OLYMTRICKS From the outside not allowed in. 22 July 2012

It's the first amazingly hot sunny day here in London the home of the 2012 Olympics. I dragged the bike out last Sunday and went for a hike. My first stop was Blackheath so named because thousands of black plague victims are buried there. For the next couple of weeks this burial site will have deadly anti aircraft missiles parked on top of the plague pits ready 24 hours a day to shoot down any potential threat to the games from the air. Nice. They've also closed all of Greenwich Park for the duration of the games. Huge stands have been built in the shadow of the Observatory right along the meridian line – the one we use to measure time, longitude and latitude and all that GMT stuff. Despite the organisers of the games promising that the park will be left in the shape they found it in – it ain’t fooling the locals! All the thousands of spectators, horses and riders churning up that centuries old grass park land and running wild over the Roman remains which have been buried here for 2 thousand years. Spectacular setting I suppose what with The Greenwich Naval College set right next to the Thames and the just re-opened Cutty Sark sitting elegantly on its new perch. Did you know there's a nuclear reactor underground of the College?

While zooming down the hill from Blackheath (which is on a flat plateau above Greenwich) my front brake cable snapped and the rear brake pads proved to be useless - typical! Almost crashed into a platoon of soldiers as they guarded one of the fenced gates into the park. It’s a good thing there are no hills where I am going because I am so out of shape – too pooped to push.

They've parked a bloody big boat on the Thames where they have helicopters ready with the SAS if anybody should decide to try and interrupt the Olympics. Kind of feels like a warzone and not the inspiration for a generation as advertised.

There’s a foot tunnel under the river linking Greenwich with The Isle Of Dogs. I used to use this everyday for a year once. Back then they had a 'lift conductor' opening and closing the doors of the lift which went up and down all day every day. I notice it’s all automated now but at least they’ve kept the tunnel itself in the same condition as I remember it and the same as it looked the day it opened it in 1902. A hundred years ago of course, this whole area was a thriving dockland and workers from South London could walk to work using the tunnel. The tunnel was bombed in World War 2 and had to be repaired at the north end. If you are taller than 5’ 5” you’re going to have to bend over a bit to get through the repaired bit. Cyclists used to zoom down the tunnel dispersing pedestrians hither and thither always followed by cries of “OFF YOUR BICYCLE PLEASE SIR” from the lift operators. Now of course there’s silence if you try this but you’ll have to get off your bike anyway half way as they’ve stuck a nasty barrier across the tunnel to stop any wayward pedal terrorists.

Sometimes walking through the tunnel you can hear the propellers of boats churning through the muddy Thames water above your head. The sound can be a bit disconcerting as you can feel very claustrophobic all of a sudden.

Here's some close ups of the highly sensitive and secret (probably) radar array's they use to detect all sorts of transmissions and possible threats under, on and above the waves. I might get a visit from the authorities for posting these shots.

Some bored looking police in boats were having a Sunday morning cruise on the river. Very leisurely, but I bet they have all sorts of automatic sub machine guns ready to use on anybody straying too close to HMS Ocean which is The Royal Navy's biggest ship.

There’s lots of Union Jacks flying everywhere on The Isle Of Dogs mostly on the tired and run down council estates built in the 1960’s. East End Cockney types who have lived through the worst of the last hundred years and having survived both the Blitz and Thatcher still believe in the Monarchy, the only connection with their heritage left.

By the way The Isle Of Dogs isn’t an island and you could write a book about its history and how it came to be called that. In fact there are lots of books out there but in case you don’t want to search one out; please read on! I mean not that I can provide you with the definitive history or anything but there’s a little personal insight I think I might be able to provide.

So on the other side of the river at Island Gardens there's some blocks of flats overlooking the river as well as The Poplar Rowing Club. I wonder if they helped to train any of Team GB?

A lot of the docks were bombed in the war and many of the dock workers who lived here perished as well. There were close knit communities back then – that old ‘Blitz spirit’ which we love to talk about so much when something horrible happens. There’s a few great pubs still around but now catering to young upwardly mobile professional bankers who live in gated blocks of flats with security fencing and CCTV cameras to keep out the local rabble. Oh yeah for anybody into their football, Millwall FC’s (named after an area on the west side of the ‘Isle’) ground is actually in Bermondsey on the other side of the river. Their chant goes something like, “No one likes us and we don’t care”. Some of that quirky English sense of humour that definately wasn't a part of the opening ceremonies the other night!

There’s a path along the river through all the fairly modern housing estates from where you have a great view of that Millennium Dome place – now called ‘The 02’. Even though it looks like an upturned bowl and took an American company (who owns the Los Angeles Kings hockey team) to sort out all its problems (it was empty for years because the Brits couldn’t figure out how to use it post 2000), I think it still looks spectacular from any angle. You can now walk across the top of it if you really want to.

You can see some tourists in this photo (above) and that funnel is actually an exhaust shaft for the Blackwall tunnel that thousands of cars and HGV’s use every day, nice for those tourists breathing in all that fresh air. I wonder if they know?

As you get closer to that cluster of bright shiny new buildings in Canary Wharf (Barclays and HSBC built new offices here - so that’s what they did with all the money!) you can see what they use those docks for nowadays. This boat (below) belongs to Roman Abramovich who owns Chelsea Football club (nicknamed Chelski by some wag of a London Black cab driver). You can barely see it in this angle because it looks just like one of the new modern buildings built is this area over the last 10 years. Apparently London's Canary Wharf is the engine of all the financial world! If you saw the opening show for the Olympics the other night you would have seen a lengthy threatrical homage (looked like a Cirque Du Soleil production don't you think?) to that other period of history when England was the engine for the industrial revolution which let's face it changed the world, for good and for bad. Here we are in 2012 and history seems to be repeating itself...This is a point nobody has really raised. I wonder why?

So then I followed the Limehouse Cut (a canal which cuts through from the Thames to The Lower River Lea) - they've done a good job reclaiming this area...good for families - lots of open space and easily accessible. I followed the path to an old mill they've converted into artist studios with over priced flavoured coffee I'm sure - all very civilised so far.

There was a gaggle of barges parked up along the canal all pointing toward the main gate, that scarily tall blue building is right next to the main entrance.

Some strange shapes were looming up over old Victorian terraced houses in Stratford and some brutally tall condos acting like modern sentries seemed to be protecting the corporate wealth otherwise known as The Olympic Park.

Stratford High Street is unrecognisable when it was just down the road from where I used to live. Now it's all green glass, and steel and all very, very tall...and full of people who want to 'live in the spirit of the games' I guess. A forlorn and forgotten 18^th century boundary marker is the only reminder of the changes that have been rung through this area in 300 years.

Boy I wish I could make some of these pics behave themselves!

Here's another couple of pics of The High Street in Stratford - this one is looking towards The Bow Flyover...

...and this one is of what used to be called, The Rex Theatre. In my day is used to hold rave's and hip hop parties. I think Dizzee Rascal used to go here when he lived in Bow.

Not much has changed around the Stratford Centre except for lots of nice purple and lime green flowers hanging from baskets and the nice shiny Westfield shopping centre patrolled by the guns of Stratford...ready to take on the robbers, shoplifters and knife gangs, presumably. Now this is where it gets interesting and ties in nicely with the show from the other night. Maybe you were one of the 4 billion people who watched it?

An assortment of bored lime green and mauve clad security types telling me to not take pictures of their gate, I guess they think I might try...umm, try what exactly? "We don't know, you're just not allowed to.”

Sponsored by Coke and McDonalds and anybody wearing a Pepsi logo will be told to remove it...OR THEY WILL BE SHOT BY THE GUNS OF STRATFORD!

Up along Leyton High Road which is the eastern perimeter of the olymtricks park there's a cluster of caravans, with washing hanging from rusty old poles, handwritten signs saying ‘beware of the dog’ and some kids playing with some bricks on their rubble strewn ex factory site.

The spirit is working well here.

A bit further up and an entire park has been sacrificed to yet more bored looking green clad types as well as a few soldiers behind the 20 foot tall fencing (topped off with Olympic themed RAZOR WIRE). Barriers and checkpoints, fencing and wary security casting suspicious glances at anybody taking pictures of their bright shiny new gates.

You can just see a little of the Athletes’ village if you climb up some temporary blast barriers and lean over some razor wire. The first to arrive looks like the Cubans and the Canadians. I think the plan is to sell these flats after the games, as affordable housing to Londoners. We’ll see how affordable they will be after the private developers get their hands on them!

Sneaky photo I grabbed peeking into The King Harold (our local when we were local). The union jack, defiance, smoking, fatness, fruit machines in a scuzzy pub...that's the real East End!

Over the bridge crossing the tracks where the Eurostar trains go to sleep and past the new Spitalfields Market (not so ‘new’ anymore I suppose but this is where they stuck the stall holders from the ‘old’ Spitalfields market before they turned that into a nick nack and funky overpriced arts market) and on the right a huge chunk of Hackney Marsh has been paved over with asphalt and razor wire. This is where some allotments were - they grew fruit and veg there, by people who had the allotments for generations...now the 'olymtricks' grow diesel fumes and surly security instead.

Where there was once a Chinese food storage wharehouse and cheap fruit and veg market every Sunday morning there is now a terrifying 6 lane entrance to the site cryptically dubbed ‘IBC/MPC Access Only’ on the road signs. A good spot for catching the attention of suspicious army types I found out. Has that Iraq vet been told to be wary of anybody looking dodgy and taking pictures of the main entrances to the site for they might come back with a ton of explosive in a van and try and gain entry without paying? I wonder.

The media have their own bland looking building, brazenly emblazoned in bold caps is: INTERNATIONAL BROADCAST CENTRE, which is behind the fence of course and built right over the cheap flea markets and boot fairs that once thrived in this part of the Bow/Leyton borders.

Down the towpath next to the canal that winds its way right through the olymtrick park a little gathering of locals are having a Sunday BBQ to protest at the gate and the gaggle of bored mauve and lime green clad security types. There’s just one fence and a little cabin to help shelter them from the rain (of which there has been a lot of recently). A more modest and perhaps more sympathetic gesture of social cleansing but there’s still a couple of plainclothes cops sunning themselves in a  boat in the canal smirking. The tension bristles beween the BBQ'ers and the boat police, which isn't a pleasant atmosphere on this hot sunny Sunday afternoon.

The canal at this point (under the M11 link road) has been blocked off, a concrete fence in place across the slimy stagnant water warning dog walkers and bike riders and any potential would be boat bombers to stay out.

You wind your way down the canal path a little across the fancy new footbridge and enter into a twilight zone of the land that time forgot. This is Hackney Wick. An artist’s hub of old factories and warehouses with cool funky kids having a street party, selling their stuff on the street and soaking up the summer sun. All under the watchful gaze of those CCTV cameras and mauve uniforms all too eager to shoo you away if you get too close to the barriers and the wire. One outraged cyclist went as far as to challenge this new police state here in the funky East End. He was shot on site by an overzealous mauve man. No not really, just kidding.

This little oasis is a refreshing reminder that there is civilization in the middle of all this corporate money masquerading as sport, the human spirit forever victorious under the pressure of political and corporate egotism. Or something like that.

Finding my way through a series of roads with wharehouses now used for all sorts of small business and studios I ended up on this footpath built on top of a main sewage pipe protected by an old pillbox.

See that little green man (above)? He’s got that quizzical expression, stroking his chin in a suspicious manner, looking at the photographer taking a snap of his guard post and the stadium in the back ground. “You can’t take pictures of the security posters”. The list of banned items on those posters is long – no explosives, apparently! Those menacing concrete blocks are part of the link of pillboxes left over from the Second World War. Tyranny vanquished then, freedom of movement vanquished now?

The flag of 2012 behind a modern sculpture of barbed wire:

So anyway, being a Londoner the sun was starting to wear me out not being used to it and all. Cycling at a leisurely pace looking for some way into or around the Olympic site was proving to be like trying to break out of Colditz Castle...or maybe trying to break into Fort Knox (that’s the proverbial expression isn’t it?)...all that gold (Olympic gold) sitting in there...I mean that’s why they have all this security isn’t it? Near the end of my journey around the site and at what the sign calls, ‘Bow West VSA.’ the gaudy pink staging is shocking against the beautiful blue sky. What’s even more shocking is that soldier bloke in the middle of the photo talking into his hand in a mysterious manner. “Suspicious cyclist at Bow West entrance, shall I challenge him?”

I didn’t even make it around to the main entrance (my bike had developed a slow puncture see and South East London is a long long way away) but it matters not. I think the essence of what is going on here I discovered during my little journey. There’s this thing they keep parroting: ‘Legacy’. They plan on creating all these jobs, creating a new West End in the East End...maybe. All the turf they have paved over they will return to the little people and their English Gardens...maybe. The disused wrecking yards, scrap metal merchants, contaminated industrial sites, the Luftwaffe bombs, flea markets, Sunday morning boot sales, cheap fruit and veg and the unloved Hackney Dog Racing track are all gone. That’s for sure.

All for this?

Who knows how long this weird spider like tower spinning a web of steel conjured out of ‘War Of The Worlds’ will last but for the moment it makes a great image for juxtaposition, context, debate and conflict, just like The 2012 Olympics.

Or perhaps it will all be for nothing as this lonely (sideways) chimney in an empty lot testifies’s to time’s fickle nature.