Blog: Olympic Legacy

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I spent a happy hour or so yesterday trying to find out which team had lived in our block during the Olympics. I didn't find out - i guess it was SECRET at the time - but i DID look at lots of interesting pictures, including this interesting DIAGRAM of where things were. They're building a Sainsbury's now where the "chill-out zone" was, and I've got a check-up tomorrow with my new GP in the "Polyclinic", but it's all still quite recognisable with how it is now - INDEED, if you could just zoom in a bit you'd be able to see into our flat!

I also found a couple of pictures of inside the flats themselves during the games, and got EXCITED when I saw a reporter in what appeared to be OUR bathroom! I eventually realised that there's probably a lot of them that look the same, but STILL: it does mean that the bathroom we have was there during the games, and thus our loo has been used by OLYMPIC ATHLETES!

And that got me thinking about the PSYCHOGEOGRAPHY of the place - all the things that had happened there over the years. I found some maps of what the area looked like before they built the Olympic Park, and found that our bit was mostly rail yards. I remember all the fuss when the games were announced, about how the history of the area was being wiped away, to be replaced by something new and, somehow, less "real". But that's the thing with yr HISTORY - all the stuff that was in the area before they built the Olympics was itself built on top of OTHER history (archeologists found evidence of habitations going all the way back to neolithic times), and now there's MORE history (also, a Sainsbury's) being built on top of THAT. I imagine, in a hundred years time, exactly the same sort of people who bemoaned the loss of the old rail depot coming to the site and talking about the historical importance of the old Olympic site. I wonder if FUTURE PEOPLE will know that that's why the place was built?

I apologise if all this is only of interest to ME, but it IS very exciting to be living there. On Sunday i went for an early evening STROLL round the new PARK they've just opened, and WONDERED at all the buildings STILL to be opened. On that diagram there's only the triangular building and ours, next to it, that are even OPEN yet, and those are still less than a quarter full. Over the next year or so, apparently,the whole LOT is going to be filling up with people and they're building MORE houses too, round where the basketball arena was.

I can't wait to see what happens to it all - so GIRD yrself, gentle reader, I'll be banging on about it for a while yet!

posted 21/1/2014 by MJ Hibbett

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