It's ten years since London hosted the Olympics so the good folk at Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park are celebrating with, amongst other things, a small exhibition. They haven't made it easy to stumble upon, having tucked it away on the upper concourse of the Velodrome and entirely forgetting to erect a sign outside "hey, there's an exhibition inside". But if you think to walk in and head confidently past the ladies on reception and find the stairwell and climb two flights and walk to the far end of the arena there it is, indeed you may never have realised it's fine to go in and watch whoever's biking round the track at any time.
The exhibition is more words than it is objects. Thankfully they are quite evocative objects, the largest being a full-sized Wenlock, the quirky Olympic mascot. This particular Wenlock has been borrowed from West Ham's stadium where it normally forms part of the collateral on a guided tour so you're saving £19 by seeing it here. Other objects in cases include Olympic and Paralympic torches and medals, should you not have one of your own, a gold-trimmed opening ceremony outfit and a scrap of running track. That's not quite a full list but it nearly is.
Half the exhibition focuses on the Paralympics and the other half on 2012 and legacy. There's too much on legacy, given this is supposed to be celebrating ten years ago, but QEOP's copywriting team are always obsessed by shoehorning their current commercial activities into everything they write. Enjoy the parklands, they say, and maybe try a new sport or watch an international clash or enjoy a boat ride or hop on a swan pedalo or slide down the big tower or grab after-work drinks or buy coffee and cake and for goodness sake this is not "a hotspot for foodies", only in your marketing dreams.
You have the rest of the summer to see the exhibition but don't come a long distance specially because it's basically a couple of alcoves decked out with information boards.
It's fabulous this, a 1:2000 scale model of central London and covered with tiny sticky-up plastic buildings all the way from Park Royal to Woolwich. If they're very new buildings or not-yet-built buildings they're white and if they're older than that they're off-white, the idea being to help architects and planners visualise the London cityscape and see how new developments fit into the whole. Most of west London is off-white with tiny pockets of white, whereas East London has a lot more of the white stuff clustered around E20, E14, E16, SE10 and anywhere there used to be industry. The level of detail is such that if you live in a Victorian terrace you'll likely be able to pick out your backyard, an honour not appointed to residents of the highrise white bits.
Of course you've likely seen the model before, it having spent most of the last two decades at NLA off Tottenham Court Road, even if it wasn't quite as big as this to start with. More recently it's become a travelling attraction used to fill empty spaces in retail developments, hence until recently it was stashed in Coal Drops Yard in Kings Cross and now here it is at the quieter end of The Street at Westfield Stratford. It's an odd place to put it, given that passing footfall is much more interested in shopping than architecture, so I wouldn't expect it to get particularly busy.
Quite the weirdest thing about the set-up is that someone thought it was a good idea to hide a cafe at the back, almost entirely obscured by a sparse bookshelf, and to hire two lackeys to make frothy coffee for non-existent clientele. There are tables somewhere in the vicinity of Uxbridge if you're interested in spending ten minutes sitting just out of sight of the model's impeccable detail. Better to scrutinise close-up and latte-free, I'd say, especially if you happen to be going shopping in E20 anytime during the next six months anyway.
Ooh that'll be today. Blossom Watch Day is the National Trust's annual celebration of arboreal colour, which resonates strongly in the Olympic Park because it's the site of London's first Blossom Garden. 2022 is the first spring its 33 trees have been publicly accessible, although because they deliberately planted several different varieties the trees haven't all blossomed simultaneously and the overall impact has been let's say underwhelming. At present one tree is in full pink pomp and another partly so, with maybe half a dozen showing straggly petal remains and the rest peaked some time back, assuming they peaked at all. Come for a nice sit down in peaceful surroundings but don't worry if you don't have a camera to hand.
I was surprised to see the National Trust promoting Blossom Watch Day in Westfield yesterday with the aid of one of those chalk drawings that only looks 3D from one particular angle. It wasn't even an especially exciting image, just a bird flying over some blotchy trees, because it turns out Mother Nature is a heck of a lot better at making blossom photogenic than a mere pavement artist. I hope it wasn't my annual subscription they used to pay two stewards to chaperone the artwork and attempt to encourage passers-by to upload it with the designated hashtag.
Also...
• I popped into QEOP's perfectly camouflaged Information Point, once located in a portakabin where everyone passed it, now hidden away in one tiny corner of an Alpine deli. The staff were charming and informative and I suspect not overworked, and offered me a map and urged me to go and see the 2012 exhibition in the Velodrome which I didn't tell them I already had.
• A 'legacy trail' has been created around the park, the idea being that you look through 12 magenta frames at key locations and take a photo/selfie/whatever. I couldn't find a map online, only a paper copy at the Information Point, and you'll never follow it without one.
• Abba's avatar theatre has almost finished taking shape, which is just as well given it's due to open to paying visitors in five weeks time. The hospitality corral out front is now externally complete and we're currently at the "laying new tarmac to cope with massive footfall" stage. A clock on a post outside counts down the days.
• Just before lockdown they started renovating the mirrored RUN sculpture outside the Copper Box, then entered a two year hiatus, and only now have they removed the black plastic sheets revealing drab mirrorlessness.
• It's now more than a year since I last saw a kingfisher in the Olympic Park (despite over a dozen sightings in the year before that), and that's a shame.
