Spoil sports
Lloyd Evans joined a march against the Olympics, and returned more convinced than ever that London needs the Games Necessary evils have been good to London. The Great Fire torched all those fiddly Tudor houses, the Luftwaffe wiped away the filthy slums, and now the Olympics threaten to burn a path up the Lee Valley and unleash a frenzy of new building. Officially, the East End is ‘Backing the Bid’. Gaudy posters dangling from every lamppost proclaim our vigorous and heartfelt support. This doesn’t quite reflect the public mood. In Hackney, where I live, our attitude is one of proud and unshakable indifference. Further east there is active hostility. A group in Stratford (NoLondon2012.org) is marshalling opposition to Seb Coe’s bulldozers with a wellorganised campaign of information. They stage regular guided walks along the Lee, a polluted tributary of the Thames which is so obscure and neglected that even the latest maps don’t know how to spell it. It’s the ‘River Lea or Lee’, according to the new A–Z. Last Sunday I joined the info-stroll and met up with a group of shivering ramblers on a patch of heath near Stratford. Our numbers were barely in double figures but our tour was being covered by the international press. A French TV crew, a New York radio journalist. And me.
We trudged through a tangle of railways, canals and straggling industrial plant. Our guide, Annie, told us that 900 businesses will be automatically relocated if the bid succeeds. There are 11,000 workers here staring at compulsory redundancy. The threatened firms are girdled with wraparound posters: ‘Don’t Blow Our Jobs’ and ‘Killing Local Business’. Some of these factories have only just been built. Others have soaked up fat wodges of redevelopment money. To trash them is crazy. But no matter. All will be swept aside by the unstoppable tsunami that is Seb Coe.
We traipsed down slimy towpaths and along channels silted up with piles of old tyres. Swans paddled through the oily waters. Ducks quacked in the rushy banks. A mildewed stench prickled my nostrils. I spoke to Jim, an amiable Scottish hippy with battered leathers and a white ponytail. ‘They’re going to degrade all this into park,’ he said contemptuously. ‘We want it like it is. Wild.’ It was wild all right. I’d have felt pretty unsafe walking alone on these narrow lanes, even in broad daylight. I noticed very few casual strollers around. But others in the group said that this manforged wasteland was a haven of peace, a place of contemplation. Maurice, a posh IT consultant who’d lived in the area for 25 years, was indignant that his favourite walks might be sacrificed to corporate fat cats.
The French TV crew left us. They had what they wanted, a recording of a Cockney stating in halting French his support for Paris. Even the most dedicated of us felt an obscure sense of betrayal. But there was nothing to be done. Onward. We passed beneath the Northern Outfall Sewer, a tremendous Victorian pipeline made of steel cylinders riveted together with studs the size of your fist. It runs for miles across the East End towards the waiting river.
This repulsively beautiful structure might stand as an emblem for the entire domain. The Lee Valley is like an industrial duodenum. The city’s daily scourings are gathered here, stored and transformed into usable matter. We came across a concrete recycling plant. It was going at full steam even on a Sunday. Groups of diggers, busy as worker ants, crawled over mounds of blasted rubble, their yellow mechanical fingers scratching at the debris, prising off great blocks like dead scabs and feeding them on to an unseen grinder which pounded them into manageable debris. And into money. Look hard enough and all rubbish yields value. There were graveyards of fridges, heaps of crashed cars, mouldering coaches sprouting greenery. I saw a weird queue of rusting forklifts all jammed together like a rugby line-out. Undoubtedly this industrial Hades has a stark and magnificent atmosphere. Its horrors yearn to be photographed in black and white by some brooding Swede who will win a prize. It’s the stuff of dissertations and student day trips, but I’m not sure it deserves to be maintained for ever.
We trekked on for another 50 minutes, emerging into a series of splodgy meadows. The wailing of a Baptist choir came to us on the freezing winds. At Annie’s invitation, we climbed a tumulus of spoil from the Channel Tunnel Link and found ourselves facing south. On the far horizon rose a familiar coronet of pierced spikes. ‘The Dome,’ she said sardonically, ‘London’s last attempt to stage a world-class extravaganza.’ Point taken. Away from the fields we rejoined the canal and its mossy paths. A pretty footbridge of wrought iron led us over a chuckling stream. My heart thrilled. On the side was scrawled ‘Fuck Sebastian Coe’. Properly spelled graffiti always lifts my spirits.
As we toiled homeward down the meandering creek, the New York reporter shoved her mike in my face and solicited my view as a representative local. Every journalist’s dream. To be interviewed by another journalist. I burbled away at great length, and to my surprise I found myself ‘Backing the Bid’. I’m not a big sports fan but the Olympics appeal to me at a deep and irrational level. The events are about as watchable as Changing Rooms or Celebrity Boob Swap (i.e., perfectly watchable if you’re half asleep). The only point of interest is the men’s 100-metre final, a race between eight drug addicts to decide who has the best apothecary. It lasts nine seconds. Now what I like is the idea that to lay on this blink-of-an-eye contest many billions of pounds must be spent, tens of thousands of workers must be contracted, and a new dream-city must be built from scratch. The mindless extravagance! The reckless waste! How absurd. How typical. How human. This is what we’re here for. This is what we’re good at. To make things of wonder for no conceivable reason.
The comparison with the Dome is awkward but unjust. No one was competing against us to build a Dome abroad. We know that the Olympics are on their way somewhere. So let’s have the big bad monster here. As for East End jobs, forget it. It’s happening anyway. The ‘900 businesses under threat’ disguises the fact that 47 solvent firms voluntarily cleared off as soon as the bid was announced. The Lee-or-Lea Valley has no future as an industrial Gaza Strip. With its canals, bridges, towpaths and woodlands — all within sight of the City’s lovely towers — it has too much residential value to serve much longer as the rectum of London. If Seb Coe doesn’t hustle these businesses out, the market will do it for him. But not as fast. Coe & co. are simply accelerating the process by a good 15 years. The Olympics is a time machine and I earnestly hope that on 5 July it lands in a swamp near me.
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