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

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/

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

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

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

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.

One of the things I love most about spending time with B is that she is fearless in nature. I think a lot of Norwegians are like that but B is fat too, which makes a difference to me, and it give me a thrill to see her striding around, being physically dynamic, and doing stuff. I am far more timid but B always encourages me to have a go at things and see what happens. The result is that I have had many mini-adventures throughout my 16-year friendship with B.

So this weekend involved going to see some lakes and rowing in some boats that the mountain authorities had left for people to play with. And then, on the way to the station, we stopped off at the Olympic bobsleigh run in Lillehammer, and we went down it. This was actually Kay’s idea, but I think the atmosphere of fatties doing stuff that B fosters helped somewhat.

Yes, Olympic bobsleigh run.

In the summer the bobsleigh people have a couple of bobs (look, I’m getting the lingo) with wheels. They fit four people, including a pilot, but we managed to cram five in there.

For about £18 you get carted up the hill in a truck, handed a sock thing to put over your head, and a helmet, and this hard leather belt, and then you strap yourself into the bob. By this time I was starting to panic, we were in danger of missing our train, and all I could think was: “we are really in trouble if we miss that train, and I feel like a fucking idiot maybe missing that train because I am strapped into a bobsleigh.” Plus ‘For The Longest Time,’ that awful fake doo-wop Billy Joel song was playing, for some reason and it didn’t help calm me down at all. I was still humming it nine hours later.

We were really crushed into that sleigh, and it barely needs saying that it was a nightmare trying to get in and out of it wearing all that gear. I floundered about and eventually settled, feeling like a helpless little slug. Everything was so tight and crammed. The super-fit bobsleigh people were very kind and helpful, and reassured me when it was too late to turn back and I said: “I’m really scared.”

Thankfully we didn’t have to do that thing where you push the bob along and hop into it, that would have been a disaster. Instead, a helper-man pushes you down the first ten metres of the track as hard as he can and then gravity does the rest. I’m not sure about the combined weights of me, Kay, and B, but our heft was on our side. We went down that track like a hurricane, 1,700 metres in 69 seconds.

This is what it feels like: every time you hit a bend, ie all the time, you bang your head against the side of the bob. It feels faster than you can imagine, incredibly fast. All you can see is a wall of concrete ahead of you. You feel really heavy because you are experiencing gravity times three. All you can hear is a loud roaring rumble.

I felt panicky before we started going, and I managed to do deep breathing and calm thoughts for about two seconds before I gave up. Then I screamed like a child the whole way down, not even a good scream, more like a pathetic stream of whimpering and pleading, gasping for breath so that I could get more air in my lungs to expell as more scream. Kay and S whooped a bit because they thought I was just excited and they wanted to join in, but I was really, properly, profoundly, giving wavery/screamy voice to my terror. The people at the end of the track said they could hear me the whole way down. Yes, I am an English fool, and obviously no stranger to humiliation.

Honestly, god knows how people can do this as a sport. And the luge and the skeleton, where people slide down the track head first on a tray-type thing – why? Why? Why? I don’t know if I admire them or what. I’ve often wondered what it might be like to go down one of those tracks, and now I have some idea.

We got to the end and managed to prise ourselves out of the sleigh. I said: “I will never do that ever again.” We could barely talk. We staggered to the car, drove to the station in silence, more or less, and got on the train.

Charlotte