Apparently the Costa Coffee in Hartley Wintney is still contentious – one of the other shops apparently has a poster campaign up that their coffee doesn’t Costa packet or some such, ho ho ho.

I’m still ambivalent.

The Courtyard Cafe – or House of the Flying Dentures* as I now call it – is considerably enlarged over the previous Petit Cafe, the original hut now serving as the kitchen for the former; but first/last time I was there, a slightly severely-dressed woman directed me to a table and then ignored me for nearly 10 minutes. I also can’t bring myself to visit because it’s clearly trying to be a restaurant rather than somewhere I can hang out with a laptop and rack up a croque monsieur, salad and multiple coffees.

The Bistro Tearoom? Similar problem. Tiny tables, chintz, no powersockets and something of a “please eat and leave” demeanour.

Costa is trying to fill a suitable niche; except in mid-september the lady behind the counter told me:

Wifi? We should have it at the end of the month.

…however, earlier this week I was told:

Wifi? Costa are rolling it out in their shops across the UK and [Hartley Wintney] will get it then.

…which is a bit of a let-down.

The situation is worsened by the fact that T-Mobile 3G signal strength is atrocious up-and-down the High Street – and unusable or at best GPRS in any building – so unless there is Wifi there is no connectivity. Hence no networking. No blogging. No Foursquaring. No Instagramming.

And by-and-large no “me” unless I want to totally get away from it all for an hour or so – which is quite rare.

The Cricketers is supposed to have free Wifi but the coverage is spotty and extends out towards the Cricket Club rather than the pub interior, which is odd. Petit Cafe used to leak its BT-Whatever-Hub password to customers, but it never worked very well. Nobody else seems to have open wifi for customers and/or the good of the village, so in a nutshell Hartley Wintney High Street is a bit of a connectivity blackspot.

Very insular.

If anyone from the Parish Council wants to address this by getting a couple of femtocells installed in shop signs and/or pursuing municipal wifi, do let me know.

I view Costa as a bit of a let-down in this regard; if they wanted to differentiate themselves they could empower the local manager to do community outreach – but this sounds like it’s not gonna happen; instead they are turning into just another franchise and once the signage starts to fray it will all go a bit down-at-heel. Their windows are plastered with planning-permission slips seeking to put diners and tables on the pavement outside; can’t see that happening in winter very much, so it will be a while before that happens.

I still wish we’d had an independent coffee shop set up – something that could give the others an incentive to improve without the anti-corporatist bullshit, simultaneously with the freedom to innovate on the High Street.

In other unfounded gossip of change, this evening I overheard that the Hotel Zuzanka Lamb Pub was going to be turned into one of:

• A Tesco – god I hope not, and since their profits took a plunge recently I think that will not happen
• A Jamie Oliver Restaurant – this one’s groundless; a friend-of-a-friend works for Jamie and scotched the rumour for me
• “Flats” – having been inside the Lamb I can’t imagine this being possible without unlikely demolition

There are plenty of other buildings over by the Lamb which are ripe for demolition and/or overhauling, but the Lamb itself is not one of them. Monachus House is one, but that seems to be covered:

Monachus House is a Grade 2 listed building. The challenge is to design a new 60 bed Care Home on a sensitive site that will be sympathetic to the setting of Monachus House.

So nobody has a offered a plausible story for what will happen to the Lamb yet. Alas. Almost the entire northeastern quadrant of the High Street is blighted, and one cannot turn it all into care homes, though doubtless some would like to try.

Re: The Green, the footpath crossing over there area where the fairground gets parked has been reseeded; nice of them to make the effort, fighting the tide of feet which use the path of desire / shortcut from the WI Hut to the Fleet Road Roundabout. It’s good that the green is maintained but that bit of it will always be a path.

Anyone else has HW gossip? Leave a comment…

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