You may have seen surveys if you went to your doctors surgery recently. They were asking you why did you think the Commonwealth Games would be great, etc. Anyways, the results were to be posted on the Council's website in August - well, basically, now.
But the results aren't up yet.
Maybe Jo-Ann Welsh knows - why not drop her an email: joann.welsh@glasgow.gov.uk, or better yet, give her a ring: 0141 287 4460.
From Games Monitor 2014:
Ardenlea St in Dalmarnock is the site of the new Athletes Village for the Commonwealth Games. Margaret Jaconelli purchased her flat in 1976 and she and her family have lived alone on Ardenlea St. for the past 5 years. All the other tenants were rehoused and now the council are threatening to evict Margaret and her family. Her story can be viewed in the film clip below:
There's a new website looking at the Commonwealth Games:
http://gamesmonitor2014.wordpress.com/
What is the Games Monitor?
The Games Monitor is an emerging group, or network, of people raising awareness about the impacts of ‘regeneration’ via the Commonwealth Games 2014 (CG 2014), and the Clyde Gateway Intiative (CGI).
Who are the people behind the Games Monitor?
We come from many different backgrounds: locals, activists, campaigners, academics. We are not backed by any political party/organisation, and none of us receive any money for the voluntary work we do with the Monitor. We are always happy to include more people in the group.
What does the Games Monitor do?
Our blog provides a clear, critical and accessible point of information about developments in the East End. We intend this site to be a hub for information exchange, publication and solidarity networking. We also want to start establishing contact with other groups in the area, who are concerned about the impacts of the Games.
What’s wrong with hosting the Games? Won’t it bring benefits to the people of the East end in Glasgow?
Despite all the hype, the lessons from many previous ‘mega-events’ like the Commonwealth Games, is that they typically run over budget; that ‘regeneration’ often causes displacement because of rising rents and prices; that there are often harmful environmental costs due to construction and road-building; and overall, that these types of events are typically more about private property development and ‘city-building’ (building an image of the city) than about the needs of local people.
But won’t the Games and the Clyde Gateway development go ahead anyway?
Yes, but we want to make sure that as many local people are involved in the process as possible, and that the real needs of the people of the East End are given voice, and have a chance to influence the outcomes of what is after all, the biggest regeneration programme in Scotland.
How can I get involved?
Check our contact page for our e-mail address. We hold regular meetings, and we intend to hold public meetings, conduct local history walks and make contact with other groups in the area. If you have any ideas you want to involve us in, or any information you want to share, then let us know and we’ll be happy to work alongside you for a better Glasgow East.
TEN months after Glasgow rejoiced at being awarded the chance to be host city of the Commonwealth Games, a major regeneration project is under way to prepare for the Games and to transform the city's poorest areas. There is just one hitch: the last remaining residents in the area earmarked as the athlete's village are refusing to move out.
On Ardenlea Street in Dalmarnock the tenement row lies empty, neglected and crying out for demolition.
For the past five years Margaret Jaconelli, 50, her husband Jack, 50, and her 15-year-old son, Aarron, have been the only residents of the tenement block. Everyone else has been re-housed as part of the Clyde Gateway Project over five years ago, but Jaconelli refuses to move.
"I feel isolated because we don't have any neighbours. I have become a recluse. I don't even have a postcode any more, the gardens are littered with rubbish and no-one comes to clean it up. It's almost as if we no longer exist."
With the Commonwealth Games approaching, the city council is desperate to demolish the whole street, but Jaconelli says she will stay until she receives the compensation she believes she is due. She says she has so far been offered only an 80% ownership of a house in Cranhill, which she has turned down.
"I just feel like the council are coming in and taking my life away, my house away," she says. "They are not interested in me, I'm just a wee person and they think they can just walk all over me. At the end of the day they can all go back to their homes in the evening, but this is my home, my livelihood, it's all I have got."
Councillor George Redmond says there is an end in sight and that will be in the form of a Compulsory Purchase Order (CPO) on the property: "It is in no-one's interest that Margaret and her family remain there, especially after all this time. I am sympathetic to a point, but this is a larger issue. The local area needs certainty so that the games can take place and Ardenlea Street needs to be demolished. For the greater good of the area someone needs to take it on the chin."
Redmond claims a CPO has been placed on the property, but Jaconelli and her lawyer deny this.
Lawyer, James M Carmichael stated: "No CPO has been served on Margaret and if there was there would need to be time to contest it and to seek adequate compensation. I actually wish they would serve a CPO on the property so I can take it to the Sheriff's Court and we can get the issue finalised and make sure Margaret gets the adequate and rightful compensation that she is due."
Meanwhile, back at her ground-floor flat in the derelict street, Jaconelli is hoping for a solution to be made soon so she can move on with her life.
"We have been in limbo all this time - I am frightened to leave this house unoccupied for more than a few hours. The surrounding empty flats are continually broken into, vandalised and set on fire. We need to move on from here."
As winter approaches, the family is not looking forward to another winter in the flat. "For the past five winters my heating bills have been sky high, I am effectively heating the whole tenement," Jaconelli says, but she remains defiant. "I'm not budging. If the council don't give me the proper compensation that I deserve then I won't be moving anywhere. I will sit right here till 2014 and watch the Commonwealth Games from my window."
11:30pm Saturday 20th September 2008
Everything is going to plan for the Commonwealth Games - see articles below (don't worry, as costs rise, we'll pick up the bill).
From the Sunday Times:
Funding shortfall hits Glasgow Games
A key venue for the 2014 Glasgow Commonwealth Games faces a funding shortfall after the credit crunch scuppered plans to raise the cash through a land sale.
(Full article here)
From the Sunday Herald:
Crossrail project in doubt due to rising costs
A PROJECT dubbed the "missing piece in Scotland's rail jigsaw" that aims to improve east-west links looks in serious doubt as the government prepares to announce its priorities in the Strategic Transport Projects Review (STPR).
***
Ministers can expect a bruising row if Crossrail has been dropped, after an earlier study concluded that it would be worth over £1bn to the Scottish economy over 60 years, and passenger use purely at Glasgow High Street, which would become a transport hub, would be three million. It was also seen as vital for improving access to Glasgow and Prestwick airports, particularly in the run-up to the Commonwealth Games in 2014, by when it was due to be finished.
(Full article here)
And finally, another from the Sunday Times:
Credit crunch makes Clydeside work dry up
A few hundred yards from Glasgow city centre, work is progressing on a flagship project as part of the regeneration of the River Clyde.
*****
The Tradeston site is in the process of being cleared but no date has been fixed on when building will start. On the opposite bank, the developer Gladedale has put on hold its speculative project, a £150m office development at Broomielaw.
Further along the river, at Custom House Quay, a £200m development by the Australian entrepreneur Rodney Price has been in limbo for two years after plans for a 200-bedroom hotel were rejected. The architect RMJM admits it still has no firm starting date.
And as the Sunday Times reveals today, Elphinstone village, the ambitious £350m development on the west side of the Scottish Exhibition and Conference Centre (SECC), is the latest to go on hold. Planning consent was finally given in May just as the credit crunch was beginning to hit housebuilders hard. The result was that Elphinstone cannot realise the value of the site from potential developers in the current climate.
The SECC had been banking on receipts from that scheme to finance the Lord Foster-designed £70m, 12,500-seater arena set to be a significant part of the Glasgow 2014 Commonwealth Games.
“It is frustrating that having waited so long for consent, it came at this time but there is no point in selling it at less than its value,” said Pete Selman, project director at Elphinstone. “There is no doubt that location is perfect and iconic. Hopefully we can still find a way to make it happen.”
These projects are at the heart of the £5 billion regeneration of Clydeside — but are the downturn and credit crunch threatening to derail long-term plans to bring life back to Glasgow’s riverside?
(Full article here)
Times Education Supplement: Swimming hopefuls left high and dry
Emma Seith
Published: 25 July 2008
Funding plug is pulled on Commonwealth medallists’ club that balanced training and school demands
Many of scotland’s most promising young swimmers will never fulfil their potential, following the closure of the Commonwealth Pool in Edinburgh, predicts a British Olympic team swimming coach.
Frederic Vergnoux launched a scathing attack this week on the sport’s governing body in Scotland after his club, which is based at the pool, was forced to close because its funding was withdrawn.
World-class swimming in the capital is dead, he said, because Scottish Swimming has axed funding for City of Edinburgh Swimming, whose members include Commonwealth medallists Kirsty Balfour and Gregor Tait.
Mr Vergnoux, who has been head coach since January 2005 and seen his swimmers break 110 national, Commonwealth and European records, is leaving after the Beijing Olympics to take up a job at the Racing Club of France in Paris, but says he would rather have stayed in Scotland.
The club will close next month, with nothing lined up locally to replace it, said Mr Vergnoux.
The consequences will be particularly dire for younger swimmers as the club played a vital role in helping them balance their sport with their school work, he claimed.
Scottish Swimming withdrew its financial support earlier this year because the Royal Commonwealth Pool is closing next year to be refurbished for the 2014 Commonwealth Games in Glasgow.
“If you support performance swimming at the highest level, the facility is one of the biggest parts of it,” said Scottish Swimming’s performance director, Ally Whike.
Instead of investing in Edinburgh, Scottish Swimming was investing in facilities in other parts of the country, he said.
“We have engaged sports consultants KKP (Knight, Kavanagh and Page) to work with the local clubs on putting together another performance organisation,” he said, but such an organisation would not come into being until 2011 at the earliest, when the new pool is scheduled to reopen.
Edinburgh City Council’s funding support of £150,000 over three years was earmarked for developing swimmers for the Olympics, and that, too, has ceased.
A spokesman for the council said it was working with its leisure trust company and schools to offer alternative facilities while the Commonwealth Pool is closed.
Mr Vergnoux, who was named coach of the year for Scotland and Great Britain for the past two years, told The TESS: “When you swim in my programme, you do 10 sessions in and 10 sessions out of the water: weights and running. It’s a full-time job, but on top of that you have to go to school. If you don’t work with the school and have a weekly plan, they won’t help you.
“We can say, ‘This kid is a good swimmer at their level and they need to train and compete. Help us get them an education too’. There will be no programme providing what we provide at the moment.”
Megan Gilchrist is one of the young swimmers who has benefited from Mr Vergnoux’s programme.
She left Whitburn Academy in West Lothian this year and Mr Vergnoux expects her to make it to the 2012 British Olympic team.
She will “certainly” represent Scotland at the Commonwealth Games in Glasgow in 2014, he predicts. “Megan’s school was so supportive. We had a system where she did the full programme with us and the school provided tutoring. Sometimes a teacher would be at the pool side when she finished training.”
Lucy Ellis, currently a member of Dunedin club and a pupil at Inverkeithing High, could miss out from that kind of support, he said.
Lindsay Roy, former headteacher of Inverkeithing High, who has followed Lucy’s progress, commended programmes such as that created by Mr Vergnoux.
“It is a sound approach because it makes sure sporting youngsters are balanced with an appropriate input into their education, both in terms of time in school and time devoted to homework,” he said.
From City Strolls:
"This is East London, four years short of that 17-day corporate extravaganza, the 'primary strategic objective' to which we are all so deeply mortgaged. Haggerston Park, E2, a modest enclosure replacing war-damaged terraces and the demolished Imperial Gas, Light and Coke Company, has long been an oasis. It was opened as a public park in 1958. Its scandals are old scandals and have no bearing on the current frenzy for makeovers, peppery paths, wooden obstacles for training circuits, laminated heritage notices. Spanking new carpets are woven for clapped-out football pitches, changing rooms erected to replace shower blocks opened in the dark ages by Wendy Richard of EastEnders. Back in the 1820s Gas Company funds were misappropriated, illegal payments made to council officials and stock accounts falsified. Now, in more enlightened times, when bureaucratic malpractice is exposed and celebrated every day, urban-pastoral reservations hidden behind high walls win prizes for visionary planting schemes and restored municipal beds. Unnoticed, rough sleepers in thin bags utilise the stone terrace of the park café that has been shut for years. Late risers, having nothing much to rise for, burrow deep into dismal kapok-stuffed cocoons, while dog-accompanists use ballistic/prosthetic devices to hurl soggy yellow-green tennis balls for their hunt-and-retrieve pets. And the stoic Chinese couple, accomplishing their own version of the Long March, scorch rubber treadmarks around the padlocked novelty of the pristine football pitches. Artificial grass is better than the real thing, tougher, each blade individually painted. False chlorophyll dazzles like permanent dew, the permafrost of conspicuous investment. Some of the rough sleepers are not elective invisibles, victims of property mania or traumatised war veterans: they are construction workers, possibly Polish, saving their wages and choosing to kip down close to where the action is. The tsunami of speculative capital, wanton destruction, hole digging; the throwing up of apartment blocks, dormitory hives, warehouse conversions along the murky waterways. A new development calling itself Adelaide Wharf, and appearing very much like an aircraft-carrier that has ploughed into a wood yard, replaced a long-standing cold-store operation. 'With its 147 units (prices up to £395,000), this is a tremendous example of aspiration coming to fruition,' says Stephen Oakes, area director for English Partnerships. Inch by inch, the working canal between Limehouse Basin and the Islington tunnel has become a ladder of glass, connecting Docklands with the northern reaches of the City. Footballers, with loose change to invest, are rumoured to be buying up entire buildings as investment portfolios; many of these gaudy shells, low-ceilinged, tight-balconied, are doomed to remain half-empty, exhibitions of themselves. The look is mirthlessly playful, Ikea storage boxes gimmicked out of swipe-cards and toothpicks. The urban landscape of boroughs anywhere within the acoustic footprints of the Olympic Park in the Lower Lea Valley has been devastated, with a feverish beat-the-clock impatience unseen in London since the beginnings of the railway age. Every civic decency, every sentimental attachment, is swept aside for that primary strategic objective, the big bang of the starter's pistol."
Full article here and here
