Was it really almost a year ago?

It's hard to believe, isn't it? It was almost a whole year ago!
And it seems that the Olympic spirit touched people in some rather unexpected ways, like this mains access in this street just south of Oxford Street.

The maintenance chaps working here obviously decided to brand their efforts in a very permanent way. (Well at least until someone digs it up again.) Those Olympic rings look suspiciously like they were made with a glass or a bottle...a beer bottle would be my guess.

It's a whole new slant on 'Olympic Legacy'.

Nevertheless, it's an impressive affort.
And to think that the pollsters were telling us that people didn't care and had very little interest in it all.
Cheers!

MACE could be ACE

Leather Lane market, Farringdon, London

I've walked by this shop hundreds of times and never given it much thought. Sure, it has always evoked memories of my childhood and I'm sure that it will for you, if you are native to the UK or Ireland. MACE. Who hasn't shopped in one at some time or other? A rare reminder of a former staple of the high street. The 'ghost' type a poignant reminder of a busier and better time. A spectre of a long-gone member of the MACE family.

Watch any outside news broadcast on the high street from the 60s and 70s, or external shoots on a British sitcom of the same time, or big-screen extensions of the same or many films from the Carry-On canon, and you'll see a MACE. The candy-stripe awnings, facias, bags and unapologetic post-modern logos. I never really appreciated how forward it was back then. And then walking through Fitzrovia last week, I saw this horror...

Fitzrovia. Under the Telecoms Tower, London.

MACE outlets are all independent traders who on joining the 'family' buy their stock from the brand owner. They also have the pleasure of paying the same for brand and marketing support. Pay...for this! Are they mad? It's a disgrace. Most kids could produce something more alluring and appropriate.

In an age when people are keen to support local traders it seems to me that Palmer & Harvey have missed a trick. The MACE of yesteryear projected all of the values that are important to today's consumer. Not for the first or indeed last time the future should be informed by the past. A neat inversion indeed. A national chain which embodies small-scale high street shop principles.

Bring back the awnings; the bags; the 3-D lettering; the optical illusionist facias and leave the perspex in the factory.

I found this fantastic site, the creator of which has a very personal link to the MACE story. Check it out.

Belt and braces

Six years is a long time to walk a circle, yet that’s how long it’s taken RCapital to walk the circle that is the girth of the Little Chef’s belly. They’ve gone all the way around it to get right back to where it started from. Of course there are a few more holes in his belt nowadays since they’ve slimmed him down in more ways than one and he’s now back on the market 117 sites lighter than he was at the 2007 weigh-in. (See my 2012 post, http://susan-turner.blogspot.co.uk/2012/01/knowing-your-arse-from-your-elbow.html.)

This team of accountants instigated the most ridiculously inappropriate and unsympathetic repositioning exercise since Consignia, namely, the grafting of Heston Blumenthal’s periodic concoctions onto an enterprise with an established heritage and clientele. An enterprise whose very ‘domesticity’ rendered it perversely ‘exotic’ in an ever increasingly ‘other’ based market.

Only it’s funny, because the “next phase”, according to the Manchester outfit they’ve briefed to rebrand the chain, seems to be the phase before RCapital got involved. It’s about getting “back to basics”. Apparently their approach will be informed by the heritage of Little Chef and what it stands for in the consumers mind. Architecture apart, that means chips, beans and fried toast and not Heston’s fabrications. You don’t say! And all of this pre-sale, which is odd really and it signals acknowledgement that their repositioning has not been as successful as they make out. Sure, they’ve made and saved money. But then they’ve got rid of more than half the chain, haven’t they. But it hasn’t worked. Has it?

It’s all a bit mad really, especially since it’s reported that Starbucks and Costa along with service station brands such as Welcome Break are interested, all of whom would draw the chain into their own brand-world to some extent, so why spend money now? It doesn’t make sense. But then none of it ever did.