Clapton Pond Blog

2012: A Legacy Of Inequality?

Julian King of National Homebuyers told ITN:

“Economic conditions affecting homeowners are leading to repossessions, mortgage rescue and quick sales in a difficult property market."

But never fear. London home-owners will do better than most this year. And by 2012...

"...house prices in Hackney, East London are expected to rise by 30.5 percent by the time the city hosts the Olympics in 2012."

...it says here. But what if you don't own? The Gazette this week editorialises:

"The Olympics and the regeneration associated with it...have helped cushion the borough from the expected downturn forecast in the property market. That will provide some new year cheer to Hackney folk who own their homes and those upwardly mobile professionals from outside the borough wealthy enough to be able to afford to buy there."

But...

"An additional premium has effectively been placed on house or flats in Hackney by the staging of the Olympics, putting a home of their own even further out of the reach of those born and brought up in the borough desperately trying to get a foot on the property ladder. The Games were meant to be a catalyst for jobs, affordable housing and economic prosperity. It appears that an unintended legacy could be a greater social divide between the 'haves' and 'have-nots' and an enforced exodus of young people who will never be able to afford a place of their own in the borough where they grew up."

If there's one legacy we don't need...

Livingstone & Legacy

Ken Livingstone has published five legacy commitments by which he will judge the success of 2012. They are:

1. Increasing opportunities for Londoners to become involved in sport. 2. Ensuring Londoners benefit from new jobs, business and volunteering opportunities. 3. Transforming the heart of East London. 4. Delivering a sustainable Games and developing sustainable communities. 5. Showcasing London as a diverse, creative and welcoming city.

Now read on. I know I will be.

Hot Housing

From The Guardian:

"The 2012 Olympics will turn Hackney and other parts of the East End into the hottest part of an otherwise subdued property market next year, according to Halifax. The borough, one of the most deprived areas of the UK, is 'likely to be one of the top house-price performers in 2008 as regeneration ahead of the 2012 Olympics attracts buyers', said Halifax. It warned that prices would be flat or falling across much of Britain next year, but said there would still be plenty of 'housing hot spots'".

Ah yes. But who benefits? And who does not?

Olympic Walk

From the Guardian's Art & Architecture Dept:

"The day's aim was simple. We would walk the perimeter of London's Olympic Park - the 500-acre site in the Lower Lea valley that has been requisitioned, fenced off and depopulated in preparation for its Olympian redevelopment. The idea was Iain Sinclair's: 'Perhaps you'd fancy a few miles moving through the Hackney-Stratford marshes: a complex transitional ecology of CGI imagery, doomed allotments and virtual arcadias?'"

Righto. Now read on.

[Photo by Stephen Gill]

Off The Pace?

From the BBC:

"In areas of east London destined to benefit from the legacy of the 2012 Olympic games there are concerns that time is running out for the regeneration plans to be finalised if they are to yield the hoped-for benefits...The government has put aside £1.7bn for regeneration in the East End. New jobs, new homes, better transport and better sporting facilities are among the promises. But some experts are warning there is not enough detail in the plans. For instance, the plans allow for the creation of 9,000 new homes. Of these, 50% are to be at affordable prices. But it has still not been decided where these homes are going or how many in which boroughs."

All this comes from Sunday's Five Live Report, which you can "listen again" to via this page, which also informs us that,

"In Hackney, some youth workers have expressed increasing worries about violence on the streets. Paul Unsworth from Frampton Road Baptist Church Youth Club says many teenagers just do not feel safe any more. 'Young people in this area feel very threatened if they move outside of their own area and out of their own estate because there's different gangs that are around in different areas.'"

Don't we know it? Will the Olympics help to make them disappear?

That Fire Near The Olympic Stadium

The Beeb has a report and other pics. This one, though, was taken from the Council press office window and sent to me. Thanks for that.

That 2012 Stadium: Well....?

So, here it is - well, virtually - the sacred arena, the field of dreams, the bowl of bounty, the, uh, building whose very imminence will bring forth a flood of inward investment and bestow upon the people of our ragged-arsed borough riches beyond compare. Yes, I'm being unfair, but hyperbole does tend to nurture cynicism and that over-claiming feeling just won't go away. I mean, simply finding a straightforward picture of the thing wasn't as easy as you'd think, and my brain is still rotating from watching the promo video. What did it all mean? That said, my initial verdict is quite friendly. Before seeing the design I heard dear, huffy old Stephen Bayley on the car radio saying how boring it was. This helped me warm to it in advance. Seb-boy, of course, has been spinning its plainness into his legacy pitch - it's being dull makes it more re-usable, see. Time will tell. No permanent future tenant has yet been secured, and somehow I can't see it being The O's. Still, if all else fails the man at The Spine can always turn it into a haven for rubber fetishists.

Olympics: Vegetable Casualties

Later today we get to see a model of the 2012 Olympic Stadium. Till then, read of vegatables trampled in its name.

2012 Approaches

From the Evening Standard, this is what the 2012 Olympic Village is intended to look like. It will cost £2 billion and house 17,000 athletes, none of them above the eighth floor because, apparently, trudging up stairs or waiting for lifts does their legs in (some athletes...). Afterwards it will become what Olympic Delivery Authority Chief Executive David Higgins calls "a legacy community", comprising 3,800 homes (of which 30 percent will be "affordable", whatever that ends up meaning), a healthcare centre and an "education campus" with primary, secondary and nursery school provision.

The promise is that the post-Games village will reconnect communities in Hackney, Waltham Forest, Stratford and Leyton. We'll see. Meanwhile, work on the Olympic Park continues. Diamond Geezer has been logging the details.

"It's been two months since the Olympic Park was sealed off and its occupants ejected. Two months since an impenetrable big blue wall was erected all around the perimeter, and a bored-stupid security guard posted at every entrance gate. Two months may not sound long, but it represents more than 3% of all the available construction time. So what's been going on here since July? Is the site still a ghost town of crumbling warehouses, or have the Olympic Delivery Authority and their big yellow bulldozers been busy? It's a bit of both, actually."

Now read on.

The Price Of 2012

From The Telegraph:

"The Government is facing a new Olympic storm over accusations about the true cost of the London 2012 games. Tessa Jowell announced the higher budget in March. A Channel Four Dispatches programme, to be screened on Monday night, will allege that the Olympics Minister Tessa Jowell knew that the original £2.375 billion budget for the games was possibly underestimated by "several billion" 16 months before she admitted costs had spiralled to £9.3 billion. The programme also claims that research by a leading academic, carried out long before July 2005 when London won the right to host the event, showed that while the economic benefits to the capital would be worth around £6 billion, the rest of the country would suffer a £4 billion economic deficit. Dispatches will claim the research was buried by the Government."

And from The Independent:

"The benefit of the Olympics to the UK economy could be more than the £2bn estimated by the Government, according to a study published yesterday by the budget hotel group Travelodge. The study found that as much as £3bn could be generated by 6.6 million more visitors between 2007 and 2016. Travelodge aims to become the capital's largest hotel brand with 7,000 rooms by 2012. The author of the report, Kurt Janson, pointed out that Sydney attracted hundreds of major conferences due to its status as host destination in 2000. In the last 20 years, London has slipped from first to 19th place in the conference league table; the Olympics could reverse this situation. 'The Games is a unique marketing opportunity to reposition Britain as a must-see destination,' Mr Janson added. He added that the benefits from the Games were not guaranteed, and that they required significant additional Government funding for tourism."

Somewhere in the middle of all these sums there is supposed to be some economic benefit to Hackney. I'll get back to you when I've worked out what it is.