Our Letter to Crosby Herald and all Councillors

The future of Crosby Village

Dramatic as it sounds, the nature of Crosby Village for the next 25 years and beyond is going to be decided this summer, probably in the next 5 weeks.

With vision it could be regenerated as an attractive bustling centre in the day, with thriving restaurants and bars in a much safer environment at night. But right now it is more likely that about half of the recognisable village will be destroyed and replaced with multistory car parks and a huge supermarket, providing the final nail in the coffin for the few local businesses that remain.

Sainsbury’s is the most important shop in the village but it’s proposal to build a new store more than 3 times bigger than the existing one will damage the village beyond repair.

Sainsbury’s want a store so big that they can only fit it in by destroying most of Moor Lane and building right across this historic route, which is the birth place of Crosby at its junction with Liverpool Road.  They want to bring so many more cars to Crosby Village that most of the remaining space in it becomes 2 or 4 storey carparks and they even lift their new supermarket off the ground, up to first floor, to get more cars under it. People in the village will have to use moving ramps to get in to it.  The large and very high white box building Sainsbury’s propose belongs on a retail park, not in an historic village centre.  Indeed Sainsbury’s want it to be 20% bigger than the ASDA in Bootle and they want a third of their new shop to sell clothes, books, stationary, homewares and electricals all directly completing with existing and potential smaller local businesses.

In their publicity Sainsbury’s say they will create 11 other new shops in the village.  They do not so clearly mention that they are knocking down 12 (?? TBC) of the existing shops on Moor Lane.  Although Sainsbury’s say they will ensure that the village keeps its Post Office and specialist chemist, even now just 5 weeks before the Council is due to review the plans, there is nowhere for any of the businesses on Moor Lane to relocate into whilst the new Sainsbury’s is built.  This would leave these local traders with no business premises for at least 18 months, by which time they may well have gone bust.  The businesses affected are Satterthwaites, Blues Bar, Lloyds Chemist, ... TBC...

We wonder if Satterthwaites lost their oldest shop, in the heart of Crosby, for this length of time that their entire business might be at risk of going bust in the current recession.  Imagine that.

The combination of halving the number of shops in the village whilst disrupting the rest of them with the construction of the new supermarket for more than a year, and then a big ‘retail park’ Sainsbury’s increasing its direct competition with many local retailers really could kill off the idea of the village as the local centre. Some people have joked it will be Sainsburyville.

Yet for all this Sainsbury’s is a good grocer and essential to Crosby’s future.  We have a positive vision where a new bigger, better Sainsbury’s store contributes to the true regeneration of the whole village with an attractive new building which could be more than twice as big as the existing store, but not three and a half times bigger as they are currently proposing.  This might sound like little difference but Sainsbury’s have a very aggressive national expansion programme, and they seem to have hardly any interest in their actual impact in real local communities, and they say they will not now reconsider their proposals.  Their business target is to catch up with Tescos.

Sefton Council has no plans of their own for Crosby and appear to have let Sainsbury’s have free run whilst developing their inappropriate proposals. The traders in Crosby are very worried but are working to maintain their businesses in the short term and are trapped, not wanting to upset their landlord – Sainsbury’s.

So that leaves us…and you. 

There is a recession, but there is also a future, especially for the young people of Crosby.  What do we want Crosby to be like in 25 years time?, and right now, for the next 5 weeks what are we going to do about it?

We have formed a campaign group, ABetterCrosby, (search online - all one word). We understand the Planning Process and how to work with it to get Sainsbury’s current plans rejected at the Planning Committee on 21^st July.  We have a strategy of action up to this vital Planning meeting.  We are able to draw on the advice of the experts who designed and built Liverpool ONE.  In the week since our Facebook group started we have gained over 300 supporters, and over 1000 people have already joined a separate group to ‘Save Crosby’.

Behind their adverts Sainsbury’s are a big commercial corporation and they won’t change their plans readily, we need all the help we can get.

Will you help us?

Jamie

for

ABetterCrosby. 

Do supermarkets look better down South?

Following on from a Facebook conversation, thanks to Maureen, this is Waitrose in Sevenoaks...

.. yes you've got it, hiding behind the hanging basket.

Nice and dicrete and apparently it's a big shop with a multistorey carpark in behind there somewhere.

This is the beginning of an exercise trying to see if there is a trend that supermarkets down South are nicer to look at than those in the North.  Now why might that be??

Heres another example .. in Kent, ...http://www.cabe.org.uk/case-studies/sainsbury-supermarket-deal,  and another in posh Ludlow http://www.cabe.org.uk/case-studies/tesco-ludlow

Conversely I have heard the new Sainsbury's in Colne, up past Blackburn is a real howler, a white box above a car park......

Anybody got any more interesting sightings?

ALERT - Moldy Peaches at Moose Coffee

Another sunny Sunday in Crosby looking for a bit of pleasure.


Ended up in Moose Coffee, as we seem to every once in a while, and it was top. 


Crosby is never going to win a 'Cosmopolitan suburb of the year' award and can sometimes feel a bit samey, but if you're eating delicious waffles, coffee in hand and reading about second-homophobia in the papers (poor Mr Laws) what more could you need for a reviving afternoon?

They didn't have any actual moldy peaches, in fact I'm not sure if they had any fruit at all - Moose Coffee is not the place for dieting and you need to be in good shape to knock down platefuls of lovely bagels, eggs, pastrami, cheese, ice cream, chocolate spread, maple syrup and more eggs. But hey... you could always borrow some wheels from Crosby Cycles and bike it home.  I imagine frequent visitors must all weigh 20 stone - but perhaps that is part of the genuine American feel. I think we would be more regular (visiting Moose) if they had some salad, on which note the toilets are clean and spacious, and the staff attentive and friendly, even to pesky 3 year old kids.  


I would honestly recommend anything from the menu, but the pastrami bagel is great - blueberry pancakes and vanilla milkshake to follow perhaps?

Regarding mold I think they actually have 5 stars for cleanliness in that rather weird Sefton Council hygiene award scheme.  The Moldy Peaches actually provided some suitably groovy American/New York background music helping the vibe, and if I knew lots about computers I would make their songs play here - http://www.myspace.com/themoldypeachesfans/music-player?sindex=2.2&shuffle=true&amix=false&pmix=false&plid=28974&artid=12227320&sseed=1468&ptype=3&stime=0&ap=1&rpeat=false 
If this works you might like the first song, but 'Who's Got the Crack?' could be a gentle anthem to hum as you mill around Crosby looking for other cheap thrills....


http://www.moosecoffee.co.uk/


http://www.crosbyherald.co.uk/news/crosby-news/2010/01/28/help-crosby-shops-get-through-a-tough-trading-year-68459-25700034/

Sainsburys can afford better

We heard someone say that Sainsbury's could not afford to do anything better than the pile of white tosh they are proposing for Crosby Village, because of the recession and all that. You know.... the property market has collapsed and nobody has any money, etc etc, wouldn't you be pleased if anybody made any investment in your community now??


Well we all need to eat, which is what makes supermarkets such a win, win, win deal for their owners. Things have to be really bad before the rest of us stop buying food.


Sainsbury's recent full year financial results 2010, http://www.igd.com/analysis/channel/news_hub.asp?channelid=1&channelitemid=14&nidp=&nid=6842 , report a 17.5% increase in profits to £610 million, on £19.96 billion sales.....hmmmm. Considering most of us are pleased to still have a job or be breaking even, it seems like the supermarkets are laughing all the way to the bank as others, like local businesses, fall by the wayside.


Sefton Council had budgeted gross revenue expenditure of £546m for 2008/9, and from the governmental news we imagine this might be the high water mark for sometime. So yes, Sefton's entire annual budget for all our local public services is less that Sainsbury's annual profits. With these kind of figures big corporations surely must pay more than lip service to their social responsibilities. 


Going back to Sainsbos big profit numbers - reading their exciting annual report 2009  http://www.j-sainsbury.co.uk/ar09/ states they have 16,191,000 square feet of sales area in the country. Their proposed new Crosby store at 50,000 square feet (20% bigger that the nice new ASDA in Bootle which is 41,100 sq ft) will only be 0.3% of that national total - but 0.3% of £19.9 billion sales is still a whole truck load of money (£61m sales per year with nearly £2 million profit per year). With these figures, and the amount of money we have put through their tills in Crosby for years, you would really think they would pay the local community a little more respect with the quality of their proposals. After all as they claim in their annual report.....








.......  their own goals 3,4 & 5 are surely relevant to development projects and in terms of their current idea of 'making a positive difference to our community' .. frankly it's corporate BULLS**T.


Sainsbury's people - PLEASE TRY HARDER, your not 'Making Sainsbury's great again'

Birkdale

Getting even more tenous now, but its only 3 stops on the train. This is an amazingly great bistro .. go.

the sea, the sky

Stating the bleeding obvious this, but there cannot be that many places where you get sunsets like this, over a coast which is so close to most of us.

Maybe it's just volcanic ash or pollution from Runcorn, but every cloud......

Formby Pool

Bear with us, this is not Crosby, but sometimes we have to stretch our wings, and one of the best things about Crosby is it's closeness to Formby, without being so dull perhaps. Bit of a dilemma really, Crosby should be wonderful, considering the coast, the train, the schools, the parks, the houses, the closeness to the city but it's not quite, why?

Anyways Formby has lots of lovely things, and apart from the Pine Woods their swimming pool must be one of the loveliest it the country. Swimming there, with their clever changing rooms and views to the park outside, feels like a little Scandinavian oasis.

Better still swimming for kids and the over 60's is free after 2pm at the weekends (or at least it was last time we went). 

Compare and contrast to the rather strange spaceship/shuttlecock, round outside, pool shaped inside disappointment that is Crosby Pool - with its ridiculous crap cafe - didn't anyone notice it was next to a BEACH when they built it, and that it could have been NICE.