Spurn those malls – and save London's street markets

hile Camden Lock and Covent Garden became tourist caricatures of themselves, SE10 kept a little raw, fleamarket atmosphere.

Not any more. This Sunday, the largest and most interesting of Greenwich's three markets, the Village Market, will close for ever, reducing the total market area by around two-thirds. It is making way for a much-needed ... er ... much-needed patch of derelict ­wasteland.

The land was originally earmarked for housing but the recession stopped that. The developers have pulled out. Yet the owners of the site, Capital and Counties, have still given the market notice to quit.

There is talk of Greenwich University buying the land but even if it happened, the site would be vacant for years while a proposal is worked up and taken through the planning process.

Elsewhere in south London, London & Associated Properties has just been forced to shelve plans to demolish Brixton's famous and unique market arcades, replacing them with a chain-store shopping centre exactly like all the others.

L&A has already closed Camden Passage antiques market, handing the whole building over to a chain, and is proposing to do the same with the Antiquarius market in the King's Road.

In better times, these decisions would merely be crass and wrong. In a recession, they are not far off suicidal. Greenwich Village Market makes money for the landowners, and for its area. A vacant eyesore earns nothing — indeed will probably push visitors away from the shops which remain.

Chains are closing stores, not opening new ones. Big retailers are being felled weekly by their reckless borrowing and mismanagement. Driving out diversified local operators in favour of a far smaller number of big corporates goes against all we've learned in the past six months about putting our eggs in one basket.

At least in Brixton and Islington the council is on side. In Greenwich, the council's mind is on higher matters than the health of its own town centre. Last week, at one of the most absurd public meetings I've ever attended, Greenwich's cabinet member for culture, John Fahy, was trying yet again to justify the council's inexplicable support for hosting the Olympic horseriding in Greenwich Park.

To remind you, this crazy plan will shut a substantial part of the park for 10 months — knocking an even bigger hole in Greenwich than the Village Market's closure. It will require the pruning of ancient trees and risks permanent damage to this priceless place. There will be no legacy whatever.

What struck me, as always, was the utter absence of any serious argument for any of it. All Fahy could do was repeat platitudes about the event inspiring a new generation to take up equestrianism (no doubt with a horse in every council flat). It would also, he said, put Greenwich on the map. But it's there already.

When challenged, Fahy resorted to straightforward fantasies about the Games bringing "long-term benefits" (unspecified) to the area and the use of the park having "universal support". That wasn't even true among the people attending the meeting.

What links all these people — Capital & Counties, L&A, the Olympics, and Greenwich council — is that they are living in the past. Their corporate, megabucks, monolith London of white-elephant shopping-centres and vanity sports events is either dead, or (in the Olympics' case) kept breathing only by public-sector life-support. The future is either diversified and local, or it is nothing.

New headache for cyclists

LIKE doorstep milk deliveries or Morris dancing, judicial ignorance is one of those great British traditions that never quite dies. The latest M'Lud keeping the flame alive is Mr Justice Griffith Williams, who has ruled that cyclists suffering accidents may be held partially liable if they do not wear helmets. "There can be no doubt that the failure to wear a helmet may expose the cyclist to risk of greater injury," he said.

Actually, there is plenty of doubt. There no large-sample study which suggests that helmet-wearing is safer, and plenty of evidence that it is not. It also discourages cycling. Of course, all activity involves an element of risk. Given the terrible dangers lurking within the average family home, for instance, perhaps Mr Justice Griffith Williams might care to wear a helmet when he is walking down his stairs.

My perfect illuminated pub

TO THE Dog and Bell in Deptford, perhaps the perfect, un-ponced-up backstreet London pub. There are open fires, wooden benches, yellow walls, mirrors with Fullers adverts. I loved it — and I especially loved comparing the place with its write-up in Time Out, which describes it as a "dark" and "foreboding" (sic) "bar", located "in no man's land".

The Dog is not dark, "foreboding" (or even what they presumably meant to say, forbidding), located in no man's land or indeed a bar. With five pubs closing every week in Britain, this is one that is going to be around long after closing time is called.