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.