Olympic snapshots:A requiem for Stratford Marsh
I read the following in the comments on Londonist yesterday and the words struck a chord, so I thought I'd take the liberty of reproducing them here.
"As a person who does a lot of photography in the area which will soon metamorphise into Olympic city, I have mixed emotions about this. I can already feel the buzz of achievement in the London air, a positive feeling not often felt these days of smug negativity. Certainly there are going to be massive advantages to the economy, London will get oodles of money for infrastructure improvement, etc. Those of us who have, will certainly have more as a result. The poor sods who live in the area aren't going to benefit, they'll just be shifted to the next marginal area.
May I suggest to you all some nice day this summer to go to the Stratford Marsh area and have a walk around. Take the DLR to Pudding Mill Lane. Don't wear your designer trainers from Selfridges and leave your iPod at home. Walk up the Pudding Mill Lane towards Carpenters Road and Hackney Wick, walk along the river Lea as it is now, walk the Greenway and look out over the city. This area of London is unique, slightly wild and overgrown, derelict and somewhat dangerous.
What I like about it is that in a world of identical All Bar One's on every street corner in London where danger lies in looking at someone crosseyed at pub closing time, the Stratford Marsh has a character which is real and genuinely its own. Enjoy the hand scrawled signs with misspelled words, the multilayered rubbish revealing what happens at the other end of our disposable consumer society. Walk along the Lea down to the Thames with its sometimes overgrown towpath and wildflowers, it's magical.
But soon the big London construction firms will be homogenising it, cutting away the wildness and taming it with 10 foot tall sticks of sapling trees, manicured grass laid down in uniform strips, and install miles of concrete for parking. If you want to know what its going to look like 3 months after the 2012 Olympics have come and gone, go and take a walk around the Millennium Dome. It is nice for Britain to have finally come out on top on something, and I like the positive buzz in the air. But I also have some sadness, because we're losing another little chunk of something unique." [Eric]
Those are two of my own photographs of doomed Stratford, but you can see Eric's rather more extensive portfolio here. They may take some time to load, and you may destroy his bandwidth in the process, but they're rather special and they give a true flavour of life in the soon-to-be erased Olympic zone.
Olympic snapshots:A requiem for Stratford Marsh
"As a person who does a lot of photography in the area which will soon metamorphise into Olympic city, I have mixed emotions about this. I can already feel the buzz of achievement in the London air, a positive feeling not often felt these days of smug negativity. Certainly there are going to be massive advantages to the economy, London will get oodles of money for infrastructure improvement, etc. Those of us who have, will certainly have more as a result. The poor sods who live in the area aren't going to benefit, they'll just be shifted to the next marginal area.
What I like about it is that in a world of identical All Bar One's on every street corner in London where danger lies in looking at someone crosseyed at pub closing time, the Stratford Marsh has a character which is real and genuinely its own. Enjoy the hand scrawled signs with misspelled words, the multilayered rubbish revealing what happens at the other end of our disposable consumer society. Walk along the Lea down to the Thames with its sometimes overgrown towpath and wildflowers, it's magical.
"As a person who does a lot of photography in the area which will soon metamorphise into Olympic city, I have mixed emotions about this. I can already feel the buzz of achievement in the London air, a positive feeling not often felt these days of smug negativity. Certainly there are going to be massive advantages to the economy, London will get oodles of money for infrastructure improvement, etc. Those of us who have, will certainly have more as a result. The poor sods who live in the area aren't going to benefit, they'll just be shifted to the next marginal area.
What I like about it is that in a world of identical All Bar One's on every street corner in London where danger lies in looking at someone crosseyed at pub closing time, the Stratford Marsh has a character which is real and genuinely its own. Enjoy the hand scrawled signs with misspelled words, the multilayered rubbish revealing what happens at the other end of our disposable consumer society. Walk along the Lea down to the Thames with its sometimes overgrown towpath and wildflowers, it's magical.