Well, last night I went to a big Vauxhall meet at Lakeside Shopping Centre, Essex, UK. We had fun organising the damned thing. One of the guys from AllCorsa decided it would be a fun idea to have a big meet at Bluewater Shopping Centre, Kent, UK, so started his preparations for the meet. He informed Kent Police that this meet was going to take place, and tried to tell Bluewater. It was advertised on MIGWeb, AllCorsa and VXROnline... Needless to say, it quickly ran around quite a few clubs.
Unfortunately, everyone was getting a bit skeptical about security kicking us all out, as Bluewater have recently enforced a new policy that states they have very little tolerance for car meets not arranged with Bluewater security. If three or more cars of the same manufacturer park up together and don't proceed into the shopping centre, they get moved on. Five or more of different manufacturers has the same rules. So really, when it had been pushed around between 5-10 different owners clubs, that's too many if even one person from each club attended... Nobody wanted to go now. the organiser just gave in and cancelled the whole event.
VXRMarc of VXROnline, however, did not agree with giving up and canceling the event. He took a stand and tried to get the event back on, and took ownership of the event and moved it to Lakeside. See, the difference between Bluewater and Lakeside is property ownership. Bluewater is privately owned land. Bluewater can set these rules and get police backing. Lakeside on the other hand, is public property. Laws still apply, obviously, but there is nothing to say that we can't be there if we behave. So to Lakeside it was.
I attended the event with Astra Owners Network, and there was a pretty good turn out! I thought it was a bit of a shame that the Astra dominated the event though. I met a few guys at the Wharf in Dartford where we then convoyed to the Thurrock services to meet a few more members. I think in total we had a turnout of 18ish members from Astra Owners Network alone! When we arrived at Lakeside, we found an array of other Astra VXR's, the odd Vectra, etc. It was good to see an Insignia as well! Especially considering how new they are!
Overall, it was a very good event, and I'd love to see more of these events being planned in the future! I thought it was good that we managed to stay away from the rest of the "cruise" scene going on just around the corner in another part of Lakeside. I followed a few guys from the Vauxhall Astra MK3 Owners Club (MK3OC) round to this area where there were a massive arrangement of cars from Vauxhall Astra VXR, to VW Golf GTI, to Nissan Skylines, to Subaru Imprezas, etc. Some brilliant cars, everyone racing around all over the place. It was a bit too boy racer for me. Not my scene. I was glad our Night of the Griffin stayed in tact. I was really happy that the only problems we had was one guy in a MK3 Astravan decided it would be fun to start racing around the carpark... screeching round corners showing us how little steering his van had, along with the best way to ruin your tyres. Within minutes, Lakeside security were round and escorted him to the M25. We didn't see him again.
Was a good night! I took loads of photos, but most of them came out badly because of the lack of light
Here are the best ones I got, unfortunately, most of them are of the same 5 cars from the Vauxhall Astra MK3 Owners Club...
We found signs of alien lifeforms:-
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