Let the games begin

Hackney author Iain Sinclair

This article titled “Let the games begin” was written by Interview by Susanna Rustin, for The Guardian on Friday 22nd July 2011 19.30 UTC

Tessa Jowell was the Labour minister who fought for the London Olympics that is due to start in a year’s time. Hackney resident and writer Iain Sinclair liked east London the way it was before preparations started. They debate swimming pools, allotments and Stratford’s huge new shopping centre with Susanna Rustin.

Iain Sinclair: When I heard we had won the Olympics I thought of Docklands and the Millennium Dome – these projects were created with a great sense of optimism, but I felt this was a smokescreen. What followed was a series of losses – of allotments, football pitches, wildlife habitats. A lot of what east London was being promised had been there all along, but had crumbled away. My sense was that we were going to lose a lot of local things on vague promises, and the only legacy I could see was the huge Westfield shopping mall.

Tessa Jowell: What we’ve seen is the transformation of Stratford, though you would probably say vandalism, in five years when it would have taken 30. These are five boroughs [Hackney, Waltham Forest, Greenwich, Tower Hamlets and Newham], with above-average rates of child poverty and unemployment. The project started by undergrounding 52 power lines. There are people who described them as the old ladies of the Lee Valley, but I think the landscape of the park is infinitely improved. What was derelict wasteland, with 300 mostly struggling businesses, has been replaced by the largest urban park in Europe for 150 years. Every building is of architectural and design distinction. Is this a park that will live and breathe every day? Yes.

IS: I agree it has been a very professional development. But this landscape you’ve described is a future landscape, a virtual landscape that has a kind of perfection. This may be achieved, but I’m making the case for a series of unarguable losses. It was already a park – corrupt and dirty in some ways, but it had these ghosts of industry because the Lee Valley had been important in the second industrial revolution, with the development of plastics, radio, gin; all these strange businesses – and it mixed with a version of the pastoral. There were tadpoles, newts. I used to see kingfishers.

TJ: Huge regeneration like this needs to be handled with care. But I think it also has to be handled with a degree of candour. If you’re going to redevelop this space, the ramshackle, make-do-and-mend nature of it will change. We delayed the development of the land around the allotments so that pumpkins and marrows could be harvested.

IS: That’s true, I went round and saw them rotting – there was nobody there …

TJ: The other thing that was incredibly important to local people was the feral cats – there were about 2,000 and the development was delayed so that every one could be found a good home. The allotments will be restored, and the football pitches. I think the authority has shown incredible sensitivity.

IS: There has been sensitivity in elements of the development, but I don’t think it’s as straightforward as you do. From the moment it started, there has been a sense of paranoia and enclosure; that you’re running into huge levels of security. There are helicopters circling all the time, and I know people who have had cameras seized. On the Clays Lane Estate there were rehearsals for a terrorist attack, with helicopters and guns. People there felt like they were in a war zone.

TJ: The thing I’ve thought about a lot is the upheaval. What I try to think about is people living with that every day. That’s why local people being able to volunteer for the Games is so important.

IS: Local people felt they had suffered from the building works, and would maybe get some privileged access to the Games, or the marathon. But we’re not going to get that in east London – for various reasons, it’s going to be a circuit in central London. And there is a legacy of contamination. The landscape as you know was incredibly toxic – 7,500 tonnes of radioactive soil had to be removed. There were two landfill dumps, a factory making luminous watch dials, drums of thorium were buried. It was an enormously difficult site to remediate.

TJ: Of the money spent in the park, 75p in every £1 was spent on regeneration, to create a platform on which anything could be built, anything could grow. Residential development before that would not have been possible, and half of the Olympic village has already been sold to a housing association.

Susanna Rustin: Is there a danger the site will end up cut off from the boroughs that surround it?

TJ: Anticipation of that has been built into the whole process. That’s why community engagement has been taken so seriously.

IS: I’ve looked at Athens where there is this beautiful Olympic site, stunning architecture in a fabulous setting, and it’s falling apart, nobody is using it, there are feral dogs and grass growing through everything. Even in China, where they made the grandest and most extreme stadia of all, a lot are simply not being used. Whatever Tessa says, this is still a global, corporate entity – the sponsors are McDonald’s, Coca Cola …

TJ: That’s the shell, but if you look at every aspect of the Games, we have shaped them in a way that’s aligned to what our values were in the first place.

SR: Won’t the whole thing feel like a hangover from more prosperous times?

TJ: I was misquoted saying we wouldn’t have bid for the Olympics if we had seen the downturn coming. But I did say it might have been harder to persuade the sceptics. In fact the £6.1bn of contracts generated by the Games were just what the UK economy needed. Jobs are being created, there’s inward investment, upgraded transport links, housing.

IS: But how are we going to sustain these stadia and grand swimming pools when the pools we had were closed because they were not financially viable? It seems extraordinary that we can find money for something gigantic but not for something small and local. When will the aquatic centre be available for community use?

TJ: When we started on this I said there were two tests: one is the regeneration of east London, the other is transforming a generation of young people through sport. Certainly until the election we were doing that – more and more sport was being played in state schools every week. It’s an open question now as to how far that scale of ambition is realised.

Ghost Milk: Calling Time on the Grand Project by Iain Sinclair is published by Hamish Hamilton this month.

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