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

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.

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

 

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

Your Park

The title of the occasional ODA newsletter makes me snigger-slash-groan. I like the way that they take it upon themselves to tell us that it’s our park, like we didn’t know it was ours to begin with. There’s something a bit double-bluff about it too, like, why do they need to tell us it’s our park? Is it because it actually isn’t? Why would we need them to give it to us?

I got a public consultation document through in May 2007 and wrote a long response about page 3 of the London 2012 Planning Application (Amendments): “In the period following the Games, the Legacy Transformation Phase involving: Erection of perimeter enclosure.”

That’s right, the developers are thinking about putting up a fence around “Our” park.

I wrote:

• A permanent fence is a hostile statement, an act of social control that tells local people that we are not wanted in this development at all.
• One only has to look at the effect of the natural boundary – the water – between Canary Wharf developments and the local community to see how devastating these kinds of boundaries can be – the Haves sit on one side, and the Have-nots (who service the Haves) on the other. Don’t let this happen here.
• It is vital that the legacy site is committed to open and free access, open to everyone, with no perimeter fence.
• I would like to be able to cycle from my house across the site to see my friends, or to work, in other parts of East London. A fence would not make this possible, circumnavigating it when it was closed would be a massive inconvenience, especially to poorer people who must rely on walking or public transport to get around when the fence is closed.
• Security cannot be used as an excuse, I’m sure the site will be bristling with CCTV cameras and security personnel as it is.

Like every Olympics-related public consultation, I never got an acknowledgement, and the results were not made public as far as I am aware. There’s a lot of talk about “community engagement” yet no one has ever replied to my letters and emails. Oh, and this reminds me that once I was offered a crayon and a card with four lines printed on it at a public consultation outside Stratford Station! I was supposed to offer my thoughts about the Olympics with a wax crayon! Hmmm…

Charlotte

Community Murals

We love home-made, off-brand olympic art like this.

Charlotte

Before and After

Thinking about naming your business or voluntary group or whatever after the You-Know-Whats? It’s Everybody’s GamesTM, right?

You might want to get used to LOCOG, it’s an acronym that we’ll probably be seeing more of around these parts in the coming years. It stands for The London Organising Committee of the Olympic Games. They’re the folks behind london2012.com, an amazingly terrifying site, the ground zero of Olympic spin and PR. Honestly, those people can take the worst ever piece-of-shit news about the games and turn it into Olympic Gold. If you’re feeling particularly adventurous you might want to download their fascinating branding guidelines – yes, the Olympics are a brand – which are hosted in a dusty corner of the site.

You’ll find out that the reason that the precious Olympic brand must be kept away from ordinary plebs like you and me is that if everybody uses it, then big corporate sponsors like Coca-Cola, Atos Origin, General Electric, McDonalds, Omega, Samsung and Visa won’t want to give the Games any money, and then we’ll be in trouble.

Meanwhile, here in Stratford, a number of local, independent businesses, not gigantic multinational corporations, but organisations owned and managed by people who work and live in and around the area where the Olympics is going to have the most impact, well, they have found themselves at the sharp end of LOCOG’s branding policies lately. Here’s a couple of pics for your pleasure.

And, well, don’t blame us if you wake up one morning to find a stiffly-worded solicitor’s letter sitting on your doorstep, or the Olympic police taping over your sign.

Charlotte

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!