One of London's newest tourist attractions can be found in Stratford, a short walk from Westfield and the big slide at the Orbit. It's the Olympic Stadium, now more properly known as London Stadium, in the heart of Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park. Tours began running daily in August, matchdays excepted, and I think it's fair to say they haven't been publicised especially widely.
The target audience is interesting. The stadium is the home of London 2012, so you might expect a significant Olympic slant, and indeed there's some of that. But it's also the home of West Ham United, so what you're really getting is a look behind the scenes of a Premiership football club. What's more it's a club with 120 years of history, but only four months of them here in Stratford, so there's not a great deal of backstory in situ.
This is a multimedia tour, so you wander around with headphones and a dangly screen to discover more about the thirteen locations on the trail. A number of red-jacketed hosts are located along the way to tell you more, officially known as Tour Experience Makers, who as well as knowing their stuff are also keen to take a souvenir photo.
Turn up on the day and a tour costs £19, book online in advance and it's £17, and I took advantage of a recent festive offer which knocked another 25% off that. Judging by how much there was to see, which is a lot but not that much, I think I got the right deal.
To start the tour, pre-booked or otherwise, you turn up at the Stadium Store on the south side of the outer podium. A sign outside indicates 'Tours' downstairs via the lift, but ignore that, the window you want is in the main West Ham shop just to the right of the tills. Here you get a plastic token, and then you have to walk a third of the way round the perimeter of the stadium to present this at the main hospitality entrance. This is where all the VIPs entered for the Olympics, and where the players and West Ham elite enter today, so watch out for Baroness (Karren) Brady at the turnstile.
Your multimedia gizmo is the key to the tour so make sure you understand how it works, particularly how to go back if you ever press something too early. And then you're off up the escalators, rising through the glitzy atrium past the medal wall to enter the secret world of the VIP lounge. This is Royal East, the drinking spot for esteemed members and their guests before, during and after a big game. You can tell it's important because of the champagne bottles arranged behind the bar and because a lot of the decor is coloured gold. The nicest touches are the big gold rings suspended from the ceiling, à la Opening Ceremony, while various designs around the walls purport to celebrate the team's East End roots. Rather less necessary, I'd suggest, is the advertising screen which blares out every couple of minutes with an advert for Heineken.
Hurrah, it's time to step out into the posh seats and look down over the interior of the stadium. It does look good from up here, with the new roof holding up the trademark triangular floodlights, now pointing down within. The pitch doesn't seem too far away either, although there is a surprisingly large ring ofhiddenspace before the temporary seating over the athletics track begins. The chairman's enclosure is nextdoor - his lot get padded red seats, everyone else gets plastic white. And while everything around now screams football, squint a bit and you can almost imagine the Queen up here, parachute discarded, as the Games began below.
That's it for upstairs, bar sight of a few other (lesser) bars on the way down. You're then down at car park level, joining the route the players take before a match, before turning off into the changing rooms. The showers are tiled claret, white and blue, obviously. The changingarea feels low key in comparison, merely a horseshoe of booths for hanging clothes, each with a power point and USB port for in-match charging. The far end's quite bleak, with bins and drinks and a big electronic clock to count down to the whistle, but I guess the empty floor space is needed to accommodate all the testosterone and banter. The tour doesn't visit the away team changing room. but I'm told it's not as nice.
One genuine Olympic leftover remains, which is the warm-up track where the athletes limbered up before racing. Only six lanes wide and barely long enough for a sprint, this critical facility was squeezed into a breezeblock void under the lower seating, now opposite the corridor running past the changing rooms. This change of focus is welcome because it allows the audio-visual guide to deviate from football, although the three files on offer are more audio- than -visual and lacking somewhat in oomph. It also provides the main upselling opportunity of the tour, as staff encourage your party to stand in front of a green screen clutching a variety of medal-winning props, which (for £10) can later be turned into framed photos, keyrings or fridge magnets. I declined, no pressure.
Next up is the opportunity to visit the Flash Interview Rooms, a suite of seven cubbyholes where players and managers go to stand in front of a wall of sponsors' logos and pontificate about how the match went. That's the lowlight of the tour, whereas considerably more atmospheric is the walk down the tunnel to pitchside, emerging into the stadium bowl at ground level. Explore the exclusive section where the substitutes and managers sit, then take a seat on the plush airline-style seats in the dugout and marvel at quite howfar away the touchline seems.
What fills this chasm is the athletics track, safely hidden away beneath red and green carpeting, and hugely more evocative than all the West Ham dressing plonked on top. You're actually standing on the home straight where dozens of London 2012 medals were won, but the multimedia guide chooses to feature West Ham performances instead - presumably because the copyright was easier.
Altogether the tour took me an hour and a half, but only because I'd watched everything the electronic device had to offer, so don't be tempted to skip ahead too quickly. On departure from the stadium expect to be offered a voucher for a free personalised tour certificate and some money off in the cafe, which sounds generous but is really a ploy to lead you back into the bowels of the West Ham store. If you're a fan, this will be exactly what you want - the opportunity to buy a plethora of replica shirts and hammer-shaped memorabilia, perhaps as that ideal Christmas gift. I waited for my certificate to be printed and left.
In conclusion, if you're coming to enjoy Olympic goosebumps, these are in relatively short supply. What you're getting with a London Stadium tour is a look behind the scenes at West Ham United, in an arena that once held some famous athletics. More to the point you're getting a tour of a modern football stadium without (as yet) a lot of football backstory. Having done the Arsenal stadium tour, this felt surprisingly similar - the executive bar and terrace, the changing rooms, the pitch - only without quite so much silverware on show. I'm glad I've been, but if you're not sure you'd enjoy it, save your money.
I got in early. Not as early as some, but still early enough to be user number 54943, and for this to be one of the first million tweets.
Concerned that this might be pointlessly addictive. posted by diamondgeezer [10:15 AM Dec 10th, 2006]
I fear I nailed it on that very first tweet.
My next was more mundane.
Having a nice cup of tea posted by diamondgeezer [11:10 AM Dec 10th, 2006]
Everything was more mundane on Twitter in those days, the general idea being to tell a handful of followers what you were doing. That soon changed.
Along came links, and replies, and pictures, and adverts, and Twitter became less about what people had to say for themselves and more about what they'd seen other people say.
Twitter is now full of people noticing stuff and bringing it to your attention. It's full of people commenting on stuff and hoping you agree. It's full of carefully crafted marketing collateral obligingly retweeted. It's full of people showing off what they're doing so all their followers will be impressed. It's full of people chatting, often hidden from sight, but forgetting they're doing it entirely in public. It's full of happiness and joy, but also trolls and hate. And all in 140 characters or less.
Worryingly it's also created millions of filtered bubbles offering only opinions with which we already agree. Along with Facebook it may have helped to polarise society and deliver electoral shock. It is both brilliant and dangerous.
I'm a big fan. But then I'm not a particularly typical Twitter user.
Since starting out ten years ago I've tweeted less than 3000 times. That might sound a lot, indeed it's an average of one tweet every 30 hours, but most regular users are tweeting a heck of a lot more than that. I know this because I've checked all the people I follow on Twitter to see how often they tweet. The average is 8 times a day, not once, which means most of these people have tweeted tens of thousands of times since joining up. I'm not typical, I'm almost mute, because I'm not offering a running commentary on my life.
Since starting out ten years ago I've gained over 7000 followers. This is indeed a lot, indeed it's an average of more than two a day, which seems ridiculous for someone who doesn't tweet a lot. I actually have more followers than tweets, which for an unverified tick-free account is quite rare. And OK, so about a third of my followers turned up in the aftermath of the post-Leave Romford skinhead t-shirt debacle in the summer, which isn't exactly proper. But I am duly honoured by that total, and blimey.
I only follow 80 people. This is ridiculously low, I've discovered, again by comparing myself to all the people I follow on Twitter. Most of them follow over 400 different accounts, often well over, and a quarter of them follow more than 1000. This means that every time they log in they're simply dipping into a stream, and much of what their followers tweet passes by unseen. I'm very much not typical because I make sure I read every single thing my 80 people tweet. It is a very carefully curated list.
In total, 58 of the 80 people I follow follow me back, which is nice. Ten of the 80 were on Twitter before I was, and 50 joined before the site got really popular in 2009. Less than ten of them are nationally famous, which I suspect is a lower celeb-total than most. I've met 30 out of the 80 in person, which isn't bad, and been in the same room as another eight. More to the point there's at least another ten I'd really like to meet but never have, which just goes to show how disconnected from the real world this echo chamber of Twitter acquaintances really is.
I don't 'like' tweets much. I've only 'liked' about two tweets a month since I started, but then it turns out 'liking' is a variable thing. Several people never 'like' anything, while others 'like' stuff all the time as a silent way to show agreement, not simply appreciation. One person I follow has 'liked' 114000 tweets, which is an average of 30 a day, but hell why not, because it's free. I doubt I'd ever get on with Facebook, I don't 'like' enough.
But mostly, like I say, I don't tweet much. In particular I very rarely tweet what I've blogged. Most bloggers announce every fresh post with a tweet, because it's a great way to tell people there's something new to read. I don't do that, because I assume you've worked out by now that if it's 7am there's probably something new to read. If I had tweeted every fresh post since December 2006 I'd have tweeted an extra 4470 times, but I decided against because I thought it might have drowned out all the other stuff. So today, let's change that...
Ten years since I joined Twitter, I've started up a new Twitter account. It's specifically for tweeting when there's a new diamond geezer post to read, indeed that's all it'll ever do. It's called @diamondgzrblog, it's started up already, and you're very welcome to follow it.
How it works is clever. It checks my RSS feed every few minutes, and if a new post appears it tweets a tweet. Only the title of the tweet is included, which might be rather brief and uninformative. But each tweet also includes up to four pictures from the post, if there are any, and this might give a bit more of a flavour. It won't be pretty - the intention is not to create a carefully crafted promotional tweet, merely to issue a notification. Also I fear a lot of you will be asleep when it slips forth, but hey, it's better than nothing, and someone might just retweet it later.
And if you follow @diamondgzrblog then I can get on with tweeting not very much not very often on @diamondgeezer. I'll carry on attempting quality over quantity, and hope that this continues to work out. And whilst Twitter may one day evolve into a useless flabby platform wrecked by ill-judged features, let's hope it doesn't, and I'll still see you on there in another ten years' time.
