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

Olympic confetti

 

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

This is where we start

Charlotte: Hello, are you there? Shall we start?

Kay: Hello, was on loo, back now. Let’s start.

Charlotte: Ok, so where were you when you heard?

Kay: I was at work. I think. I’d been hanging around Meridian Square a bit earlier, but I wasn’t there for the announcement.

Charlotte: How did you hear about it?

Kay: Someone had a tiny black and white TV on their desk and I heard it that way. How did you hear?

Charlotte: I was at work too, I knew it was going to be announced and I went to the coffee bar, where there are some tellies. There was quite a crowd watching them. Work is very corporate, and the people watching the announcement were like Sports Guys, white, middle class, suited, all looking like one big blob of corporate bloke-ness. When the announcement was made they cheered so loudly, it was deafening.

Kay: It was the cheering that alerted me to it too. People that I sat next to at work were quite disinterested. I think it was a blokey thing to be interested. Before the announcement it seemed it was only significant if you were into sport.

Charlotte: Yes, I felt like a freak (nothing new there) for going down to have a look because I’m not very sporty, though I’m fascinated by the Olympics. That roaring cheer really creeped me out! It was like being amongst the Pod People and kind of crystallised my alienation from them! In retrospect I think I made a connection between the corporate cheers of my colleagues, and the corporate hell of the Olympics that I knew was to come. So what was it like for you? What did you think when you heard that London had been chosen?

Kay: I was really surprised. Everyone was expecting Paris to win. I’d wanted that too because it was near enough to go there without ruining our area. But actually, I felt kind of happy and excited. I felt weirdly proud.

Charlotte: I can understand that. For me it was his kind of dizzying feeling, excitement, but kind of “Oh fuck” too. I felt like I needed a lie down in a darkened room to get over it. I guess I was in shock, though it wasn’t a very joyful sensation. I went back to work feeling sort of numb. And then the next day the bombings happened and I didn’t think about it for a while. You went back to Meridian Square didn’t you? What was that like?

Kay: Yes. It was good to have an excuse to stop working that seemed legitimate. I phoned up some of the service users and encouraged them to come down and see what was happening. I think that was part of me feeling positive about it. I was working with these really disenfranchised Newham people and I thought at the time that they might be able to own it in some way, that they would get to see a big world event on their doorstep. Of course, none of them could be bothered to come down so I was there by myself looking at the craziness.

Charlotte: Will you stick the pics up at some point? Have you got any pics of the giant athlete man-woman?

Kay: I think so. I’ll search for them.

Kay: I saw the press out in force. Newham Mayor Robin Wales and Tessa Sanderson and some kids singing. Everyone was extremely hyped up and there was litter strewn everywhere.

Charlotte: It’ll probably be like that for the next four years. Do you have anything else to add about what it was like when we heard?

Kay: No but just to say something about the bombs the next day. We had planned a trip to Southend and couldn’t go because of the bombs. It seemed like living through something properly historic. I thought the events were linked and I think then I started to properly consider the Olympics as being bad for Stratford.

Charlotte: Wow.

Kay: Thanks. It was big. One of the service users didn’t know about the bombs and had got really cross with us for not going to Southend. When I explained it to him he was really upset. We ended up going to the cinema instead.

Charlotte: Is there anything else you want to add? Maybe you could say a few words about what it’s like starting this blog.

Kay: I wish we’d started it earlier! There are so many little things that I see that have just slipped away. Anyway, we’re on it now. It’s exciting. I think it will be a great way of documenting this proper history we are living through. How about you?

Charlotte: I feel excited about it, I think there are so many great stories in Stratford at the moment, the real stuff, not the stupid crap that we read about from official sources, I’m desperate to document it. I’m looking forwards to having some fun with this, I have big hopes.

Charlotte: Onwards?

Kay: Hurrah!