Tag: London 2012

It\’s the end of the world as we know it (and I feel fine)

Browsing survivalist websites recently (don\’t ask), I clicked on a banner ad for Hardened Structures, and specifically for their \’2012 Shelters\’.

The 2012 Shelter sounds like a serious piece of kit. The website tells us: \”As a specific Threat Event, the anticipated catastrophic effects resulting from 2012 are far greater than the anticipated effects from WMD’s, anarchy, climate change or any of the other specific Threat Events for which we have developed mitigation designs … most engineers and scientists agree that for a fully protected 2012 shelter the following threats must be mitigated;

  1. 3-Bars Blast Overpressure of 45 psi
  2. Force 10 Earthquake in successions
  3. 450 MPH winds
  4. Extreme Gamma & Neutron attenuation from a 100 megaton air burst detonated 20 miles away
  5. Solar Flares with 1,000,000 volt EMP
  6. Flooding (complete submersion for 100 hours)
  7. Extreme External Fires at 1250 F for 10 days
  8. Magnetic Pole Shift
  9. Radiological, Chemical and Biological Weapons
  10. Forced Entry and Armed Assaults
  11. 12’ of snow and 10’ of rain
  12. 500 lb Hail Stones or flying debris at a speed of 100 mph\”

Usually I find that ignoring TV for six weeks keeps you safely insulated from the Olympics, but some people are clearly determined to take no chances. 900 days to go, and counting.

Nothing can stop them?

It\’s good to see that Saint Etienne have offered to write a song for London 2012. SE are the quintessential London band, and What Have You Done Today, Mervyn Day? their unsentimentally-filmed elegy for the Lower Lea Valley\’s vanishing grimescape is well worth watching.

But, based on the evidence to date, their bid to craft a 2012 anthem is doomed to disappointment. From Barcelona to Beijing, understatement has rarely been an Olympic theme. London\’s bid was buoyed along by mannered M-People caterwhauling, and our contribution to the closing ceremony at Beijing was a faintly embarassing attempt to distill the essence of \’Cool Britannia\’ (remember that?), while ticking appropriate boxes. Red double-decker bus, as seen in establising shots in every film from Goldfinger to 28 Days Later? Check. Old white man from once-important rock band? Check. Inoffensive young black woman from talent show to counterbalance said rock dinosaur? Check. Global brand/footballer type person? Check.

I hope I\’m wrong, and there may still be a lot of suprises before the 2012 opening ceremony, but I am afraid that Saint Etienne\’s music, while not always my cup of tea (too winsomely Heavenly Records, if you know what I mean), is too subtle, too particular, too crafty and crafted, to fit into the bizarre, homogenised world of Olympic culture and bombast.

Parklife

It\’s hard to get a sense of the scale of London\’s Olympic Park. 270 acres is the size of about 135 football pitches, to use the official journalistic unit of measurement (though, apparently, football pitches also differ in size). This is not one park, but a whole new network of new green spaces in one of the most built up and complex areas of London.

Yesterday, to accompany the announcement of the Park\’s designers, London 2012 issued some material about the character and content of the Park after 2012. The plans are starting to take shape: there will be areas of woodland, open space for events, hills to challenge walkers and cyclists, and a \’One Planet Pavilion\’ to encourage environmental responsibility.

I think the Park will be incredible, but this is the first time that I have ever considered a landscape design to be bossy. This Park is not going to let us alone: it will be telling us to take more exercise, to recycle more, to appreciate native trees, to run, to cycle, to jump, to lose weight. Where\’s the space for more leisurely activities – for lazing, for smoking, for drinking, for kissing? Will the Park tell us to pack a healthier picnic, to watch out for our units, to practice safe sex? I wouldn\’t rule it out.

We can expect more homilies as the 2012 Games draw nearer. The quasi-spiritual wing of the Olympic movement is fluent in the international language of pious eyewash: children are the future, cleanliness is next to godliness, mens sana in corpore sano, we don\’t own the planet we are just borrowing it from our children (or is that Patek Philippe watches?), citius altius fortius, now wash your hands.

It\’s at times like these, to paraphrase the Beck song, that the IOC makes me want to smoke crack.

(Not) going down the pub

Raised on concrete stilts, the Docklands Light Railway affords a privileged view of East London to its passengers. Amidst austerely functional blocks of post-war housing, churches and pubs stand out – richly tiled and decorated relics of a Victorian past. Owned by the breweries, they (the pubs, that is) were left standing on street corners as the slums of Poplar, Shadwell and Whitechapel were demolished.

But changes in the pub trade are now conspiring with London\’s insanely effervescent property market to dismantle what the Luftwaffe and the planners left intact. The Evening Standard recently reported that around a quarter of pubs near the Olympic site in Bow are closing. It\’s unfair to blame the Olympics for this – a changing population (more muslim in East London), the smoking ban and changing attitudes to drinking all contribute – but London 2012 is accelerating the process that kills boozers.

As the market value for new-build flats goes through the roof, the new pub-owning companies – nowadays as canny as property speculators as they are at managing licensed premises – are quick to take advantage. Depending on your views, you can call this regeneration or gentrification, but the outcome is the same – a gradual retreat from the ideal of mixed-use neighbourhoods to which modern planners and developers must at least claim to aspire.

It\’s not just happening in East London. Urban 75 lists some of the shabbier (and I mean that as a compliment) drinking dens that have closed around Brixton in recent years, to be replaced by \’luxury apartments\’. Fight backs can work: the Pineapple in Kentish Town managed to see off developers a few years ago, but it\’s probably easier in NW5, where stars like Rufus Sewell will rush to your aid, than in E3 or SW9.

Councils are taking notice, and several (including Tower Hamlets) have put in place policies to protect viable pubs in residential areas, but it may already be too late. The city is zoning itself, making a mockery of mixed use. As brutal \’vertical drinking\’ districts spread like a rash, neighbourhood pubs are in retreat, before the relentless march of housing-led \’regeneration\’.

It\’s been a long time

I\’ve been distracted, having holidays, not smoking, all sorts. I\’ve also been reading Robert Caro\’s biography of Robert Moses, The Power Broker.

The book is a monster of nearly 1,200 pages, and its subject comes over as pretty monstrous too. From the mid 1920s to the 1960s, Robert Moses dominated public projects in New York, covering the five boroughs and Long Island with new toll roads, beaches, parks and bridges, creating the type of alienating, car-dominated urban landscape that Jane Jacobs has taught all good urbanists to despise. He achieved these feats through a combination of thuggish arrogance and low cunning, with unattractive top-notes of racism and class prejudice.

And yet, governor after governor, and mayor after mayor, found him indispensable, unsackable. Whatever his methods, Moses got things done, and he got them done within electoral timescales. When he was building his first parks on Long Island in the mid-1920s, he had $1 million out of a total of $15 million. Instead of completing a few projects within budget, he assembled land for a much larger number, thereby forcing NY State Congress to vote him the remainder. Caro reports him as saying: \”once you sink that first stake, they\’ll never make you pull it up.\”

What would Moses have made of Crossrail\’s latest faltering step forwards? When I worked on the Jubilee Line extension project in the mid 1990s, Crossrail was the next big project. Offices were being set up, and engineers recruited. And then, nothing. And now, maybe something? But breakthroughs are reported so frequently, and to so little effect, that it\’s hard to feel too excited by the news.

We seem to be very good at stopping big projects happening in the UK. The Treasury feels that it has been burned by so many wannabe-Moses characters, that it publishes volume upon volume of guidance on stopping big projects. The safest answer is always \’no\’. Soon after London won the 2012 Games, I had a meeting with a senior civil servant. \”You\’ve got the Treasury in an awful spin,\” he said. \”You\’ve robbed them of their three standard strategies: delay, descope and say \’no\’.\” At the IOC meeting in July 2005, London (Jowell, Livingstone, Coe) put some stakes in the ground. They won\’t be quickly forgiven.

What\’s in a name?

It\’s very rare these days for a story to appear and disappear, without leaving a digital trail somewhere on the internet.

Last Thursday (14 June 2007), London\’s three evening papers picked up the same story: that the International Olympic Committee Co-ordination Commission (the group of IOC members sent over to check on London\’s progress in preparing for the 2012 Games) had said that they were uncomfortable with the Olympic Delivery Authority\’s name.

Why? Because the bulk of the ODA\’s £9bn budget is now to be spent on cleaning up land and putting infrastructure into East London\’s Lea Valley, rather than on erecting Olympic venues. The panjandrums of the IOC are nothing of not assiduous in defending the value of their brand, and they were reported to be unhappy with the association of the \’O-word\’ with such extensive public spending (and some of the unavoidable but unpleasant side-effects of development, like displacement of businesses and residents).

The story had a ring of truth, however odd it might seem at first glance. The IOC is very keen to emphasise that the Olympic Games are self-funding (from ticketing, sponsorship and merchandising revenues). Their view is that, if a city has to build new facilities to accommodate the Games, then that is their business, and a demonstration of the catalytic effect that the whole circus can have on nations that host it.

But you can\’t have it both ways. It is a truth insufficiently acknowledged that \’regeneration\’ is not the one way street that its shiny name implies. Regeneration displaces, and regeneration costs. The Olympics have made the Government do what they would never have done otherwise: make the heavy investment needed to turn round one of the poorest areas in the UK. The IOC should be proud to be associated with this investment, and should take its share of the knocks too.

The story had vanished by Thursday night. Perhaps it was untrue. Or perhaps it was seen as too damaging to the brand…

First post

Well, the London Olympics have shown their unifying force. With a great fanfare, the new London 2012 logo was launched last week, and the nation came together to take the piss.

Whatever the merits of the new logo, it has unleashed a torrent of creative abuse and mockery. Does it resemble a broken swastika? Larry Grayson in teapot stance? David Brent dancing? Lisa Simpson doing something lewd and quite possibly illegal? The UK\’s GDP must have taken a pounding last week: normal business was suspended, in favour of that Great British pastime, mockery.

Co-incidentally, Communities and Local Government Minister Ruth Kelly announced a desire for a British \’national day\’, another of the Government\’s fumbles at national identity (here). The trouble is, all assessments of what \’Britishness\’ means dissolve quickly into cliche: tolerance, rule of law, sense of humour, blah. Sense of humour gets nearest, but the reality is less cuddly than that. Our real characteristic is the ability to laugh at anything. Anything.

In his wartime polemic, \’The Lion and the Unicorn\’ (the source for John Major\’s much-mocked evocation of \’old maids cycling to Holy Communion through the morning mist), George Orwell argued that the goose-step would never have caught on in England: \”because the people in the street would laugh\”.

Our laughter is not gentle. It is scatalogical, harsh, unforgiving. It infects the engravings of Hogarth and Gillray. It has no respect for authority, and is ready to attack any trace of pretension or pomposity. It\’s not pleasant, but it is ours.