From the archive - Stratford will become like London’s Soho warning
1st July 1999
STRATFORD was becoming like Soho, a councillor said this week, and plans for another late-night entertainment venue would only make things worse.
The public entertainment application for Chicago Rock Café, in Greenhill Street, comes before Stratford District Council’s licensing sub-committee today (Thursday).
The application, by Luminar Leisure, has provoked a storm of criticism. Residents are frightened that, should the licence be granted, the late-night rowdiness will become worse. “Trouble will increase if this licence is given the ahead; these so-called ‘entertainment establishments’ attract a yob element,” one Grove Road guesthouse owner wrote.
Forty residents have contacted the council directly, with many writing emotionally charged and forceful letters.
As well as complaints about rowdiness, drunkenness and noise, many complain that their cars have been vandalised, their houses damaged and their gardens used as toilets and litterbins. One person claimed to have witnessed prostitutes working in Windsor Street. Most blame their troubles on youths spilling out of recently opened Yates’s Wine Lodge, in Windsor Street, and Bar M, in Greenhill Street, saying they had had no trouble before.
One Grove Road resident told the council: “[The openings] have changed our neighbourhood from a quiet peaceful place to live, into one which is intimidating at night for those of us that live here.”
3rd July 1964
“IT’S wonderful that this lovely town should take so much trouble for me,” said Mr Allen Parkinson when he stood on the Bancroft Gardens looking at the flock of mute swans from which 12 will be chosen to be flown across the Atlantic to the United States to live on a new, one-acre lake at his Movieland Wax Museum.
With the help of Angus Maude, MP, Stratford Chamber of Trade broke through red tape to secure the first export of royal swans.
“They’ll be the first swans to fly first-class,” Mr Parkinson, “and that’s as it should be, because they are royal swans.”
After he and his 18-year-old daughter Pat were received in the parlour by the mayor and mayoress, they were told by John Hardman, the ornithologist who will select and catch six swans of each sex aged between one and two years, that it will be about a month before they are ready to travel.
Mr Parkinson told them that the museum, of which he is founder and president, attracts 800,000 visitors a year to see effigies of great stars of the screen.
It is to be moved to a new site where ‘Swan Lake’ will commemorate Grace Kelly’s film and will be opened by Princess Grace in about a year’s time.
