Interview: Marie O'Riordan, Marie Claire (Evening Standard)

By David Rowan

TO its smirking rivals, it looks like panic. Marie Claire, the women's glossy with the fastest-falling circulation, is slashing its cover price, trimming its format, and saturating its opening pages with celebrity features that could be straight from Heat.

Until now, the self-styled "glossy with brains" has affected to ignore the rise of Glamour, its cheaper, handbag-sized competitor, even as its own sales dropped by 10 per cent in the last circulation round. So does a risky 50p price cut and a new compact size suggest that Marie Claire's publishers are belatedly apeing Glamour in desperation?

"Absolutely not," insists Marie O'Riordan, editor of the 16-yearold title for the past three years. "The format change is simply the climax of all our editorial work, closer to the American size that we've always been attracted to. We've simply given the magazine a modern facelift without compromising our values." The new £2.50 cover price, too, is simply a way of "putting cost savings to the reader's benefit" and cutting the reliance on free gifts.

The pressure has been on O'Riordan, a 44-year-old Dubliner, ever since she took over in 2001 from Liz Jones, whose own resignation followed an 11 per cent circulation drop to just above 400,000. Since then, it has fallen to 361,000 for the six months to last December, 20,000 of which were given away. Cosmopolitan sells 100,000 more, and Glamour's sales have soared to 583,000.

Under such circumstances, isn't O'Riordan - a former editor of Elle and More! - worried about keeping her job?

"My publishers and joint owners [the magazine is a partnership between IPC and the French Marie Claire Group] concluded that it was market forces and not editorial content that caused the last drop," she says. "They felt the formula was right. In this job you always expect to get sacked - but at the moment they're completely behind me."

In fact, she suggests, the new six-monthly circulation, out next month, will show a rise. "I can't yet give you the details, but the growth you'll see is all newsstand rather than bulks. We're reinventingthe magazine while we're on a roll, rather than in a panic."

The new package includes a "Cause Celeb" column, in which celebrities discuss issues close to their hearts. Cover-boy Brad Pitt talks about his and Jennifer Aniston's plans for children ("We're still in rehearsals"), and the "Reportage" section exposes nothing more shocking than attractive female Olympians.

There is little echo of the grainy real-world reporting that once won the magazine media awards.

But much of that "burqa" journalism was formulaic, O'Riordan believes. "The 'circumcision from Africa' feature that we were defined by became a byword for all you'd satirise in a woman's magazine as earnest and worthy," she says. "You had this very serious six-page black-and-white feature that ultimately made you want to slash your wrists."

It would be more "compelling", she decided, to entice readers to read shorter, more attractively presented features that nonetheless touched on social issues. So the new edition covers Aids through the singer Beverley Knight's account of a friend's death. "The British public have gone celebrity crazy, and we can't ignore that," says O'Riordan.

BUT that does not bring in the awards. "I agree," she reflects. "We haven't won a major award for four years, but we have been shortlisted. We do have at least one hard-hitting feature in every issue. But I resent the accusation that they're token serious pieces."

The magazine will continue to campaign to reduce binge-drinking; but she dismisses her predecessor's concern to highlight eating disorders as "misguided".

It can be "a bit difficult" having joint publishers, she admits. At the board meetings she attends she hears their "frank exchange of views". Occasionally, she says, the French publishers "really panic" if they feel that their UK edition, the most profitable one, is "going off the rails".

The group's international president, Evelyne Prouvost-Berry, "is a marvellously clever, strident woman, so when she criticises anything my heart really sinks, as she's never completely wrong."

This last happened with some beach photographs in the August edition to which Prouvost-Berry took exception. "She thought they were vulgar. I said, 'That's the point,' as it was a comparison between US and Iranian beach habits. I can see why she wouldn't like them, and probably I secretly guessed. I just hoped she'd appreciate the juxtaposition."

She accepts that Glamour's arrival has been the magazine's biggest challenge. "It was genuinely a really good, fresh take on the glossies. It's smart, it's funny, and it tapped into the Sex and the City milieu. We're a bit more 'me, me, me' now, we're sassy, and we want to talk about shoes as much as we do about men. I did feel when I inherited Marie Claire it was stale."

But isn't it a huge gamble to use a price cut to compete?

"We've only dropped 50p, so our gamble isn't as big as, say, Company's [which dropped by £1.10 in 2001]," replies O'Riordan. "It's all about whether you want to bribe your reader with a free bag, or whether you actually want them to buy you every month."

A free gift can increase circulation by up to 100,000 in any month - but equally, she points out, a recent Victoria Beckham cover led to a 20,000 circulation boost year on year. Besides, she insists that her readership is older and more upmarket than Glamour's, and that's what matters to advertisers. Luxury-goods advertisers, she insists, have not dropped, and October's issue will be even larger than September's.

The Glamour effect may cause more magazines to fail, she says - "I'd imagine Eve is vulnerable, maybe She" - but Marie Claire's future is assured.

"I confess I was terrified before I came in from the printers with the new edition. I thought, 'Oh no, have I become the woman who's taken this great institution and played around with its brand position?' But I don't think I have."

That depends on how many copies walk off the shelves from tomorrow.

(Evening Standard, July 28 2004)

Read more!

Interview: Greg Gutfeld, Maxim (Evening Standard)

By David Rowan

THE war of the lads' mags is turning personal. Circulation figures next month are due to show the newcomer weeklies hammering the monthlies, Bauer is launching a third men's weekly and Jack has thrown in the towel. Now, Greg Gutfeld, a troublemaking American, has been brought in by Felix Dennis to reinvigorate Maxim - and he's lost no time in making a pile of enemies.

After publicly demanding free suits "like that old, bald guy at GQ" [Dylan Jones], he claims that a furious Jones threatened to beat him up. Gutfeld then published pictures of "origami porn" fashioned from Anthony Noguera's Editor's Letter in Arena. He offered a prize for readers who called a telephone number claiming to have found the " embarrassingly tiny" genitalia hidden in his own pages. He failed to mention that the number was Noguera's.

It is not the first time that Gutfeld, a loud, fast-talking 39-year-old, has riled the media establishment. His current challenge, starting with the September issue, is to boost UK Maxim's circulation, which is expected to fall next month to well below the current 243,000.

The market has been rocked by the launch this year of Emap's Zoo and IPC's Nuts, which between them sell more than 400,000 each week. Their heavily marketed arrival has also hit monthly titles such as Loaded (currently claiming 263,000 sales) and the market leader, FHM (601,000).

Gutfeld believes that the answer lies in confounding readers' expectations. His strategy for Maxim, he says, is to assume that readers have seen everything before. "They've read all those how-to-get-laid pieces," he says. "Most of these magazines have become pretty boring, with few expectations of the reader. I'm trying to aim a little higher and make the magazine a bit more surprising, unpredictable, and funnier. We're starting with the truth, questioning everything and seeing what we can add."

He has reshuffled the magazine to expand music, motoring, sport and gaming, so that it focuses less on "how great it is to be a guy" in favour of suggesting useful things for readers to do, listen to, drive or watch. Its point of view will invoke "the unspeakable truth": affirming a man's private thoughts, such as, he suggests, the guilty attraction on seeing newspaper photographs of an abducted woman.

Yes, there will be stunts - a previous jape involved sending three crisp-munching dwarves to disrupt a magazine industry conference - but there will also be his brand of dark, occasionally cruel humour.

As the butt of an earlier campaign, Art Cooper, the late editor of US Esquire, wrote to Dennis denouncing Gutfeld as "the boorish personification of Nietzsche's observation that 'there is nothing more frightening than ignorance in action'," and demanding that he be sacked from Stuff. Instead, Gutfeld printed the letter and had Cooper's handwriting analysed to show that he "fears ridicule".

So the results of Gutfeld's strategy are of variable taste. There is a surreally deadpan "joke page" (a blonde calls a plumber ... who proceeds to unblock her sink); there is also the Courtney Love "Death Clock", ticking away to an arbitrary date when she is supposed to die. Beyond the predictable babe galleries, there are also less comfortable features offering prizes for readers' accounts of "Roying", in which "young straight men seduce older straight men with heterosexual lures". This, Gutfeld declares, is his favourite section.

"I used to do that kind of thing when I was bored and at a bar," he says. "I'd aggressively chat up a businessman, until both of us felt uncomfortable. It was a test of how far you could go before you even scared yourself." He explains that he has a girlfriend.

BUT how will such innovations help Maxim compete against the weeklies? "They deliver exactly what's expected of them, but I'm not surprised when I read them," he says. "When you walk by the men's section of the newsstand, it's as though you're being yelled at by a bunch of simpleminded drunks, all screaming for attention and all selling the same, desperate wares. Magazines like FHM are dated. But if a magazine has a strong point of view, it won't have to yell." Maxim, he suggests, now has that confidence "to speak softly".

Is that enough to boost circulation, down from a peak of 328,000? "I'm more interested in the readers' mindset than their demographic," he explains. "I assume they're the guys sitting in the middle of the bar watching other guys make fools out of themselves and thinking about things, with a smarter point of view. I don't want to go chasing readers by becoming obvious. I'd rather they came to us because they heard about us, that Maxim was as funny as hell. So it becomes an obsession."

Since arriving in May, he has found journalism here to be " grittier and tougher" than in New York, and is grateful that editors "take themselves less seriously". But British magazines are facing a crisis, he suggests. "It's funny, everybody I talk to in the business is really bored doing the same old stuff. It so feels it's ripe for change. I've never met a more talented group of people, but maybe the marketing aspect of magazines took over for a while and they got real safe with their formulas."

Still, Gutfeld knows that it can be a ruthless world for editors who deviate too far from what is expected. Even after lifting Stuff 's circulation from 750,000 to 1.2 million, he was moved aside to be "director of brand development" last year amid concerns over the magazine's editorial eccentricities. He was also previously fired as editor of Men's Health in the US - although he did manage to slip some vengeful mischief into his final editor's letter, which caused the publishers to stop the presses once they belatedly discovered it.

It is a thread of troublemaking that has followed him ever since he was expelled from school in California for lighting a firework in class. A stocky, shortish man, he admits to being bullied at school - but he is uncomfortable being "psychoanalysed" in search of his motivation.

There is, he says, a simpler explanation to his relentless mischiefmaking. "You can make fun of anybody in any business, but in publishing they think you've got a mean-spirited purpose and are being dark or mean. You should be able to have fun - even at the subtle expense of other people."

Let's see if his British rivals can be persuaded to see the joke.

(Evening Standard, July 21 2004)

Read more!

The Times: Tech column - Wikipedia/Odeon online

By David Rowan

IF YOU still have any old Britannicas clogging your bookshelves, it is time finally to haul them off to Oxfam. Wikipedia, the world's fastest-growing English-language encyclopedia, has just published its 300,000th lucid entry, eclipsing Britannica by a factor of three. It is a scholarly, thorough work of reference that costs nothing to consult apart from an internet connection. Best of all, entries are endlessly updated to keep them relevant, errors are gladly corrected within minutes, and -unlike its stuffier predecessors -it respects the specialist knowledge of you, its user.

Wikipedia comes from the Hawaiian word for "quick". In barely three years, thousands of volunteers have contributed copyright-free articles at wikipedia.org

in 83 languages, from Afrikaans to Yiddish. Anyone can improve definitions by clicking "Edit this page" tabs above entries, and every day a further 2,000 terms are defined. It might sound a recipe for chaos, inviting corruption by personal prejudice or commercial interest; but somehow a collective sense of civility has prevailed to create a genuinely useful and entertaining resource.

In the entry for The Times, for instance, you can read a cogent history from 1785 to the compact's launch, with a commendably neutral commentary and brief biographies of editors past and present. Nor are your inquiries interrupted by intrusive advertisements: the site is funded by donations and contributors' goodwill.

Recent additions include Wiktionary, a collaborative dictionary and thesaurus (wiktionary.org), Wikibooks, an open collection of electronic books (wikibooks.org) and Wikitravel (wikitravel.org), an up-to-date and honest guide to 2,014 destinations (oops, it's grown to 2,015 since I started this paragraph). You might expect such open-source knowledge repositories to lack the hardbacks' authority, but entries face the scrutiny of thousands of other users. That makes them "highly reliable but not perfect", admits Jimmy Wales, the Florida-based entrepreneur who co-founded Wikipedia in 2001.

Still, its expensive paper predecessors were not perfect either. Wikipedia's entry for "Britannica" includes 26 categories of the work's "mistakes and omissions" - which its online successor has corrected.

++


If you have tried to use Odeon Cinemas' website you will have noticed how badly designed it is: clumsily built around Java-script, it makes browsers crash and is so inaccessible that it may contravene the Disability Discrimination Act. Matthew Somerville, a 23-year-old Oxford graduate, decided to help by writing code to make the film listings easily searchable. As with his previous projects, offering "accessible" versions of the National Rail, Hutton inquiry and Directory Enquiries websites, he built a simple-to-use interface on his own website, dracos.co.uk. It became so popular, with 250,000 hits last month, that it even overtook the Odeon site on some Google searches.

Odeon is unhappy, even though Somerville does not benefit from the service. Its marketing director, Luke Vetere, wrote to him threatening legal action after "an increasing number of complaints from customers", and last weekend Somerville was forced to pull the search facility. By coincidence, National Rail has also contacted Somerville to say that his website is welcome to provide its simplified train-timetable search until the official site is relaunched this October.

Now, which seems to you the more enlightened online business?

(The Times, July 20 2004)

Read more!

Interview: Tony Elliott, Time Out publisher (Evening Standard)

By David Rowan

WANTED: Editor to give careworn 36-year-old a makeover. Active social life promised if you can tolerate a boss with a reputation among colleagues for " creative interference".

Laura Lee Davies, for five years the editor of Time Out, leaves at the end of the week having decided that she has "done all I need to do here". As she prepares to move to writing and broadcasting - entirely amicably, she insists - Tony Elliott, the chairman and founder, has yet to find a replacement. Filling one of arts journalism's more influential jobs is proving harder than he might have thought - he has been considering applications although he remains open to suggestions. But then Time Out finds itself at a particularly difficult moment.

With a proliferation of free newspaper listings supplements and the internet's expanding reach, the magazine's circulation has taken a hit in recent years.

Although the company dismisses speculation of "swingeing" cutbacks, the new incumbent will clearly face pressure to stop circulation falling further. "It's undeniably tough," Lee Davies says. "But this is a really good time to put in an editor with their own strategy."

There are no signs of gloom in the magazine's Tottenham Court Road offices. Time Out London's circulation may be down 20,000 from its peak to 87,000, but it still contributes handsomely to the group's £3 million-plus annual profits. The company's website makes money, its 48 city guides sell 350,000 copies a year, and it earns licence fees on every local edition sold from Athens to Abu Dhabi. As for Time Out New York, at first dismissed by its rivals, it has proved so successful that the company plans to expand across North America.

"The schedule is to launch in Chicago next February, and, if Chicago is a relatively quick success, it will be easyish to raise the $20 million we need to do LA," says Elliott, who founded the business in 1968 and still owns it outright. He has a commitment to fly six times a year to New York, from where the Chicago business will be run. "San Francisco is clearly also a city we'd like to do. And there's a provisional plan to launch Time Out Toronto in 2006."

Over the next decade, Elliott's "substantial" global expansion plan will bring Time Out to perhaps dozens of the world's great cities. Its imperial march is charted on the floor of his cluttered office overlooking the British Museum dome: beneath photographs of a younger, longhaired Elliott, one of him grinning with Janet Street-Porter (his first wife), and a snapshot of John Lennon, are piles of the Beijing, Dubai and Mexico City editions.

St Petersburg launched earlier this year; Mumbai and Moscow will follow by October. Apart from New York and Paris, they are all joint ventures which rely almost entirely for content on locally recruited staffs.

"What's so exciting is that these guys go off and you think, 'F***, it's just like Time Out!'" says Elliott, who, at 57, appears to have lost none of his enthusiasm for the magazine launched with £70 an aunt gave him for his 21st birthday.

By focusing on the quality of listings, he believes that Time Out can shake up the most saturated magazine markets, even Los Angeles. At the same time, he says, Time Out is significantly expanding its internet presence, with a film site launching in the autumn. The paid-for site will initially be available only to the magazine's subscribers to protect its sale.

Circulation has certainly been hit by free weeklies such as The Guardian's Guide, Metro Life in the Evening Standard and The Knowledge in The Times. Fullprice sales (at £2.35) are down to 69,000 but, Elliott claims, the drop has "flattened out". The free supplements, he insists, will never adequately compete. "They don't offer our depth of information, and people who read Time Out regularly don't see them as a direct replacement. There's been no erosion of our advertising base."

A frequent criticism is that Time Out has sacrificed its early radical edge in favour of consumerism. "I think it's more than fair comment," Elliott replies. "But Time Out ought to reflect what's going on in London, and people's priorities have changed a lot since the Seventies." Having downgraded the news section two years ago, he now feels that "frankly there should be more news". But he adds that the magazine fulfils its social responsibilities by championing and bringing audiences to "the new, the fresh, the innovative" in the arts.

Politically, Elliott thinks Ken Livingstone has been "great" for London. "I sent him £1,000 for his first election campaign, though I never got an acknowledgement." He is "positively anti-Blair".

A near contemporary of Richard Branson at Stowe, Elliott is some way behind in The Sunday Times Rich List, at an estimated £90 million. He lives in St John's Wood with his second wife, Jane, once a picture researcher, and their three teenage sons. He was never a hippy, he says: with his "very middle-class, Daily Mail, slightly suburban background", he was more interested during the late Sixties in building a business than in smoking dope. Only once did he come close to working with Branson: during the 1981 Time Out strike, Branson sought to buy into the business. "I spent a day with him up at the manor, and at dinner he got into a discussion with somebody about politics," Elliott recalls. "He just shouted them down. I realised this was somebody you couldn't work with. He's a trader, basically. We're creators."

Elliott can be demanding, too. "Tony's obsessed with detail, and is always phoning up section editors when he notices a tiny listing is missing a phone number," recalls Dominic Wells, a former Time Out editor, now at The Times.

As one of the few remaining oldstyle magazine owners, Elliott retains that rare power to do what he decides is best. He no longer receives takeover approaches, he explains, "as it's well known that I don't want to sell". Over the next five years, he hopes to find a longterm investor to accelerate the expansion, but he is determined that Time Out will never be part of somebody else's media empire.

"Things will get bigger," he says. "I haven't quite worked out how to do it, but at 57 I still think there's quite a long time to go."

(Evening Standard, July 14 2004)

Read more!

The Times: Tech column - virtual currency fraud/Vodafone censorship

By David Rowan

Forget about internet banking fraud: that's old news. The real growth area for online criminals involves currencies that you will probably not even have heard of. With the boom in multi-player online games such as EverQuest and Lineage II, the imaginary wealth that players accumulate has become a surprisingly tradeable commodity in the "real" off-line world. If you have built up "Linden dollars" in the game Second Life, or "gold" in Ultima Online, you will always find other players keen to acquire them, and perhaps your screen character, for cash.

Not surprisingly, fraudsters are targeting these virtual currencies.

Counterfeiting has long been a problem on some "currency exchange" websites, usually blamed on software glitches that let players "mint" unearned rewards. But now a more ruthless criminal fraternity is coveting these most unlikely commodities. The Gaming Open Market, one of the more popular online exchanges, has just suspended most trades after a con artist obtained virtual goods worth $3,000 (£1,650) from the games EVE Online and Star Wars Galaxies. The scam followed another recent theft via the site involving $1,200 (£650) of Linden dollars.

The addictive qualities of these role-playing games will be confirmed by any of the hardcore EverQuest fans who commonly spend ten or even 20 consecutive hours online. Their neglected partners share their woes at online support groups such as "EverQuest Widows" -but if they knew how much real-world value their partners might inadvertently be acquiring, they might be more supportive. Three years ago an economist in California named Edward Castronova tracked 600 auctions of EverQuest-related goods. With almost half a million paying participants, this is one of the more successful multi-player games. Castronova calculated that the treasure and platinum pieces traded were bringing their owners the equivalent of $3.42 for each hour they spent online. In other words, this non-existent realm had a per-capita income of $2,266, making it the world's 77th richest nation ahead of India and China.

Since then, dozens of private brokerages have been established, from PlayerAuctions to the IGE Virtual Exchange. Today, even non-playing speculators are investing thousands of dollars. You might want to demand firmer anti-fraud guarantees before cashing in your buy-to-let to join them, but don't dismiss the phenomenon as a geekish indulgence. This online world has become anything but a game.

+++

It is always entertaining to watch mobile-phone operators come over all self-righteous. Vodafone claimed on Friday to be the first network to "protect children" from adult content, amid intense self-congratulation in the press. Let's forget for a moment that its filtering system will be useless if a child's 3G phone is registered under an adult's credit card. Vodafone has already conceded that sexual content "is a big commercial opportunity", doubtless something that some of its executives were considering as they networked at Amsterdam's recent Adult Online Europe conference. All the porn-friendly networks regard sex and gambling as reliable ways of recouping chunks of their licence debts. With the under-tens now the country's fastest-growing group of mobile-phone owners, it will take more than press releases to prove corporate responsibility.


(The Times, July 6 2004)

Read more!

Daily Telegraph: Trouble in hand-made kitchen country

If you can't stand the heat...

Mark Wilkinson has made his name and fortune designing beautiful kitchens. Now he wants to build an eco-friendly electricity plant in his Wiltshire village to fund affordable housing. But some locals are up in arms, vandalising his wisteria and complaining about plummeting property prices. David Rowan reports on a very English power struggle.


No one will admit to vandalising Mark and Cynthia Wilkinson's wisteria, but the couple have a pretty good idea who was behind the hate mail. Word gets around in a village like Bromham. Tucked away in a serene Wiltshire valley, this prosperous community of 1,900 people still enjoys its own thriving post office and a remarkably well-stocked convenience store - even if, in the Greyhound Inn, you soon hear those familiar village complaints, over pints of Wadworth 6X, about youngsters forced away by ludicrous property prices.

The trouble for Mark Wilkinson began when he offered a possible solution. Wilkinson, whose internationally renowned handmade kitchens cost from £25,000 to £250,000, is a towering figure in this picture-book part of Wiltshire. He lives in a rambling house near Bromham's 12th-century church, owns almost 80 acres of adjoining land, and employs about 200 people at three sites in the village, from where he and Cynthia run their £20-million furniture empire.

Having spent 24 years in Bromham, it seemed only natural for Wilkinson to share with villagers his excitement on discovering a technology that could recycle his factory waste to give them free electricity, as well as pay for some "green" low-cost housing. Little did he suspect that his proposals "for sustainable living" would provoke a furious local rift that raises far wider questions about the future of English village life.

Wilkinson, 53, calls himself a "dreamer-designer", leaving it to his wife to manage the commercial realities of Mark Wilkinson Furniture (MWF). He designed the first kitchen for Smallbone of Devizes in 1977, leaving four years later to go it alone. Today, his kitchens, bathrooms and individual ornate pieces appeal to celebrities such as David Seaman and Antony Worrall Thompson, and sell in showrooms from Moscow to Chicago.

Walking through a kitchen being photographed at his showroom for a glossy magazine, he explains that his philosophy is about "bringing more friendship, kindness and beauty into people's lives", while minimising his business's ecological "footprint".

"Sustainability" is a word that Wilkinson uses a lot. Beneath ruddy cheeks, his Lord Kitchener moustache twitches animatedly as he denounces today's industrial-waste-disposal processes as "clumsy, uninformed, inelegant and unimaginative". "And then last year," he says, "I found this `Eureka!' company."

The company is a British start-up called Compact Power, which runs a pilot "advanced thermal conversion" power plant at Avonmouth, Bristol, that turns waste materials into heat and electricity.

Wilkinson, whose factories throw out 20 tonnes of waste each week, was intrigued, particularly when he learnt that a plant the size of a medium-sized warehouse could, in theory, generate enough electricity to power 2,000 homes. "They had technically the most advanced process for dealing with waste material in the world, and they were English," he enthuses.

After sounding out the parish council, he wrote to Bromham's residents in February proposing a scheme that could make the village "a beacon of sustainable living for the 21st century". If he installed a power plant in a disused quarry that he owned, and relocated his factory alongside it, he could process not only MWF's waste, but also that of other businesses in the county.

As well as providing free local electricity, the plant would generate good profits - £150,000 a year, by one estimate - that would pay for affordable housing. An unspecified number of homes would be built, to be owned by a village-controlled "community trust". It was, he stressed, "a chance for the community to be in control".

A Wilkinson-appointed team set about preparing the village for change, bearing copies of E F Schumacher's book Small Is Beautiful. "Can Bromham afford to stay just the same," its submission to the parish newsletter put it, "or is it right to plan for our children and grandchildren's future?"

Wilkinson insisted that he would never act unilaterally. "The dream was that we'd involve the village in a discussion, and the village would come together and establish what it wanted," he says. "It was always my promise that if the village didn't want the project, it would never even go to planning. I've no wish to alienate sectors of the village that I intend to die in."

That, however, was not to be. Soon after the letter went out, a group of villagers formed a pressure group, Defend Our Village Environment (DOVE), to fight what Wilkinson saw as his "beautiful and virtuous circle". Critics found no end of reasons to oppose his "incinerator": toxic emissions from dioxins and mercury would threaten health and local agriculture; trucked-in waste would generate extra traffic; property would be devalued; a greenfield site would be lost to a claimed 200 houses. A few locals who disagreed with DOVE, meanwhile, set up a rival campaign called LOVE (Let Our Village Evolve), whose posters did not stay up for long.

It counted little that Compact Power denied the health claims, pointing out that the Environment Agency has singled out its Avonmouth plant as a model of low emissions. Nor had the project team suggested how many houses might be built. Yet soon, Wilkinson was being insulted in the village shop and receiving what he calls "nastiness" in the post.

The journalist Roger Cook, a family friend, has seen the "awful" hate mail. "I found the letters deeply offensive, and I'm a fairly gnarled old hack," Cook says. "Mark and Cynthia are very good citizens of Bromham, and they've taken it very personally. All Mark wanted to do was listen to what they thought."

Wilkinson did not expect the abuse, but believes that he understands what prompted it. "There's this fear of change, of the perceived devaluation of properties," he says. "On the contrary - I think it would have been a project of such significance that their house prices would have increased. Houses near the Eden Project in Cornwall aren't cheap now - but they were."

Opponents insist that their hostility is not personal. "I've lived here for 10 years and have never met the man, so I've got no personal gripes," says Nic Jennings, 42, a founder member of DOVE who took medical retirement from the Prison Service. "We've investigated his proposal, and got hold of a lot of paperwork. Bromham isn't the sort of place for dangerous clinical waste. There's also the housing, and its effect on property values. What I've paid for this place could have bought a much bigger property elsewhere. And I don't want it spoilt."

Others allege a more mercenary motive. "I can see from a business perspective what he's doing - trying to make more money from his land," says one villager active in community life, who asks not to be named. "But why build an incinerator in a village rather than on an industrial estate? Estate agents tell me the house-price drop would be for the long term." The man adds knowingly: "People have questioned why he's still here and not on a trading estate. Is it to publicise the fact that his kitchens are made in `ye olde country village'?"

Those who know the Wilkinsons well insist that they wish only to benefit their community. A company executive points out that MWF could save thousands each year by using a franking machine, but instead buys £50,000 of stamps to support the village post office. Others point out that they quietly sponsor local people who are in need, for instance by paying university or medical fees, "but would be horrified if that was reported".

Matters came to a head on April 27, when the parish council's annual general meeting debated a motion "fiercely oppos[ing] the proposals" and calling on Wilkinson "to irrevocably withdraw" them. The motion was carried by 171 votes to four, with just seven abstentions. With that, Wilkinson (who stayed away) declared that his plan would move no further.

Not every villager believes that he was given a fair hearing, and the issue remains a conversation point on local streets. "I feel cheated," says Jane Paget, who works at a residential special needs school. "I've had 20 or 30 villagers say to me, `I wasn't for it, I wasn't against it, but I'd have liked to find out more.' This could have been a fantastic opportunity for the village, or not, as the case may be. But now we'll never know."

Alex Ross, who runs a small electrical business, was one of the four who opposed the motion. "Normally, you'd get three men and a dog at a parish AGM; this time there were 200 people. It was hijacked by one person who took over the meeting and misinterpreted the facts to scare people. The village either evolves or dies - and that discussion has been cut short."

Mike Edwards, who is retired, has his own theory about what split the village. "There's quite a bit of jealousy," he says. "There's no real reason why people should be against Mark Wilkinson other than the fact that he's successful."

In the meantime, Wilkinson has decided to restrict his dreaming to less inflammatory arenas than perceived property prices. After more than a year's work, he unveiled a kitchen commissioned by the National Trust, which was displayed at the Daily Telegraph/House & Garden Fair at Olympia last week. He discusses its fine design details - an Egyptian hockey-stick cornice; a Georgian cockbead - in the same passionate tones as he explains his broken dream of a sustainable energy project.

"My crime is daring to dream," he says of his abandoned plan. "For all the arguments about health fears or traffic, the bottom line was `My house price is going to plummet'. But it would have been a benchmark scheme."

He is disappointed, he says, but proud that his arguments are finally receiving a hearing in these pages. "And we will be here to talk to people from other communities who want such a scheme. Because," he adds with a boyish glint, "it is a beautiful thing."

(Daily Telegraph, Property section cover, July 3 2004)

Read more!