Cafe.

It is quite unusual for local events to be reported in the national press. Last week was one of the occasions when this usual rule was broken. The story has caused much local consternation. As I've written on my blog on several occasions in the recent past, since Morrison's supermarkets were taken over by American owned private equity company Clayton, Dubillier and Rice, the retail chain has been loaded with external debt and is basically being run into the ground. The popular cafe in the Erith branch of Morrisons is being permanently closed down, as are other facilities within both the Erith and many other Morrisons branches around the country. I doubt that the Erith store will last more than another couple of years before it is sold off. I have heard unsubstantiated rumours that Aldi have been looking at buying it as competition for the forthcoming Lidl store in Fraser Road. I have spoken to several employees of Morrisons, all of whom state that the place is being slowly wound up prior to being sold off. Country wide, other Morrisons closures include 52 cafes, 13 florists, 35 meat counters, 35 fish counters, four pharmacies and all 18 market kitchens, which are small food courts that offer freshly made meals, including pizzas to take away. The American venture capitalists appear to have no interest in retail but in my opinion are really interested in making a quick profit. I think that if he was still alive, former chairman Sir Ken Morrison would be horrified. For a medium sized town Erith has very few places other than fast food restaurants to sit down and eat. After the shocking closure of the Bookstore Cafe at The Exchange after it received a one-star scores on the door health rating, and also the closure of the Mambochino cafe in the Riverside shopping centre after it went bust there is little opportunity for a proper knife and fork sit-down meal. We do have a large Gregg's which took over the Mambochino site but that really is not much more than a glorified coffee and sandwich bar. Admittedly there is the the Riverside Fish and Steak restaurant and The Ark Christian bookstore and cafe in Pier Road, but that really is about it. It does seem to me that the senior management at Morrisons are cutting off their nose to spite their face in this instance. I know that's the Morrisons cafe has a dedicated regular clientele, some of whom visit the supermarket specifically to use the cafe. It has also in the past been used for small public meetings, which is a resource which will also be missed. The police Safer Neighbourhoods teams in the local area have used the cafe for consultations with members of the local public in the past.  It is ironic that in order to visit a cafe in the future, one will need to either go to the transport cafe in Fraser Road which has excellent reviews or travel to Slade Green, Northumberland Heath or Upper Belvedere. Comments to me at hugh.neal@gmail.com.

Now for some retail from a rather more civilised time, when the giant supermarket chains had far less of a hold over the British shopper than they do now. The upper photo was taken by Pier Road based professional photographer George Gilbert early in the morning of Sunday the 17th of July 1966. It shows what Erith High Street looked like fifty nine years ago, including L.B Stevens the Butcher. The only buildings still in existence in the photo are The Cross Keys pub, which can just be seen to the extreme right of the photograph. Slightly to the left of it you can just see Erith Post Office, which is still open as well. It was only a very short time later that the whole of the centre of Erith was demolished to make way for a horrendous brutalist concrete shopping centre, which was universally loathed (and as a child, my main recollection of which was a strong smell of stale wee and Jeyes Fluid). I don't know a single person old enough to recall the old town centre who would not have it back if it was possible. The lower photo shows the last day of trade for L.B Stevens - Master Butcher, photographed on Saturday the 27th May 1967, just before the shop was shut for good and demolished. By the look of things, the immaculate shop, with Len Stevens in his bow tie, spotless apron and straw boater hat was a real credit to the area. If the redevelopment vandals had not come in and demolished things, I do wonder if Stevens the Butcher would still be running today? With the increase in popularity of traditional suppliers, Erith could have become a haven for foodies. I have heard it said that if the original, historic Erith town centre had been preserved, then Erith could now be Whitstable on the Thames. How things might have been different if wiser heads had been in control?

Every so often I feature an old and long forgotten technology that did not really take off. The system is technically sound, but a nearly complete failure in the marketplace, with a very low take-up by a few audiophiles only. Apart from the problem of the bulky cassettes, the performance of compact cassettes had improved dramatically with the use of new materials such as chromium dioxide, Dolby B noise reduction, and better manufacturing quality. For most people, the quality of compact cassettes was adequate, and the benefits of the expensive Elcaset system limited. Now marks the fiftieth anniversary of another media format that should have made it big, but due to a number of factors, it ended up being consigned to the parts bin of history, and never really took off. Back before all-digital music, back before the Digital Compact Cassette, back before even the Digital Audio Tape existed, there was a strange audio device that, briefly, captured the imagination of Hi-Fi enthusiasts across the world. The Elcaset, as it was called, was an enlarged cassette that started in Japan, wove its hidden, spinning spools round the world and then finished, appropriately enough, in Finland. The humble Compact Cassette was already more than a decade old in 1975, and its pros and cons had by then become fairly clear to most listeners. It wasn’t a huge reel-to-reel deck as used by pro studios, and was thus portable by the standards of the day—even though Sony's cassette Walkman was still a few years away. The sound was generally acceptable for a generation raised on crackly mono Dansette record players. But the small tape size—two sets of stereo tracks squeezed onto a strip of tape just 3.81mm wide—and the slow playback speed of 4.76cm (1⅞ inches) per second rendered the device incapable of really capturing and playing anything near the full sonic range that music ultimately requires. What's more, there was often plenty of hiss that couldn’t easily be masked. So 50 years ago, a trio of rising Japanese electronics giants decided to inject some quality into the game, something that they hoped would hit the Hi-Fi market as well as aspiring consumers and indie studios. Thus Panasonic, Sony, and Teac came up with the Elcaset, a larger small format. It was virtually twice the size of the old cassette—more like a paperback book in size, at a hefty 15cm wide, 10cm tall and 2cm deep. It contained quarter-inch tape running at double the speed of regular cassettes, which naturally gave the format greater frequency response and a wider dynamic range, as well as much less hiss. It also had six tracks, despite still playing back in stereo—the third track on each side was for a cue function that was designed as an additional facility that studios could use, but never fully implemented. The other big difference was that the Elcaset’s tape was gently pulled away from the body shell when it was played, so that even the most scuffed—or crudely-made—frame wouldn’t effect the audio signal. To put it in technical terms, the cassette had a high-frequency bandwidth that hardly got over 16,000Hz, whereas Elcaset exceeded 25,000Hz, and had a fine mid-band (the region in which most vocals and guitars live). It made a better noise, basically. The best Elcaset decks had three motors, three heads for playback, recording, and erasure, closed-loop dual capstan, VU meters, and remote control. All-in-all, they sounded pretty excellent. Sony, Teac, and Panasonic had their own top-of-the-range versions as well as more reasonably priced decks, and there was even a hand-bag sized "portable" version, the EL-D8, which looked like, and essentially was, a piece of mobile pro-audio kit. With a "big four" PR launch—input from Panasonic, Sony, Teac, and then Hitachi—for their "revolutionary Elcaset system," the format should have become a big seller. There were some good reviews, and certain pundits still claim today that Elcaset's overall performance was virtually as good as leading mid-range reel-to-reels at the time, such as the Revox B77. So with the cassette already battling the newish 8-track cartridge, the manufacturers believed Elcaset would apply the killer blow to the older format, leaving it to struggle with the 8-track for market supremacy. Unfortunately, Elcaset's arrival in 1975 (though it did not reach the UK until the following year) coincided with the year that sales of several other innovations took off. One of these was the Chromium Oxide (CrO2) cassette which, while not quite matching the finesse of the Elcaset, did greatly improve cassette sound and could crucially be used in any existing cassette player. The CrO2 cassette cost 40 percent more than a normal tape, but for the audiophile or the discerning pop fan, there was now a premium recording-cassette that didn’t require a whole new deck. The leading tape manufacturer Sansui eventually started to make Elcaset tapes after Sony belatedly brought out a chrome tape of its own for the new decks. But this was already too late. For the compact cassette player there was also Dolby B, which looked and sound fairly fresh on the scene. Dolby B (which funnily enough followed after Dolby A) took out the hiss, reducing noise without overly affecting the sound, again adding value to the existing, cheaper, format. Another innovation, aimed purely at the Hi-Fi market, was a superb range of cassette players from Japanese firm Nakamichi, which had been making them since the autumn of 1973. These slowly gained a great reputation as they squeezed every last drop of sound from a compact tape and, when used with a chrome cassette, almost gave vinyl a run for its money. Decent examples of the legendary Nakamichi Dragon player still command three and four-figure sums today. And, speaking of money, one minus point amid a splash of mainly good reviews was the Elcaset’s exorbitant initial price—coming in at over £1,400 in today’s money. So when indie sound studios realised that the sound was going to be, in some cases, a little worse than a cheaper, used, reel-to-reel deck, that market started to shy away. The convenience of Elcaset would have saved a little studio time, but not enough to warrant the outlay. On top of this, reel-to-reel was comparatively easy to splice—to edit with, literally, razor blades - a technique I was taught back in the late 1980's when I was an intern at BBC Radio London. Elcaset on the other hand could only be dubbed, and recording drop-ins could never be as accurate even if the cue system were ever completed. As for domestic sales, Hi-Fi was costlier back then anyway, but such a price was a big leap for all but the most dedicated audiophile. No way was the average person going to spend such an amount on what many just saw as a glorified cassette. The last straw, domestically speaking, was the failure of Sony and the others to provide pre-recorded tapes. Many people, even Hi-Fi enthusiasts, didn’t always want to have to record their own material. Some just wanted to buy Top 40 albums off the shelf of their nearest music store—but they couldn’t with Elcaset. This would prove to be an error that Sony barely noticed, and repeated with the Betamax video format—their last such content mistake; subsequently they bought up CBS Records as well as shares in various film companies. Elcaset tech was undoubtedly ahead of its time though, and the extra-shell tape handling that it featured would go on to dominate the video market for the following 25 years with VHS and S-VHS. The people behind the "biggest, bestest" cassette just hadn’t considered the public’s price limits, their love of prerecorded material, or even the possibility that existing rival formats could still develop their own innovations. In 1980 the Elcaset itself officially died, the last few thousand unsold players auctioned off at a fraction of their worth to the highest bidder. Incredibly, there were virtually no serious bids from the US, Japan, or even Western Europe, and the highest bid actually came from a Scandinavian distributor. So the last Elcaset players ended up in bargain basements in Finland, blasting out at the snowy forests while the rest of the music world began to forget about their beloved cassette’s short-lived big brother. There’s also no denying that these machines were built for the ages; there’s many a tale of Elcaset players being found in attics this century, after 35 or 45 years in storage, and still playing perfectly. Analogue audio fans still swap "elcassy" tips on sites such as tapeheads.net, and if you ever need to lubricate your belt and two spools—and you probably will with the older Sony tapes—this is definitely the place to find out how. There is now a niche but steady market in secondhand Elcaset players and unused Elcaset tapes, not just on eBay, but in Finland, the UK, US, and Poland. Former Bexleyheath hifi dealer Whomes used to sell Elcaset machines - especially the very high end models - I recall visiting the shop with my late Dad and being given a demonstration - though Dad was never going to buy a machine - but a free look was something else altogether.

Three weeks ago I wrote an article on the Thamesmead based, high security Belmarsh Prison. This week the end video features actor and documentary maker Ross Kemp. The piece is described thus:- "For the first time ever, a citizen was granted access to stay overnight in HSU Belmarsh. Ross Kemp details the experience as he is locked in a cell for one night".  Comments and feedback to me as usual at hugh.neal@gmail.com.