Dear Paul,
I’m sitting in our office in Chinatown* on Grand and Lafayette, next door is the excellent Thai Angel, across the street is a new French restaurant, opposite is the Landmark Pancake House and a stones throw away is that bastion of Little Italy, Ferrara’s Bakery. And, as one of the people responsible for creating the campaign in question, with a British father and a Dutch mother, it feels like I’m in a reasonably good position to address some of the other points you raised!
When we first started planning this campaign about a year ago, we sounded out the local business community and various levels of local and city government officials, not one person voiced anything other than support. Since the campaign went public ten days ago we have generated significant international media coverage, which benefits the whole city, just under three thousand people have taken the trouble to sign the petition, there are seventy posts on the blog, of which about half a dozen are negative and three of which are so vitriolic it’s hard to take them seriously. In fact many of the issues you raised are answered by the map at www.campaignforlittlebritain.com, which illustrates the fifteen British businesses in the area, or are being discussed in the campaign blog and we’d encourage you and your readers to contribute.
There is one point we would like to address here, your suspicion that this is a cheap advertising ploy. If we were proposing “Cheerio’s Little Britain” you’d have a point, but we are not.
Yes, two British businesses, Tea & Sympathy and Virgin Atlantic, are leading this campaign because it is relevant and authentic that they should. Virgin Atlantic’s inaugural flight was to New York, they even hatched their business plan in the White Horse pub, and now they fly about half a million people a year between the two cities. Tea & Sympathy has been a stalwart of the local business community for seventeen years, in which time it became known as the “unofficial British Embassy” which in many ways was the creative inspiration for the campaign.
Cheap advertising ploy’s are here today gone tomorrow, this campaign is about transparently creating an Anglophile destination in a country full of Anglophiles, in a city that will get 38 million domestic tourists this year, which is clearly going to benefit the whole business community in the neighborhood.
Of course we hoped this idea would generate some debate, and we did half expect some Brits to come out against it, as David Remnick said “…the British are the only culture to feel schadenfreude about themselves”. For all of us who created and support the campaign, we are proud to be entrepreneurs who live in the entrepreneurial capital of the world, and, proud to be British. We hope it inspires more Brits to follow suit, to start with they can sign the petition supporting Little Britain in the Big Apple!
Best
CFLB
*the Chinese are the second largest immigrant group in the city, 39% live in Queens, 33% Brooklyn, 24% Manhattan [source: nyc.gov]
The article in the Metro can be seen here
http://ny.metro.us/metro/blog/my_view/entry/My_View_Show_us_your_Brits/7750.html
or more probably a homage to The Wicker Man, and, apparantly a cameo from Cate Blanchett, which we didn’t spot.
