It isn't far from round here to the 2012 Olympic Park, but it often feels that way. I speak partly as a runner who pounds the Lea canal towpath all the way to Old Ford Lock and the left turn beyond it, which bears me up onto the Greenway and a close view of the stadium. By then I'm starting to feel the strain of trying to make it back home again in less than an hour, but also trying to envisage precisely how I and my fellow residents of this part of Hackney are going to benefit from the largest urban renewal exercise in Western Europe.
The distance from Pond to Park is phsychological as well as physical. You can get to Stratford or Hackney Wick with far less pain by train, but how many of us really want to visit those destinations? Actually, I think there's quite a few. The existing Stratford shopping centre, soon to be rendered small and shabby by comparison with a glistening new Westfield mall, has long drawn Clapton residents of my acquaintance east, just as Walthmstow market has drawn some north. Other locals' consumer instincts pull them west towards Stoke Newington or the Angel. These variations look to me suspiciously like a social class thing. Will Westfield, with its John Lewis anchor and promise of added swank, turn the compass points of Clapton's burgeoning intelligentsia?
That's one of those "legacy" questions that only the future can answer. Another one, related to the first, is about jobs. The shopping mall is expected to generate thousands of the retail kind, but citizens of Newham are better placed to snap up those. Hackney's great hopes lie with the destiny of the press and broadcasting centres after the hordes of media folk have returned to the corners of the globe from whence they will arrive in their thousands next July. The aim is to re-fit and re-populate the shells with cutting edge, hi-tech industries and all the surrounding cafes, hair salons and phone accessory outlets such modern centres of commerce generate.
There's a way to go. When I run to the Olympic Park I pass the press centre on the way, and the larger broadcast building lurking behind it. I've watched them change and grow and their foreground landscaped, though this cannot hope to compensate the residents of Hackney Wick's Leabank Square for the loss of a once wilder and more pleasant view from the opposite side of the flat water. Bit by bit, the towpath is being spruced up too, with resurfacing work and the insertion of corpulent mooring posts complete with signs which indirectly warn river-dellers not to use them (I'm guessing they're reserved for spectator river bus use). The travellers who made their home under a flyover have long gone.
It's all quite exciting and stupid too: I hope the East End regeneration dream comes true and find the commentariat sceptics tiresome, yet I can't shake off the bedrock objection that bringing greater, tax-payer driven prosperity to Hackney and the other Olympic boroughs in need of a lift shouldn't really require the pretext of a three weeks of international sport. Then there's the distance between today's hype and tomorrow's reality. Will children in Claprton schools whose classes have been renamed "Helsinki" and "Beijing" really find fulfilling work in that putative "media hub" rather than drifting in to the alienated unemployment that awaits too many of them? The running and jumping will be one thing. But will the really big Olympic dream ever come true?
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