Olympic week

This week seems to have been a bit Olympic (in between work on padded lamp posts).

Cabe's away day for their enablers at Leyton Orient on Wednesday included presentations on the development of the Olympic site and what supposed to come after, with the paving needed for the games coming out and then a move to make it more like a park, with housing development from both sides then coming in to mingle with the parkland to create Elysian fields. Or something. Though Simon Barnett, who's our representative on an Olympic advisory board, says that there are concerns that the legacy plans are being scaled back and the parkland is being shrunk too much.

Cabe's awayday also involved a tour on a minicoach around the Olympic site, for which we needed to present our passport and were warned that on no account were we allowed to take photos of the site for copyright reasons. All that you can really see at the moment is just the work to essentially flatten everything on site, clean up the contaminated soil with big soil washing machines, and some of the more major infrastructure changes, such as a new embankment of the Lea so that barges can be used to bring in material (and therefore reduce some of the impact of lorry trips on the surrounding area). There is a real corporate control of the presentation of the plans, with much emphasis on the green sustainability of the development (for instance they intend to reuse on site 90% of the materials from demolishing existing structures). Though demanding 3,000 cars and dedicated lanes for the IOC doesn't quite fit with this.

In contrast to the presentation on Thursday, Pete and I went to a talk at the Museum of London by Peter Marshall on Thursday. His view of the Olympics was much more cynical - his talk showing pictures of a changing East London implied that the Olympics will end up similar to the docklands developments with flats for the rich while those living outside the new developments get left behind (though he did criticise the docklands developments for lacking an overall plan - but then implied criticism for the Olympics for being the opposite and having too controlling a plan for the area).

I think like most Londoners I have a pretty ambivalent view about the Olympics in 2012, based around thinking it's all a bit of a waste of money but keen (through work) to make the most of the opportunity. The appeal for lots of people (particularly government departments and quangos) is that the 2012 games has two things that make organisations want to get involved and try and develop their own plans to add to it - firstly a nice clear target date in five years time, and secondly the awareness that there's a lot of cash going to be spent to make sure it happens and that other activities get linked into it. Which explains why we'll be having a number of meetings on related plans on this at work next week...