Ghost Milk: Calling Time on the Grand Project (10 page)

Two or three mobile phones are raised in tribute from behind a steel sculpture that resembles a dynamited palm tree. A Chinese gentleman from the takeaway waves a tiny red flag. Poor David Hemery, the 400-metre-hurdles champion from Mexico City, is obliterated by his protectors. The torch is a cone of flaming banknotes, a brand to light a witch’s bonfire. Black-clad APS Crowd Safety operatives with shaven heads, and thuggish joggers in acid-drop cycle helmets, shoulder-charge a solitary Free Tibet banner-waver. Smashing him backwards into the Gala Club bingo hall. Members of the security services, with cameras registering dissidents, outnumber the embedded television crews in their blast-resistant trucks. The whole circus more of a foretaste of the real thing than anybody could have predicted.

When, a few days later, I return to Stratford, a city state with a population ‘the size of Leeds’, it seems that nobody has given them the news of their status as a post-Olympic jewel. The Rex Cinema is defunct. The main road difficult to cross and vandalized by public art. The Labour Party offices are boarded up. The library is operative: it features a scale model of the coming Stratford City tended by legacy fundamentalists, sharp suits pouncing like Mormons on casual observers.

‘Is there anything you’d like explained?’

I back off, instinctively, in the English fashion. ‘How did you get away with it?’ doesn’t need asking. Here, in essence, is the solution to the Olympic mystery, the enigma hidden behind the smokescreen of upbeat PR, websites, viewing days, junk-mail publications and professional obfuscation. Stratford City will be ‘the largest retail led mixed regeneration in the UK’. In other words: a shopping mall. With satellite housing we must call, for convenience, the Athletes’ Village. But the heart of it, the land swallower, is a gigantic mall conceived and delivered by the Westfield Group, which is controlled by Frank Low, the second-richest man in Australia. Westfield are the fourth-biggest shopping-centre developers in the world. They have assets of £30 billion. A last-minute deal was struck for them to take control of the 180-acre Stratford site, for which privilege they paid £180 million.

The brothers David and Simon Reuben, who held a 50 per cent stake, were put under some pressure to sell out. Ken Livingstone, with characteristic tact, invited the Indian-born siblings ‘to go back to Iran and see if you can do any better under the ayatollahs’. City Hall and the various Olympic quangos prefer to deal with a single monolithic entity. Westfield would also take on the White City shopping mall (a traffic island separating the Westway and Shepherd’s Bush). Planning permission has been given to Westfield for 13 million square feet of ‘mixed use’ development, with the Olympic Village being converted into housing after the Games. The word on the street being that if nobody can be persuaded to take up residence in this reclaimed wilderness, the tower blocks (generic and architecturally undistinguished) will serve as holding pens for asylum seekers and economic migrants, until they can be shunted back through the conveniently sited Channel Tunnel link.

In the gold-rush land grab of flexible futures – hyper-mosques, evangelical cathedral-warehouses (£13.5 million offered to the Kings-way International Christian Centre to move off the nine-acre site they were illegally occupying) – legacy is all-important. It’s like reading the will and sharing the spoils before the sick man is actually dead. ‘The legacy the Games leave is as important as the sporting memories,’ said Tony Blair. And the legacy is: loss, CGI-visions injected straight into the eyeball, lasting shame. We have waved this disaster through, we have colluded: dozens of artists roam the perimeter fence soliciting Arts Council funding to underwrite their protests. It’s so awful, such a manifest horror, we can’t believe our luck. All those tragic meetings in packed cafés, the little movies. Blizzards of digital imagery recording edgeland signs clinging to mesh fences alongside compulsory-purchase notifications: we buy gold, we sell boxes. Gold from the teeth of dying industries, cardboard boxes to bury murdered aspirations.

In Stratford I met some of the legacy professionals. They have an office in Westminster, close to Green Park. A typical career path to the business of fixing the future might come out of Hackney Council in the bad old days, when they were £72 million in the hole, and on through the selling of Thames Gateway. And now this: the invention of something that will never happen by people who won’t be there when it does. In the entrance hall of the library, I notice the head of Keir Hardie in a perspex box. He’s not quite forgotten, the first Independent Labour member of parliament, voted in at West Ham on 4 July 1892. Cast in bronze by Benno Schatz, Hardie has his place in the scheme of things: a paperweight, a legacy we prefer to ignore. A tongueless bust in an airless cabinet.

On 26 September 2007, I stood outside Stratford Station – like those unfortunate celebrities on Millennium Eve, waiting two hours for their connection to the Dome – in the hope of spotting John Hopkins with his black Land Rover. And his sidekick Nathan, the name-badged driver. Hopkins has the title of ‘Project Sponsor, Parklands and Public Realm’. He is employed by the Olympic Delivery Authority: as an explainer, facilitator, tour guide. He is an affable, well-informed man with an interest in London history. He recently attended, so he tells me, a public conversation between Peter Ackroyd and a journalist ‘who looked like Hugh Grant’. Stephen Gill accompanies me; he has photographed the site so often, before the occupation, that he can’t pass up this opportunity. The spill-zone in front of the station has a triumphal arch with an electronic timer ticking down the minutes to Olympic glory, a corkscrew clock tower (with broken clock), a steam engine called ‘Robert’ (home to dozens of incontinent pigeons). Beggars, junk-dealers and god-ranters, expelled from more salubrious districts, are much in evidence. Across the road is a labyrinthine mall-tunnel of resistible bargains, sachets of ‘Calf’s Pizzle’ at £1.99 a hit. There is an underpass with prints of night-blue skies dedicated to the legacy of Stratford’s own poet, Gerard Manley Hopkins.

Circle-citadels indeed. The Jesuit poet’s smoke-ring conjurings have come to pass. Stratford Circus, as we drive to our entrance gate, has choked Joan Littlewood’s Theatre Royal in a rash of Pizza Expresses and Caribbean Scene restaurants, budget multiplexes fronted by an ugly silver-hoop sculpture. ‘Ah well,’ wrote Hopkins, ‘it is all a purchase, all a prize.’ David Mackay, author of the original Stratford City plan and lead architect for the Barcelona Olympic Village, is horrified by what is happening: ‘The silliest architecture seen for years. The Olympic legacy will be more like a Hollywood set for a ghost town or an abandoned Expo site.’

The first thing that goes, as we emerge beyond the fence, is any sense of place. There is nothing by which to navigate, except the legend: ‘Bronze Age, Viking, Roman and Norman inhabitants have enjoyed the temperate climate, fertile land and powerful river … A once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to revitalise the valley, leaving in its footprints world-class sports, business and leisure facilities.’ Twelve thousand new jobs; 1.2 million visitors. ‘Billions of TV viewers.’ And statistics beyond number. Statistics are the cash crop of Stratford. Our slow circuit is respectful of tadpole beds, Museum of London ditches, wire fronds and crushed concrete arranged in gallery-quality exhibition piles. Gill wants to record these abstract patterns, but permission is refused.

He emailed me, soon after I got home: ‘I had a kind of territorial feeling, everything had been taken away. I almost cried in the back of the car, it is such a political experience. Whenever the guide talked about removing fish, saving the newts, making homes for insects and butterflies, I always checked on the opposite side to the one he suggested, it was much more interesting.’

Nathan, our gap-year chauffeur, told us, while we waited at yet another checkpoint, that they had given him another job, filling in tax-concession forms for the contractors, allowances for asbestos removal, handling pollutants. Manufacturing cake. That’s what they call the heaps of rendered mud. Treats for cloned cattle.

One area I do recognize, even in its peeled form, is the mound on which the Clays Lane Estate once stood. Bill Parry-Davies was employed to represent tenants who felt themselves threatened by the documented evidence of radioactive material, used in the manufacture of luminous watch dials, buried in cesspits on the site.

‘There was concern,’ Parry-Davies told me, ‘when the contractors started boring deep holes … The nature of radioactive material is that it only becomes dangerous once it’s been disturbed. Once you release it into the air, as dust, it becomes a major problem … At the end of last year, they undertook tests on the run-off into the River Lea. They found levels of thorium in the water. Atkins, the engineers, considered that it was possible that thorium had dispersed along the water table. Thorium is ductile and malleable, it’s used as a source of nuclear energy … When they found the run-off in the Lea, it was enough to confirm the engineers’ prediction of what could happen. The effect being that the entire Olympic Park is contaminated with thorium at water-table level.’

Even if figures are fudged and scare stories buried, it is going to be tricky to fulfil Ken Livingstone’s promise that the money for the construction of the Olympic Park will be earned back, afterwards, by flogging the land. ‘They won’t be able to do it,’ Parry-Davies confirmed, ‘unless they clear the whole thing up, which is a huge undertaking.’ It’s a grim scenario, especially for the travellers expelled from their established camps at the base of the Clays Lane mound and for the tenants who tried to hang on to home and community. ‘Those who are still there,’ Parry-Davies reported, ‘are woken at five in the morning, to find a police and army exercise going on, anti-terrorist war games, bombs and guns and helicopters, clouds of smoke. Nobody told them this was going to happen.’

The Olympic Park is zoned like a city under siege. You listen for the muffled thrum of a big-bellied airlift squadron. Murphy, Morrison, Nuttall: they have strategic checkpoints and private armies. The shadow of old Berlin is unavoidable. But this time the corporate entities have walled themselves, by their own choice, inside their defended stockade. Only by erecting secure fences, surveillance hedges, can they assert their championship of liberty. The threat of terrorism, self-inflicted, underwrites the seriousness of the measures required to repel it. Headline arrests in the Olympic hinterland followed by small-print retractions.

We have to sign our names on clipboard forms at every barrier. We splash through troughs of blue disinfectant. John Hopkins, with his interesting grey moustache, keeps up the patter. ‘New jobs are being created,’ he says. ‘Look at those Polish women from the relocated salmon-packing operation enjoying their alfresco lunches.’ The next night, on local-television news, I recognize Hopkins, in a boat, giving the identical word-for-word pitch. Say it often enough and it becomes true. They are very good, the explainers, at delivering an unchallenged monologue, but when the hard questions come, a momentary time-delay kicks in. They struggle like flak-jacket correspondents unsynched by video-phone technology on a desert road.

Gareth Blacker, a deathly pale, black-suited Irishman, was sent by the LDA – before the unfortunate business of the mislaid procurement funds – to patronize the folk at the Manor Garden Allotments. He had the same soft-spoken, infinitely reasonable pitch as John Hopkins. Perhaps they have media professionals to teach it. Blacker stood in the rain, under a golfing umbrella, staring at highly polished shoes, while his PR consigliere, Kinsella, hovered in the background. When Blacker responded he seemed to be answering the wrong question, the one asked a minute ago. The allotments, an island oasis ticking every possible regeneration box, stood in the way of the perimeter fence.

‘This is part of the Olympic Park and the Olympic Park legacy. It’s a temporary move. We want the allotments back after the Games. Everything will be in place. The only thing that will come out is a lot of concrete.’

‘How can something return after it has been obliterated?’ I asked.

Blacker checked his laces. A question of national security, simply that. ‘The highest levels of security on a building site for a long, long time,’ he said. ‘More security than this country has ever seen.’

Consultation concluded. Sheds come down, blue fence goes up. Some of the gardeners relocate to a dank swamp and start again, others shrivel like the summer crops they will never see. The afterlife of the allotments, the home-made sheds in which so much time and love had been invested, would be a series of affectionate portraits by Stephen Gill and a clear-eyed elegy on film by Emily Richardson. Direction of travel. Letting a hidden camera run, while she toured the Olympic site on an official bus, allowed Richardson to record a Tourette’s syndrome spill of upbeat statistics combined with tracking shots across a panorama of blight and ruin. A superimposition that reduced audiences to hysterics.

The tacky blue of the perimeter fence does not appear on any of the computer-generated versions of the Olympic Park. The prospect from the north is favoured, down towards Canary Wharf, the Thames and the Millennium Dome. The heritage site looks like an airport with one peculiar and defining feature: no barbed wire, no barrier between Expo campus and a network of motorways and rivers. The current experience, in reality, is all fence; the fence is the sum of our knowledge of this privileged mud. Visit here as early as you like and there will be no unsightly tags, no slogans; a viscous slither of blue. Like disinfectant running down the slopes of a urinal trough. Circumambulation by the fence painters is endless, day after day, around the entire circuit; repairing damage, covering up protests. Sticky trails drip into grass verges, painterly signatures. Plywood surfaces never quite dry. Subtle differences of shade and texture darken into free-floating Franz Kline blocks.