This modern market is rubbish says Blur axeman

For years, Graham Coxon was happy to play along as the shy, sensitive (albeit slightly nerdy) guitarist for pop band Blur. So it's surprising to see him launching an attack over the fate of his local market.

Coxon has lashed out against the £12m redevelopment of Camden's famous Stables Market, which he tells this week's Camden New Journal is destined to become a "mediocre, modernist piece of crap."

As it stands, 55 businesses, including the area's Proud Gallery, have been forced to move out of themarket by the end of this month to make way for a shiny, new, glass-and-chrome shopping arcade which will be erected in its stead. "This is a pathetic attemptat modernism," says Coxon.

"What's going to be in it? More Starbucks coffee houses and Carphone Warehouses? It should be full of tailors, shoemakers, guitar makers, cheesemakers and independent shops, but of course, they are not going to do that."

If Coxon were serious about his gripe, he might care to follow his former bandmate, drummer Dave Rowntree, who as Pandora revealed, stood as Labour councillor in Marylebone during the May elections. Camden council, however, insist the row is nothing to do with it.

Says a spokesman: "We are currently considering a planning application from the Proud Gallery about relocating. Otherwise, this isn't really one for us, since it's the business of the Stable market. They were the ones who chose the new design."

* With a damehood to her name, not to mention a long overdue Oscarfor her portrayal of the Queen, Helen Mirren could be forgiven for trying to distance herself from some of her steamier earlyscreen roles.

Not a bit of it. Mirren has recently recorded a commentary for the DVD reissue for her controversial 1979 opus Caligula.

It's all a game to her, not just because the film was a commercial and critical catastrophe (the writer, Gore Vidal, has since washed his hands of it), but for those who haven't seen Caligula, it's basically soft porn.

The film, which also stars Peter O'Toole and Malcolm McDowell, was produced by former Penthouse mogul Bob Guccione who was responsible for the film's most graphic scenes.

Says an apologetic Mirren: "It has an irresistible mix of art and genitals."

* Actress Tamsin Egerton is just the sort of precocious scallywag that you're most likely to encounter in her new film St Trinian's.

Egerton, who will appear as the suitably brattish Chelsea opposite Rupert Everett in the upcoming big screen revival of the motley girls school, tells me during her time at school she could hardly be described as the model student. "I actually finished school at 16 and I don't want to go back. And my agent said I shouldn't. At drama school, they like to take you apart and rebuild you but I don't want to change now," she said at the launch of the Film4 Summer Screen Festival. "I played truant all the time. I was modelling so I'd go to shoots and call in sick."

Music, I'm sure, to Gordon Brown's ears.

* Spotted in toffs' drinking den Mahiki: style commentator and IoS columnist Peter York, whose Return of the Sloane Ranger hits the shelves this Autumn. York was spied in deep conversation with the owner of the Mayfair boîte, Piers Adam, though I'm told he swerved the club's signature drink, The Treasure Chest, reportedly Prince William's favoured tipple.

Overheard in the reception area of Kensington's Royal Garden Hotel, where giddy female staff were busy accommodating England's rugby players ahead of their clash with Wales on Saturday: "The good-looking ones I'm too scared to go up to but, actually, most of them have got cauliflower noses and ears and are pretty ugly. Quite a few of them look like Shrek."

* Christine Hamilton is cock-a-hoop at the news that the former Men Behaving Badly star Caroline Quentin is to play her in Robin Soans's new play, Life After A Scandal. The same cannot be said about the great battleaxe's husband, former Tory MP Neil.

"I am incredibly flattered - Caroline is a wonderful actress - but Neil is incredibly worried about who is going to play him," says Christine. "Last time a programme was made on us, it was the gorgeous Charles Dance, which was obviously an absolutely enormous compliment, but it can only go downhill from there.

"Caroline is the third actress to have played me, so I only hope that when we finally end up on the silver screen, Hollywood will let me play myself."

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