Tonbridge Gateway....

Now I'm not one to just have a moan for the sake of it but.... You always know there's a big BUT on the way when someone opens a sentence like that. But I have just had a nose in the new Castle offices and tourist information and can tell you that they must have spent a pretty penny on the whole thing. Actually I'd like to know just how much. It seems particularly galling that the council, and by this I think I mean both our borough council, TMBC, and our county council, KCC, are spending this amount of council tax payers money on seemingly lavish new designs and desks, which no doubt they call "customer interface positions" just at a time when most people are cutting back severely or having the real threat of job losses hanging over them. This is what it says on the Kent County Council's web site about this new concept they are calling "Gateway" which they plan to roll out across the whole of Kent by the look of it:

"Gateway draws selected retail concepts into its vision for improving access to public services.
Today's innovative retail spaces deliver both an holistic customer experience and community ethos, not simply measured by 'consumer choice' or 'sales'. We aim to make Gateway a model that delivers public services, alongside any other transactions customers may wish to make...."

Retail concepts! And here's me thinking that the council were suppoosed to serve us the tax payer, it now seems that they want to improve their "retail" environment in order, presumably to extract even more of our hard earned cash out of us. I don't think I'd feel any better or worse about going to pay my council tax bill or parking fine in a spanking new office with a state of the art lift or the old oak pannelled one, I'm going in to pay a bill for goodness sake! One of the retail concepts that they site as justification for their revamped brand image is the banks spending of £100 million on branch refurbishments to which has been proven to lead to higher performance. This must have been written before the recent collapse of the banking system otherwise no one could have been paid to write this utter drivel. Another example they quote as having inspired the change is the Discovery Channel Store in Washington DC as having "breathed new life into museums." It beggars belief that they think that people want this kind of experience for our museums, let alone our council offices. Why stop there why not use the Disney Channel stores as further proof that the concept will work. What next? shall we replace statues of Winston Churchill with Mickey Mouse?! It's worth reading what they actually say on this:

"Discovery Channel Store in Washington DC creates a powerful social and educational experience. This 'social retail' revolution has breathed new life into museums making them accessible to wider communities around the world."

They have erected new signs everywhere around the castle and built a new extention to the thousand year old structure which, admittedly, looks nice but you have to say rather out of place with it's modernist architecture. The tourist information, apart from the new desks I've already mentioned seems smaller and devoid of, well, tourist information apart from a few leaflets on the wall like they already had before this multi million pound face lift. I think I've told you what TonbridgeBlog feels about all this and I'm sure that in an easier economic climate they could have got away with it unscathed, but surely I'm not the only one who feels that this revamp is totally over the top, totally badly timed, totally ill advised and a total waste of our money....