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Margate won't get funding for regeneration unless they sign a gagging order with TV company

trashpony

trashpony

Hag
So Margate near me is one of the most deprived towns in the UK with one of the highest level of empty shops (34%). Everyone in the town was very excited to have been chosen as the beneficiary of £100,000 of government funding for regeneration together with Mary Portas' advice on regenerating the town.

But now it turns out there is a massive catch - unless the retailers agree to appear on a reality show, they won't get the money and Portas will choose a different town.

FFS :facepalm:

http://www.retail-week.com/property...rticle?blocktitle=Most-commented&contentID=-1

and

http://margateneverruns.com/post/24976748215/mary-portas-talks-to-margate
 
:hmm:

So, Government money is tied in with a deal with a TV station.

Which TV station? (The retail week thing requires registration)

Not one of Murdoch's by any chance?
 
Completely fucking ridiculous - although tbh it was obvious from the off that the whole Mary Portas thing was a silly publicity stunt which would do precisely nothing to address the underlying problems of town centres and had far too little money behind it to make much positive difference in any case.
 
Puddy_Tat said:
:hmm:

So, Government money is tied in with a deal with a TV station.

Which TV station? (The retail week thing requires registration)

Not one of Murdoch's by any chance?
Click to expand...

How weird - if you google it, you get a link which opens fine but my link (which I C&Ped from the page) needs a password. The production company is called Optomen - they're an independent who do work for a load of TV stations including the beeb but this is being shown on C4
 
I'd have thought participants could keep working Portas into a reality tv show in an entertaining manner, keeping to just this side of slander :) .
 
Streathamite said:
what the hell is a govt body doing diverting cash to Portas and a TV company?:confused:
Click to expand...

I consider it such a sign of the times that I first mentioned this story in the Tory incompetence thread.

Mid you its far from clear to me at this point whether the £100k is actually directly linked to the TV project, whether Margate will lose it if they tells Portas to take a hike.
 
She knows fuck all about retail anyway. Whats killed retail in the UK is business rates and rents which are silly. A monkey knows the solutions to the UKs issues
 
starfish2000 said:
Whats killed retail in the UK is business rates and rents which are silly.
Click to expand...

There's much more to it than that. For a start I'd point to the way that supermarkets have been allowed to grow without let or hindrance, and especially the way they've diversified into the book and record markets (among other things), creaming off the profitable mass-market end of the business and making specialist retailers unviable. Then there's a slack planning regime that's simply waved through any number of unnecessary and damaging out-of-town developments, lack of investment in public transport and other things needed to facilitate high-street shopping, crap town planning in the post-war era, and so on and so forth.

IMO any solution to the high street's problems has to start by stripping the main supermarket chains of some of their functions (personally I'd like to see them restricted to being no more than retailers of cheap packaged foods and cleaning products) and preferably breaking the biggest chains up altogether, tightening up the planning rules on out-of-town developments, making the tax system disadvantageous to them, and generally creating a legislative climate in which running an independent town-centre retail business is as easy as possible, whilst initiating a new supermarket or out-of-town shopping centre is slow, difficult and eye-wateringly expensive.
 
Roadkill said:
There's much more to it than that. For a start I'd point to the way that supermarkets have been allowed to grow without let or hindrance, and especially the way they've diversified into the book and record markets (among other things), creaming off the profitable mass-market end of the business and making specialist retailers unviable. Then there's a slack planning regime that's simply waved through any number of unnecessary and damaging out-of-town developments, lack of investment in public transport and other things needed to facilitate high-street shopping, crap town planning in the post-war era, and so on and so forth.

IMO any solution to the high street's problems has to start by stripping the main supermarket chains of some of their functions (personally I'd like to see them restricted to being no more than retailers of cheap packaged foods and cleaning products) and preferably breaking the biggest chains up altogether, tightening up the planning rules on out-of-town developments, making the tax system disadvantageous to them, and generally creating a legislative climate in which running an independent town-centre retail business is as easy as possible, whilst initiating a new supermarket or out-of-town shopping centre is slow, difficult and eye-wateringly expensive.
Click to expand...

Completely agree. What has killed Margate (and the surrounding towns) is the building of a massive series of retail parks in the middle of the island. All the 'big name' retailers are there, having moved out of their high street stores. Margate used to have a Primark, M&S, etc but they have gone (despite a promise that chain retailers would not be allowed to move to the retail park) and smaller retailers cannot manage those massive sqft-age. The building of the shopping centres (there are five in total - each of the main supermarkets have a hypermarket there as well as other shops) has destroyed the local communities. The local people voted overwhelmingly against the development, voted out the councillors at the next election and the development still went ahead.
 
Take the cash but have a town pact to say 'portis is a twat' every second sentence during their reality tv filming sessions.
 
That is f-ing outrageous. Then again, £100,000 wasn't going to go very far either. Definately not worth selling your soul to the devils of reality TV!
 
I think all involved should attempt to make £100, 000 plus by milking this story to the max! Speak to anyone and everyone who will listen/pay and expose the scam..
 
Yeah my local council spent a million taking on the lease for the former Woolworths store, then millions more to upgrade it in order to attract TJ Hughes to move there. It is suggested they did this because they didn't want a pound shop there, as its right next to a new shopping centre that was built on the town centre last decade. Well that went well didn't it, TJ Hughes died and now its a Poundland! :facepalm:
 
trashpony said:
So Margate near me is one of the most deprived towns in the UK with one of the highest level of empty shops (34%). Everyone in the town was very excited to have been chosen as the beneficiary of £100,000 of government funding for regeneration together with Mary Portas' advice on regenerating the town.

But now it turns out there is a massive catch - unless the retailers agree to appear on a reality show, they won't get the money and Portas will choose a different town.

FFS :facepalm:

http://www.retail-week.com/property...rticle?blocktitle=Most-commented&contentID=-1

and

http://margateneverruns.com/post/24976748215/mary-portas-talks-to-margate
Click to expand...
That's fucking disgusting and, sadly, unsurprising :(:mad:
 
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