by which time the fire had reached the path and the large shrub in the top left of the photo was ablaze.”

They suspect a careless smoker either in the park or walking down the pavement on the other side of the railings, chucking a lit fag end into the bushes.

I can’t imagine any Phantophiles being so gauche with their smouldering butts (ooh-err), but as Matthew says, ‘it’s an unpleasant reminder of just how dry everything is at the moment.’

… Andrew’s hat, served with a little sauce on the side.

Toria has just seen actual movement on the Heart of East Greenwich site – a JCB. She says it’s “doing ‘stuff’ (technical term) within the old hospital grounds! It’s moving and everything..”

Can the long-awaited development have actually started at last? That JCB looks a little lonely – but small beginnings…