Olympic Site Photos

I took a rainy ride on my bike back to Stratford from Victoria Park today.  I’d put my camera in my pocket with the idea that I might see some interesting Olympic sights on the developing Olympic site. I’ve caught glimpses from the car and the train but cycling through, I thought, would give me a chance to get up close.

I ended up getting pretty lost and confused as the geography of the Stratford/ Hackney Wick borders  has changed thanks to the blue fence.  I wanted to go this way but I couldn’t.

Turning around, I found myself down by Hackney Wick station and I was glad for the diversion as I snapped this place that I’d seen a while back from the train.

It was good too, to see the spirit of the Olympics celebrated in skip form.

Eventually I made it to the Greenway and got a great view from there of the Stadium works.

There was a lot of security guards up on the Greenway guarding the access to the site. There’s a strange temporary covered bridge (that I didn’t photograph close up as there were too many official looking henchmen around) that gives access to the site and has two guards on the entrance and signs warning that only “Team Stadium” are allowed inside.

I talked to one of the guards a bit further down and asked him if his job was to stop people getting on to the site who are not supposed to be there. He said that it was. I asked him if anyone had ever tried and he said. “No, not yet”. He also told me that his job was very boring unless people came by and talked to him. It was funny to think of him as one of the often quoted gainfully employed locals that the Olympic construction work has provided a job for.

On that note, I took this nostalgic photo too, representative of the industry that the site has displaced. Kay

The Stratford Hoard

My boyfriend, Simon Murphy, is taking part in The Stratford Hoard and part of his collection of funny-looking guitars and homemade fuzz-boxes will go on display at Stratford Station this weekend for a few months. Stop by and have a look!

http://www.musical-den.blogspot.com/

Slumlords

It’s not unusual for people to tell me how well I’ve done when I tell them that yes, I co-own my flat and yes, I live near the Olympic site. It’s meaningless to me. However, because I don’t want to move, this is my home. People get saucer-eyed when they talk about property values in Stratford and I want to say a few things about how this is affecting my immediate neighbourhood. There are a number of housing blocks going up, but there are changes that aren’t so apparent too. The area is changing from a medium density part of the city to an ultra-high density area.

I live in a Victorian terrace and the flat upstairs used to be occupied by one man. It is now occupied by between four and six people, including some migrant workers. The house next door used to be occupied by a small charity. Now there are twelve student rooms.

Noise never used to be a problem, and now it is. We hear people fighting upstairs and next door. The garden next door is now neglected. The people who live here are young and transient. Landlords are laughing in Stratford as they turn what could be beautiful housing stock into cheap and profitable slums.

Charlotte

Have Your Say

Kay and I first went to a public consultation about the Rail Lands development in about 2004. A meeting was held at Sarah Bonnell school. Some people had been hired by an advocacy group of some kind in Newham to talk about the Stratford City development. 

The fact that I am so hazy with the details, who was involved, who organised the meeting says so much about the process of public consultancy around the development for Stratford City and the Olympics. As a punter, these are mysterious and inconsistent processes!

These projects are supposed to be publicly accountable, but the planning application for Stratford City took up a whole wall of the library and I remember the handful of people at Sarah Bonnell would be completely unlikely to have the time, energy or technical knowledge to go through any of it. I think most people were at that meeting because it was in a warm room with free tea and biscuits. It was humbling to see how little local dialogue was present.

In 2007 I submitted a letter to the Olympic Delivery Authority Planning Decisions Team in response to another piece of public consultation. No one ever replied. I have no idea if my comments about perimeter fences, cycling lanes and car parks ever made an iota of difference to anything. I even wrote to them to say that no one ever replied, and I got no reply to that either!

Lately, public consultations around these projects seem to have dried up. 

I was digging through some papers recently and I found some forms that were used for another Olympics consultation which I’ve scanned. 

This was held on the concourse outside Stratford Station in 2006 some time. I remember the weather being cold and grey. I’ve scanned some of the leaflets and questionnaires that they, whoever they were, were giving out. I was really struck by the simplistic tone of the materials, adults as well as children were being encouraged to complete them, but people were only given crayons to write with! The options given on the reverse seem really limited, and are obviously skewed to corporate stakeholders. I think it’s interesting that the forms ask for demographic details and postcodes several times, maybe this is the information that the organisers really want. Anyway, I think it’s unlikely that anything anyone wrote on those forms would ever make any difference to any planning decisions. That Have Your Say URL is not live anymore.

By the way, I’m particularly tickled by the sentence on the back of the pack that reads: “Huge numbers of people will play a part but local people will be most affected by the Games, and will benefit most from the regeneration that they bring.” Ha ha! Funny joke!

As I write this, I realise how much I’ve tried to be involved with public consultations for the Olympics, but how the system is designed to shut up people like me.

A further example of public consultation occurred last summer. An organisation called (I think, it’s hard to tell from their website what they’re actually called) Fundamental Architectural Inclusion, which is actually based in Stratford, held a community consultation in Stratford Park as part of the London Festival of Architecture. I came across it by chance and thought it would be good to attend because the organisers were showing a couple of films I’d really like to see. There were conditions for attendance though, these involved being seated by someone and taking part in a workshop. The other attendees were people from day centres and schools. This is not my demographic and I didn’t fancy being treated as though it was for an afternoon. But no, it would be out of the question to sit and watch the films only and not participate, and not to be seated at a table with the others by one of the attendants. I emailed Architectural Inclusion later on to see if they had copies of the films, or knew here I could see them, and I was met with a rather sniffy “No.”

Architectural Inclusion sounds like a great organisation, but my encounter with them was really depressing. It was as though they had no idea how to work with someone who wasn’t part of their target audience. All they could offer was to try and jam me in to a format that didn’t suit me at all. Basically they were saying: you can participate if you agree to be infantilised by us and play by our rules. Hmmm.

Charlotte

We didn’t!

Olympic confetti

 

Confetti found by Kay in Meridian Square an hour after the successful Olympic bid was announced.

Stratford City

It’s not just the Olympics that are going to change the face of Stratford. Coming hot on its heels is Stratford City. This development was planned with the possibility in mind that London would host the 2012 Olympics, but was going to happen whether or not the bid was successful. Parts of it overlap with the Olympic park though, the athletes’ village bit I think.  

I’ve been thinking about Stratford city recently, specifically about the planned shopping area. Read all about Stratford City on Wikipedia, and visit the official website. I tried to see what the street plan would look like on the official site, but all I found was a master plan in such a tiny scale that I couldn’t work anything out. I did find out that the main drag in Stratford City will be called First Avenue. Sounds classy doesn’t it? The Stratford City development declares itself as providing a new town centre for Stratford to the west of where the current one is.

 

A topic for another post is about streets that have disappeared under the Olympic site. Over the course of Stratford’s history, streets have been lost and new ones created. I think Stratford’s history is interesting in that its centre and geography has shifted a few times. If you look for them you can see the clues. Look at the Theatre Royal standing as a lone survivor of the bit of Angel Lane that used to form a crossroads with the High Street before the Mall and the one-way system was built. The Stratford City development means that it is due to shift again.

 

Although now I’d call myself a Londoner, I’m originally from Birmingham. As such I know a bit about how town planning can change the face of familiar places. Going back to visit, I find a city centre that has changed beyond recognition. My teenage territory has all but disappeared under the developments of Broad Street, New Street, Chamberlain and Victoria Square and,  of course, the redeveloped Bull Ring, which is testament to a new and dynamic Birmingham, encapsulating the spirit of the city’s motto: “Forward”. I like the new Bull Ring, especially now I have sophisticated London tastes to satisfy. I’m glad of the showcase Selfridges, though who is ever going to buy this rendition of the Bull Ring bull in sweets for two grand is a mystery to me.

 

  

 

But I miss the small stalls and shops that made up the old bull ring centre. You can no longer buy a hairpiece from the wig stall next to the meat counter in the covered market, or go to the old Druckers café, or find somewhere to buy hoover bags or vegetables. These kinds of shops, shops for ordinary people, for poor people, are not welcome in the city centre now.

I guess my fear for the future of Stratford as a place to shop started when I first saw an artist’s impression of Stratford City, probably in early 2003 when the planning application was first submitted. Back then, there were no Olympics on the horizon, London was yet to bid and Stratford felt like an ordinary place on the outskirts of London. The picture I saw of smartly-dressed white people shopping at Dolce and Gabbana just made me laugh. It looked so far from anything I knew about Stratford that it was beyond belief. I imagined a white elephant of windswept and deserted shops that no one local would use. Of course now things seem very different and a Dolce and Gabbana is not so far-fetched. It seems as though something that was beyond my imagination was not beyond the imagination of the planners. I resent that, how Startford’s future, where people shop in Dolce and Gabbana, has been imagined for me. It’s as though now I’m going to be living someone else’s dream.

 

If you’d asked what I wanted for Stratford, the Stratford of the future, I’d have wanted to keep it how it was, though I might have demanded that the Golden Egg returned.

 

Kay

 

2012 Pomposity

 

Christine Ohuruogu! A woman of Newham! How could your image end up being used to sell Uhlympic ideology, sweatshop trainers and nationalism? Ugh.

Newham Welcomes The World

As we saw during the handover ceremonies, the Olympics is fast becoming a platform for mediocre corporate arts.

But all is not lost!

Ronald Corp and his New London Orchestra are pioneering a series of beautiful and culturally-sensitive performances in the community with their long-term project, Newham Welcomes The World.

In 2007 the project debuted with The Journey Begins, an unforgettable night. A 400-strong choir made up of locals kids and adults, and a full orchestra, performed a song cycle all about Newham, including our very own Newham Anthem! Sample: “We’re the centre of diversity, Newham’s the place to be!” Hope Massiah, who is nothing short of fabulous, provided the lyrics and a year later I’m still singing these songs to myself.

I’m only sorry that a recording of the event isn’t available, neither can I find an online lyrics sheet. All I can offer is some cruddy phonecam footage. 

The 2008 Newham Welcomes The World project was a different affair. Staged at our beloved Theatre Royal, Pass The Baton told interwoven stories of Newham residents old and young, and was preceded by a performance by the New London Orchestra. Judging by the number of mates and family cheering from the audience, the show was performed by local people.

Where so much Olympic baloney is based on the premise that East London was a wasteland until the IOC rolled into town, Newham Welcomes The World demonstrates that there is already plenty that makes this neighbourhood special. Hats off to Corp and the crew for producing wonderful work that is so fantastically relevant to the changes that are happening, and that encourages and empowers local people to tell our stories ourselves. It’s thrilling to witness work that reflects the people and places we know best and which doesn’t try to whitewash over the reality of life in East London. Newham Welcomes The World makes me feel heartened, hopeful and very proud of this area.

http://www.newhamwelcomestheworld.co.uk

Charlotte

Lillehammer

A few weeks ago I had the good fortune to go to Lillehammer in Norway. Lillehammer was the host for the 1994 Winter Olympics.

Over the years, my friend B, who has a place in Lillehammer, has told me about the surge in nationalism that was tied up with the 1994 games, and about how problematic that was. I’ve found it useful to bear in mind as my own compatriots start to get drunk on the Olympic spirit.

During this trip we went to the Olympic museum which was so exactly how you’d imagine it that I can’t be bothered to write anything about it. One thing that stood out was a video presentation where the expression “It was better than we could have imagined,” was repeated many times.

But the part that I found the most interesting was the tat for sale in the shop. 14 years after the Olympics came to town and they are still selling off original bits of tat, models of the Olympic torch and programmes. In 2013 the same kind of crap will be coming to a car boot sale near you, no doubt.

This nasty piece of trash sums up pretty much everything that's wrong with the mixture of nationalism and grasping medal-greed.

Here are some notes I wrote about something else that we did whilst we were in Lillehammer, an Olympic thing.