Buddy, I can still spare a dime

I’ve puzzled for a few days how to wrap up the first year of this blog.
The answer's easy, though.
With a thank-you, of course, because 4,880 of you have taken a peek and had a read (or a laugh) at what I’ve had to say.
The biggest audience by far has been in the UK, with useful chunks coming from the USA, Germany and France. So the transatlantic alliance is alive and well and relations with Europe weren’t completely trashed by the Cameron V Sarko bust-up.
I’d also like to say thank you to some regular readers in Russia, India, Hungary and Singapore, and some welcome attention from Brazil and Canada.
What have you been reading? The single most-visited post was ‘Champagne, Chips and property development’, some thoughts about the Invest in Nottingham Club’s London day (and the champagne and chips I had at St Pancras).
But even that was dwarfed by the three posts which followed Westfield’s bombshell decision to sell Nottingham’s Broadmarsh shopping centre on the eve of a planned £450 million redevelopment. I’ll have a few more snippets on that in January.
Various observations on the economy, notably about oil prices, inflation, employment trends and public sector job losses, also appeared to go down well.
Well, I hope they did anyway. I’ve tried to shed light on a mix of major business-related issues in Nottingham and get underneath what seem to me some misleading analyses of where our economy is at.
Once again, I’ll have more to say on that shortly and it won’t all be depressing.
One of the lessons I’ve learned over the years in business journalism is that people who own and run businesses can get really fed-up of clichéd representations of what they do, and don’t regard one set of bad numbers as reason to give up and go home.
So ‘leaps’ in this number or ‘plunges’ in that might make today’s headlines but they tell you little about economic reality. Rifling through the Office for National Statistics website, you soon discover that some of these leaps and plunges aren’t leaps and plunges at all.
Similarly, the biggest beef for me at the moment is the lack of long-term perspective in some reporting of our economic predicament. Yes, we are going through an unprecedented economic crisis, but we are doing so during a period of unprecedented wealth and health. So, buddy, I can still spare you several dimes.
Whether its Christmas, the holidays, Hanukkah or just another day at the office, have a good one.

Champagne, chips and property development

The buildings I like most are those that instantly leave you in awe, that say something about the world they are part of. As a kid, I used to see Nottingham’s domed Council House as a symbol of civic grandeur, and stepping on to the platform at St Pancras inspires a similar feeling.
Particularly so yesterday, as a part of the station’s landmark hotel was turned into a suburb of Nottingham for the evening. The Invest in Nottingham’s Club’s London event attracted an audience of approaching 200 people, many of them connected to the city’s development industry, some outsiders who had been invited to hear what we have to offer.
I spent the evening chasing people whose badges didn’t have the red dots which picked them out as club members or Nottinghamians of one sort or another. Why? Well, the can-do approach of Club members was great to see but it’s the impact this has on those outsiders that determines whether they will do what the club’s name suggests.
The responses I got will be explored in some detail in next Tuesday’s Business Post, but they were broadly mixed – not in a negative sense, but in that they thought Nottingham was absolutely right to chase investment but could not buck a universally tough market. Impressed as they were by some very slick presentations of large-scale development, they wanted to know that in a difficult climate Nottingham’s planners would do everything possible to make sure that red tape did not make an already tough process frustratingly slow or expensively pointless.
At the moment, development money is heavily biased towards London and the South East, where a stronger economy is delivering more obvious opportunities for investors and financiers who remain risk-averse. So anything which makes it more difficult to operate in the provinces won’t help change that.
Nottingham’s new director of corporate development, David Bishop, was in the audience rather than on the podium, though he spent a lot of time quietly chatting to people. But his voice and his department’s approach to planning and development will need to be heard soon.
In the meantime all praise for St Pancras, a fabulous building whether you are arriving from Nottingham or Paris. I can certainly recommend the Champagne bar, where a fine non-vintage went down remarkably well with a bowl of chips.
So well they should just call it The Nottingham Special on the menu.