: At quarter past five this afternoon, diamond geezer received its three millionth visitor. If you're my regular reader at the Mercedes Benz factory in Northants, hello, it was you! Although, to be fair, your click-through was merely the three millionth time that a slightly ropey stats package has registered a unique visit, which isn't quite the same thing at all. Three million visits is an impressive total - the equivalent of everyone in Wales reading my blog once. But viewed another way it's not much - on average, ten double deckers of readers a day, which is only 0.01% of the population of London. What I do know is that my audience is coming faster. The first million took just over five years, the last million's taken less than two.
The Olympics provided a temporary upward bump this summer, almost doubling my daily visitor numbers. A lot of that uplift was from search engine referrals, which was the pleasant consequence of going on and on and on about the Games ad nauseam. But by far my best day came thanks to a single photograph people liked and linked to, because photographs are easy to like and don't require effort to read. Indeed there's not always much correlation between post length and number of visitors. I wrote a thousand words for each of the first three posts this month, but yesterday's 13 word filler earned greater readership than any. If I've learned anything over the last three million visitors, it's that you lot are entirely unpredictable.
What I like to do, every time one of these readership milestones rolls by, is to look back and analyse where my visitors came from. In particular I like to draw up a league table of top linking blogs, ordered by volume of visitors clicking here from there. That used to be quite interesting, and important, back in the era when blogs thrived solely because other blogs linked to them. How times change. As we established last week the blogroll is dead, and through traffic now comes from elsewhere. When people like what you've written they no longer announce it via their own space, because writing paragraphs is too much hassle. Instead they tap a few characters into some micro-blogging portal, that is when they're not too busy tweeting national news stories or sharing videos of kittens. The ability to drive traffic to blogs has shifted, away from those who generate their own content towards those who merely digest the content of others.
So my regular linking league table now includes a range of websites broader than mere blogs. I've not gone as far as including Google, because that would be top of the list by a factor of 20. But I am including three services that didn't even exist when I started out, and they now dominate beyond expectation. My apologies if they've shoved your website down the top 20 since my last league table last December. And thank you all for linking (assuming you still exist).
Hasn't Twitter done well? It's a long way off dislodging Girl With A One Track Mind from the summit, but it's easily the dominant force in blog referral of late. It's so easy to tweet a link - it takes almost no effort at all - and people are so willing to click through on blind faith. As for Facebook, I'm not a member so I have no idea what you lot are up to behind the password wall. But Zuckerberg's social network has become a significant generator of traffic, presumably because there's nothing meaty worth reading within. And I'm surprised to see Reddit doing so well, but only because I'm not a member there either and never did quite get the hang of what Redditors talk about.
Other than that, very little has changed here since my chart at two and a half million. Londonist continues to hold firm, because they sometimes kindly mention me (and because they get over a million readers a month). Charlton-based 853 is the only proper climber, and Tom's Tired of London Tired of Life the sole new entry. His is one of five blogs here that post daily, and have done for years, which shows the power of persistent longevity. But the rest of the top 20 stagnates, including three blogs that are now dormant, three that have disappeared completely, and three who deblogrolled me years back. Blogging's returned to being a niche activity, undertaken by the devoted, overlooked by the mainstream.
A significant role is still played by RSS and various feedreaders, whose simplicity allows thousands of you to read this blog without ever visiting it. As far as you're concerned I'm no longer writing a continuous story, I'm generating atomised blogposts - which makes a complete mockery of attempting to count visitor numbers accurately anyway. I guess in reality I passed the magic three million many months ago, but didn't realise it. Never mind the inexactitude. I don't mind where you come from, I'm just well chuffed that you bother. Hello and thanks to all of you. And here's to many more...
Sorry about yesterday. The server supporting my comments system failed, causing nasty database collapses and making it very hard for pages to load. It's all fixed now, thanks Kirk, although normality may take a little longer to return.
Around the post-Olympic Park c) Leyton Road to the Bow Roundabout
15 more photographs here; map here
Westfield's car parks may have reopened, but pedestrians approaching from the east still get a mighty raw deal. Whereas cars and buses can enter direct up Penny Brookes Street, those on foot aren't officially allowed through because there's a brief "dangerous" section past a narrow gateway. It looks easy enough to fix, if anybody cared, but instead the official diversion starts from a painted silhouette further down the road. This backroad used to be the queue for vehicle search, but now it's a lonely walkway round the back of the last remaining empty tent. Westfield's shops aren't far off, but there's a railway in the way so the diversion heads back, and then up a lengthy zigzag to a point less than a hundred yards from the original blockage. Honestly, what were they thinking?
One day this'll be the edge of the East Village - a housing mountain whose sales website is all superficial froth rather than specific detail. But if you want Waitrose and M&S on your doorstep, where better? We're approaching via the shops' backsides, where all the lorries park out of sight to disgorge their cargo. The bus station's open again, too big for the handful of services currently starting here, and still a really depressing place to wait. At least it has more passengers than Stratford International station, which peaked during the Games (athletes, badge traders, Javelin) but once again resembles a ghost town. On the DLR piazza, the Olympic covers have come down revealing the athletes' welcoming ceremony space beyond. And in the cavernous High Speed ticket hall, it seems nobody wants to travel to central London in six minutes any more, not now it costs a fiver. At the coffee shop a member of staff is sticking a sign in the window to warn that "seating is for customers only", except there are no customers, nor sign of any arriving. Stratford International? Alas, not any more.
It was around here that, for the first time ever, I spotted an unattended open door in the security fence. I could easily have wandered through, pressed deeper into the site, even set off a controlled nuclear device, now nobody cares any more. Rather more hi-vis sentinels are waiting at the end of "Olympic Park Avenue" to stop drivers exiting Westfield from deviating into the heart of the Park. It'll be a mega-junction this, eventually, but for now it's a dual carriageway dog leg where walking's discouraged. We're at the John Lewis end of the shopping centre, which is a good excuse to nip up to the third floor to see how the Olympic firesale is going. The shelves are still stacked high, though with a reduced range of merchandise. There are cut-price oven gloves and tea towels aplenty, and plastic Mandevilles reduced to clear, and a heck of a lot of model taxis, and a wall of as yet unclaimed keyrings. Unsurprisingly the £10 metal fish and chip forks still haven't sold out. But I'd say that less than half of the shop's contents have been reduced in price, which is impressive, because as yet there's no sign of the public losing interest in buying.
You're free to walk along the edge of the Olympic Park here, the former Stratford Gate entrance, where row upon row of empty white tents await the call for someone to come and take them down. LOCOG have three weeks to get rid, before they officially hand over the Park's infrastructure to the London Legacy Development Corporation. There's no point in crossing the road here now - apart from mild nostalgia - so the central reservation is being replanted with earth and trees, and all the pedestrian crossings have been covered up. Two huge magenta signs remain to direct non-existent spectators to nearby stations, but the sponsors' pavilions have almost disappeared, off to whichever global shindig they're needed at next.
The reopening of Montfichet Road is good news for Blue Badge Guides running Olympic tours. Over the summer they've been reduced to meandering through housing estates, but now they can guide their sightseeing flock up this ramped street for a close-up Park view. We're bang opposite the Aquatic Centre here, its grassy nose nudging out into a swiftly-cleared hinterland. The exterior paint job has been tarnished now someone's peeled the logos off the end wall, but not to mind, those winged grandstands are going soon. I eavesdropped as one guide told her group all about the Orbit and waved a laminated photo she'd taken at the top. They listened intently, but could only gawp across at its twisting steel summit and the mighty stadium beyond. A few brief weeks and they're once again out of public circulation, back to 'look but don't touch', as the great Olympic lockout continues.
Warton Road's security barrier has gone, thank goodness, so shoppers (and bus passengers) can now enter Westfield without being beckoned over for inspection. The Greenwayfootbridge remains, for now, although the pedestrian crossing beneath has been blocked off in case it disturbs traffic too much. The Greenway Gate didn't take long to disappear, now an empty space watched over by two bored-looking security bods. And as for Stratford High Street, the final stretch of this six mile circumnavigation, that continues its transformation into mismatched urban highrise. The curved wooden tower at Dane's Yard lights up at night, and will probably be mistaken by future tourists for the Olympic cauldron. Wherever you can see a space it's a sure bet some developer has their sights on squeezing in more flats, as the Games' transforming effect ripples outwards. The Olympic Park's peak moment may have passed, but the entire perimeter's in flux as inside slowly knits with outside. All change.
Around the post-Olympic Park b) Eastway to Leyton Road
11 more photographs here; map here
"Check Point Ahead" says the police sign on the path leading off the Lea towpath, even though there isn't. The security presence hereabouts has almost vanished since the Games departed, and the media-specific bus station now lies very very empty. One entrance remains open below the multi-storey, lightly supervised, allowing access for those involved in the un-fit-out of the International Broadcast Centre. The pavement further along is still barriered-off, for no readily apparent reason, while one of the contraflow arrows on the tarmac has been painted out to make the road one-way again.
The A12 roundabout is busy again, and not with Olympic traffic. The back route to Westfield begins here and has reopened, for vehicles only, threading the long way round the edge of the Athletes' Village. But mid-Games this junction was the location of another unfortunate cycling death. A bus carrying journalists turned left across Dan Harris's path, and the sad result is made evident by the number of candles in jars and limp bouquets still laid out near the roadside. Dan's ghost bike has since been removed, but his helmet, his gloves, his trainers and his neckerchief remain. All this memorabilia makes for a poignant reminder, but alas passing motorists will probably only ever think "what's that mess doing in that tree?" as they go by.
A number of Olympic grandstands are visible from Ruckholt Road, each now a metal skeleton stripped of purple and pink branding. It's still possible to picture the tennis, the football, the BMX and the hockey taking place within, but before long all elevated trace of these events will have gone. It's left to the Velodrome to leave its permanent mark on the skyline, along with the bright orange footbridge that leads nowhere for the foreseeable future. Beyond the bridge is an evocative treat for those of us missing the Olympic Park - a riotous outbreak of those gorgeous meadowlike flowers. Entire banks are still in full bloom, even into October, lining an exit ramp the public have for some reason never been allowed to use. And that tree up there, the one with the big ring around it, that's art that is. It's one of ten History Trees, one of which will appear at each entrance to QE Olympic Park, in that hope that bark and ring will fuse in centuries to come as a long-lasting reminder of 2012.
Don't look across at Hackney Marshes, at least not at the East Marsh, now acres of vehicle-less coach park. It'll be football pitches again next year, but not this season. And it'll be a while before you can drive again down Temple Mills Lane, still blocked off part way down by metal gates. The remainder of the road is used solely for access to the Lea Interchange bus depot, and as somewhere for all the drivers to park their cars. I don't know who thought to plant sunflowers on the Eton Manor side of the road, but they've thrived, and grown, and make a brief but splendid display beneath the razorwire.
Waltham Forest Welcomes You, says the sign by the unnecessary footbridge the council built. They thought there'd be hordes crossing the railway to enter the Olympic Park, whereas it turns out the existing two narrow walkways would have coped admirably. Nice bridge though, nice bit of legacy. It's unclear why someone's painted "574m" in giant letters on the wall by the allotments, although the equally giant arrow pointing in the general direction of Leyton station suggests a Games-time waymarker. Almost nobody walked instead via Asda's car park, past the ill-fatedLeyton Food Market, although that route was deliberately upgraded too. The Retail Park now has a proper entrance off the High Road, down steps rather than a narrow zigzag ramp, which is yet another positive outcome from the Games.
Bright orange "London 2012" banners still hang outside the station - one suspects the council are reluctant to finally take them down. But the aftermath of the Games is still very much underway further down the road. Drapers Field remains a warehouse rather than a recreation ground, with two chatty guards down by the entrance overseeing who goes in and out. There's much more security at the other end of Temple Mills Lane, because this was the backroom entrance to the Park, and is still the backroom exit out. This way please for all those retro-fitting the East Village, upgrading from athletes' accommodation to saleable flats, and from medical facility to Academy. There are a heck of a lot of kitchens to install, seventeen clustered blocksworth, even if the balconies look really drab now the competitors have taken their flags home.
A special hello at this point to Ravinder K Atwal. About five years back she was invited to design panels to screen a wall along the edge of the local estate, which she did with a series of close-ups of youth playing sport. All well and good, except that Ravinder thought it necessary to label each and every panel (and there are dozens) with her full name and qualifications. "Artist - Ravinder. K. Atwal B.A(Hons) M.A." they read, every last one of them, in a scarily self-important manner (and with little knowledge of punctuation). And then she added her web address for good measure, that's www.ravindersartworld.com, in the hope that passers by might be so won over by her smeary ping pong players that they'd rush to check the site out. Alas, Ravinder, it seems you've allowed your URL to lapse, and all that remains is your fading ego stapled to the wall.
I know you stopped thinking about London 2012 three weeks ago. But some of us still live round here, and the legacyof the Games isn't going to go away. So I've been for yet another walk round the outside of the Olympic Park, clockwise from the Bow Roundabout, as East End life sort-of gets back to normal.
Around the post-Olympic Park a) Bow Roundabout to Eastway
14 photographs here; map here
Olympic Park ahoy. It's nearly a year since Brian Dorling was knocked off his bike and killed at the Bow Roundabout. His commemorative ghost bike used to be locked to the traffic lights, but TfL moved it up the road (with permission) when they last retweaked the junction. It's still there, just past McDonalds, looking sadder than ever now all the replacement flowers have finally died (and sadly there's no sign of anyone shifting it back by the lights where it belongs). Good news for cyclists across the road - the towpath alongside the Lea is open again, and has been since the day after the Games closed. Nobody's yet removed the gate which blocked the river to all traffic, merely floated it back against the bank, but presumably it'll disappear eventually. Crossrail have restarted construction of the Pudding Mill Portal, digging their big hole just over the wall. The river now narrows at this point, for strengthening purposes, thanks to a metal-lined algae-filled cofferdam.
It's lovely to be back walking along the riverside. Everything's still lush and green at summer's end, with blackberries bursting through the gaps in the spiky pre-Olympic security fence. The occasional jogger pants by, a couple of moorhens splash and squawk, and familiar shapes rise up above the foliage. They'll be clearing out inside that stadium now, in readiness for who knows what, while the Orbit gets mothballed until paying customers eventually return. At the Greenway a pleasant surprise, as the ramp up to the sewertop is unexpectedly open. No access at the top, however, while workmen busy themselves with clearing away all trace of the Victoria Gate. They're moving poles, and dismantling tents, leaving the odd chair still to be collected as the security theatre vanishes. It'll be a while before full access to the Greenway returns, some say December, but it's good to get even partially back again.
There's no action at the waterbus stop, long since abandoned by dodgy chancers Water Chariots. Across the river at Swan Wharf, some painted words on a wall and a few wooden trestles are all that remain of The Fringe. This "pop-up entertainment and hospitality club" was hoping to lure in moneyed bacchanalians during the Games, but its Twitter account petered out before the first closing ceremony so I assume it failed to meet expectations. Past Old Ford Lock the salmon-painted Fish Island Riviera shines even brighter. They've cleared the carpark of luxury portacabins now, but one wonders if their Olympic business model survived the Telegraph's utterly damning restaurant review.
Look past the old Big Breakfast House and the stadium still looms - so close from here, yet a world of memories away. All the temporary backrooms and Prestige pavilions are being taken away, slowly, gradually, with workmen busy even on a Saturday morning. What's missing are the security guards, previously ubiquitous, but reduced to a skeleton staff now it doesn't matter whether Tower Hamlets gets bombed or not. Onward past several narrowboats, most moored, others afloat. One appears to double up as a coffee shop, advertising flat whites and long blacks on a lateral chalkboard, but it doesn't hang around long enough to serve anyone.
White Post Lane won't be reopening fully for at least another year. A bloke in a hi-vis stands guard at one end of the bridge, letting only workmen pass, his security badge reading 'Reinstatement'. He's trying to give two elderly cyclists directions to the View Tube, and seems surprised when I warn him it's not open for another two months. The road beyond the barrier is that which ferried umpteen buses across the middle of the Olympic Park, if you remember seeing that when you visited. The copper tower of the Energy Centre rises alongside, with a somewhat unexpected black door leading out directly onto the towpath. And that's the backside of the Copper Box, where you might have watched handball or goalball, and which reopens next summer as as the non-thrillingly-named Multi-Use Arena. A new pedestrian footbridge is already half complete, linking via Wallis Road to Hackney Wick station... if only that had been open this summer, how convenient would that have been?
At Hackney Wick the Lea opens up along an arrow-straight channel. Peering through the Olympic security fence, this edge of the park is mostly tarmac. A lengthy linear car park has appeared, at the very last minute before the Games, squeezing in hundreds of numbered parking spaces in lieu of parkland. Apparently these were added at the request of American broadcasters NBC who didn't fancy using the appointed multi-storey round the corner, but then barely used these additional spaces either. What an appalling waste of money, and an entirely unnecessary peripheral eyesore. Peer further across the hardstanding and two temporary structures are still clearly seen - one the marshmallow-like Basketball Arena, the other the red/white rooftop panels of the Well Known Fizzy Drink Beatbox. There's clearly a heck of a lot of 'reinstatement' still to go before the acres beyond are reborn as the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park in ten months time.
You have to feel sorry for the inhabitants of Leabank Square, whose lowrise flats face out across the river from the Hackney banks. They've made a big effort to beautify their side, but the opposite panorama is unalloyed architecturalhorror. Green slopes were removed so that the International Broadcast Centre could be built, a bland panelled behemoth that's due to live on after the Games as a tech hub. For their sins, the even uglier catering block was dumped in front of Leabank Square's windows, although hopefully that's temporary. You'd think they'd have have lots to complain about, but I see the blog address daubed on the riverbank has now been painted over, and the blog itself appears to have gone into passive hiatus back in July. Eastway ahead, more tomorrow.
The Crystal is Newham's latest pride and joy, a long spiky glass building at one end of the Royal Victoria Dock, close to the Dangleway's northern terminal. It was due to open in time for the Olympics, to soak up tourists with nowhere to go, but construction and fitting out took a little longer than expected. The end result - with a cablecar landing alongside alien shininess - means there are few more futuristic-looking corners of London. The whole thing has been funded and built by German company Siemens, who do all sorts of engineering things you're probably not familiar with, and they'd like to change that. Half of the building is a conference centre, backroom offices and a café, and the other half an urban sustainability exhibition. It's not going to be an easy sell.
To kickstart day one, Newham held a Waterfront Festival which succeeded in bringing the crowds. Music blared from a temporary stage, faces got painted, beer flowed, and children poked around inside an inflatable whale (like you do). One of the longest queues was for a raffle to win one of 50 return trips on the cablecar, which I fear says more about the disposable income of local residents than the excitement of the journey. The Newham Steel Band cheered up the area by the bar (thanks Felix, thanks Marcia), and there were watersports and boat trips around the dock. An extensive area alongside the Crystal has been semi-cultivated with raised borders and diagonal paths - the 21st century version of an Elizabethan knot garden. Alas it was being summarily ignored by almost all the day's attendees, probably because it's had less than one season to bed in, but hopefully will look a little greener next spring. Meanwhile the café inside the venue was being well frequented, thanks to realistic prices and some appealing-looking baked snacks.
And so to the exhibition. There was a queue to get in (which I suspect will be a one-off), but also free biros for everyone (which may not be). A surprise - the building feels smaller on the inside than it looks on the outside, with the main display space clustered around a central mezzanine. We were directed first upstairs, to the 'Forces of Change' zone, where we filed into the small cinema for the a/v presentation. A succession of urban themes sped by, like the bullet points in a GCSE Geography essay, but nicely illustrated with globally sourced images. The picture quality suffered somewhat when a small child worked out he could stand on one of the projectors, but thankfully he got bored quickly and wandered off. The "megatrends" theme continued outside on a few electronic displays, with Demographic Change considerably more interesting than Climate Change or Urbanisation, but upstairs felt perhaps a little sparse.
The main body of stuff to do is downstairs, divided into several themed zones. Some are more interesting than others, with "Smart Buildings" probably the most tedious. "Water is Life" looks more spectacular, with a waterfall rolling off the upper floor to flow off a transparent table, but the associated text goes a bit too deeply into "non-potable sources" and "rainwater harvesting" to inspire the average visitor. A Boris bike makes an appearance in the transport zone, and the man himself appears on video in "Future Cities" giving a cogent argument for low-carbon initiatives (like a certain New Bus). Expect to have to read stuff if you want to get the most out of your visit. The Crystal's very much a fact-dropping place ("every second the world's cities grow by two people") ("on a planet of 7 billion, only 90 million are over the age of eighty... for now"). Although there's plenty to press, select and slide, children under the age of 10 aren't likely to be entertained.
All of the interactive displays launch with the swipe of a card, which caused a major problem yesterday because there weren't enough of these to go round. Instead management took the decision to distribute no cards at all, so staff had to keep wandering around to launch things else we couldn't view them. This made for a frustrating sub-optimal experience, having to walk past potentially interesting exhibits, although that was probably a Day One Only issue. There again, while some of the interactives were fun and thought-provoking, others were merely linear, or over-fiddly, or with non-obvious confusing functionality. By the time I sort-of understood what I was doing in the "Creating Cities" simulation I'd bankrupted the council coffers, and the complete four-player game proved much too complex for one run-through. Maybe that was the point.
I was expecting more of a hard sell from Siemens, but there was reassuringly little. The electric car in "Keep Moving" is plugged into a Siemens charging point, and the interactive windpower graphic has "Siemens" written entirely unnecessarily on all the turbines. Other than that, all the branding is concealed in which aspects of sustainability the exhibition chooses to showcase and which it doesn't. The "Healthy Life" section focuses on company-specific areas of technology such as CT scanners, while "Clean and Green" spends too long on waste management and not enough on practical advice. In fact I'd say that's The Crystal's major failing. I came away aware of several things that people should be doing to make their cities better, but felt that most of these were for architects, planners and politicians to undertake, not me. The Crystal's not a "change your lightbulbs and recycle more" sort of place, it's aimed more at education than direct action. Whether this is a sustainable attraction has yet to be proven, but a visit here (not Sundays) (nor Mondays) will definitely make you think. [8 photos]
I'm duly honoured by each and every one of these blogroll links, so many thanks to you all. But I also notice that the list is 15% shorter than last year (which in turn was 20% shorter than the year before that) (which in turn was 20% shorter than the year before that) (which in turn was 20% shorter than the year before that). Ouch!
I compile this list every year, so I started by checking all 113 blogs on last year's list to see how many of them still linked here. About one in three have fallen by the wayside and don't appear this year. Most of these are on hiatus (either deliberately, or through month-long neglect) which is a shame. A few have simply vanished off the face of the internet. Several have removed their blogroll altogether, usually after updating to a revamped template. And one or two are still going strong but have removed me from their blogroll, which I guess is the way it goes. I used to be able to refresh my annual list with several new blogs, but this year there aren't many to find. My list is ever-shortening, and is now less than half the size it was four years ago.
Maybe this blog is past its prime. These collapsing numbers could be explained by an increasing lack of interest in what I have to say, and far fewer people linking as a result. Who wants to read the verbose ramblings of a self-indulgent non-professional when the web now has so much more varied content to enjoy? And it takes effort to read 800 words a day, a length which I'm sure scares many potential visitors away. So much quicker to read a pithy 140 character summary, or to look at one lovely photo, rather than taking time out to plough through seven potentially irrelevant paragraphs.
What's clear is that blogging is evolving, shrinking, retreating. Fewer people blog these days because alternative platforms exist (and take far less effort to update). Blogrolls have become invisible and irrelevant, especially to anyone subscribed via an RSS feed. The majority of fresh 2012 blogs have no blogroll at all, because sidebars don't look good on smartphones. Most importantly, new readers no longer come clicking via a long-standing blogroll in a sidebar, they arrive via a one-off reference on Twitter/Facebook/whatever. A blog is now only as good as its last post, and long-term reputation counts for very little.
Anyway, I hope that my list is fairly complete, but I bet it isn't. Let me know if I've missed you/anyone off the list, and I'll come back and add you/them later. As for the rest of my readers, maybe you'd like to click on a few of these 99 links to see what you're missing. I can't promise they're all thrilling verbal discourses, but I'm sure you'll discover plenty that are.
Around the post-Olympic Park
One day this'll be the edge of the East Village - a housing mountain whose sales website is all superficial froth rather than specific detail. But if you want Waitrose and M&S on your doorstep, where better? We're approaching via the shops' backsides, where all the lorries park out of sight to disgorge their cargo. The bus station's open again, too big for the handful of services currently starting here, and still a really depressing place to wait. At least it has more passengers than Stratford International station, which peaked during the Games (athletes, badge traders, Javelin) but once again resembles a ghost town. On the DLR piazza, the Olympic covers have come down revealing the athletes' welcoming ceremony space beyond. And in the cavernous High Speed ticket hall, it seems nobody wants to travel to central London in six minutes any more, not now it costs a fiver. At the coffee shop a member of staff is sticking a sign in the window to warn that "seating is for customers only", except there are no customers, nor sign of any arriving. Stratford International? Alas, not any more.
The reopening of Montfichet Road is good news for Blue Badge Guides running Olympic tours. Over the summer they've been reduced to meandering through housing estates, but now they can guide their sightseeing flock up this ramped street for a close-up Park view. We're bang opposite the Aquatic Centre here, its grassy nose nudging out into a swiftly-cleared hinterland. The exterior paint job has been tarnished now someone's peeled the logos off the end wall, but not to mind, those winged grandstands are going soon. I eavesdropped as one guide told her group all about the Orbit and waved a laminated photo she'd taken at the top. They listened intently, but could only gawp across at its twisting steel summit and the mighty stadium beyond. A few brief weeks and they're once again out of public circulation, back to 'look but don't touch', as the great Olympic lockout continues.
"Check Point Ahead" says the police sign on the path leading off the Lea towpath, even though there isn't. The security presence hereabouts has almost vanished since the Games departed, and the media-specific bus station now lies very very empty. One entrance remains open below the multi-storey, lightly supervised, allowing access for those involved in the un-fit-out of the International Broadcast Centre. The pavement further along is still barriered-off, for no readily apparent reason, while one of the contraflow arrows on the tarmac has been painted out to make the road one-way again.
A number of Olympic grandstands are visible from Ruckholt Road, each now a metal skeleton stripped of purple and pink branding. It's still possible to picture the tennis, the football, the BMX and the hockey taking place within, but before long all elevated trace of these events will have gone. It's left to the Velodrome to leave its permanent mark on the skyline, along with the bright orange footbridge that leads nowhere for the foreseeable future. Beyond the bridge is an evocative treat for those of us missing the Olympic Park - a riotous outbreak of those gorgeous meadowlike flowers. Entire banks are still in full bloom, even into October, lining an exit ramp the public have for some reason never been allowed to use. And that tree up there, the one with the big ring around it, that's art that is. It's one of ten History Trees, one of which will appear at each entrance to QE Olympic Park, in that hope that bark and ring will fuse in centuries to come as a long-lasting reminder of 2012.
Waltham Forest Welcomes You, says the sign by the unnecessary footbridge the council built. They thought there'd be hordes crossing the railway to enter the Olympic Park, whereas it turns out the existing two narrow walkways would have coped admirably. Nice bridge though, nice bit of legacy. It's unclear why someone's painted "574m" in giant letters on the wall by the allotments, although the equally giant arrow pointing in the general direction of Leyton station suggests a Games-time waymarker. Almost nobody walked instead via Asda's car park, past the ill-fated Leyton Food Market, although that route was deliberately upgraded too. The Retail Park now has a proper entrance off the High Road, down steps rather than a narrow zigzag ramp, which is yet another positive outcome from the Games.
Olympic Park ahoy. It's nearly a year since Brian Dorling was knocked off his bike and killed at the Bow Roundabout. His commemorative ghost bike used to be locked to the traffic lights, but TfL moved it up the road (with permission) when they last retweaked the junction. It's still there, just past McDonalds, looking sadder than ever now all the replacement flowers have finally died (and sadly there's no sign of anyone shifting it back by the lights where it belongs). Good news for cyclists across the road - the towpath alongside the Lea is open again, and has been since the day after the Games closed. Nobody's yet removed the gate which blocked the river to all traffic, merely floated it back against the bank, but presumably it'll disappear eventually. Crossrail have restarted construction of the Pudding Mill Portal, digging their big hole just over the wall. The river now narrows at this point, for strengthening purposes, thanks to a metal-lined algae-filled cofferdam.
There's no action at the waterbus stop, long since abandoned by dodgy chancers Water Chariots. Across the river at Swan Wharf, some painted words on a wall and a few wooden trestles are all that remain of The Fringe. This "pop-up entertainment and hospitality club" was hoping to lure in moneyed bacchanalians during the Games, but its Twitter account petered out before the first closing ceremony so I assume it failed to meet expectations. Past Old Ford Lock the salmon-painted Fish Island Riviera shines even brighter. They've cleared the carpark of luxury portacabins now, but one wonders if their Olympic business model survived the Telegraph's utterly damning restaurant review.
White Post Lane won't be reopening fully for at least another year. A bloke in a hi-vis stands guard at one end of the bridge, letting only workmen pass, his security badge reading 'Reinstatement'. He's trying to give two elderly cyclists directions to the View Tube, and seems surprised when I warn him it's not open for another two months. The road beyond the barrier is that which ferried umpteen buses across the middle of the Olympic Park, if you remember seeing that when you visited. The copper tower of the Energy Centre rises alongside, with a somewhat unexpected black door leading out directly onto the towpath. And that's the backside of the Copper Box, where you might have watched handball or goalball, and which reopens next summer as as the non-thrillingly-named Multi-Use Arena. A new pedestrian footbridge is already half complete, linking via Wallis Road to Hackney Wick station... if only that had been open this summer, how convenient would that have been?
To kickstart day one, Newham held a Waterfront Festival which succeeded in bringing the crowds. Music blared from a temporary stage, faces got painted, beer flowed, and children poked around inside an inflatable whale (like you do). One of the longest queues was for a raffle to win one of 50 return trips on the cablecar, which I fear says more about the disposable income of local residents than the excitement of the journey. The Newham Steel Band cheered up the area by the bar (thanks Felix, thanks Marcia), and there were watersports and boat trips around the dock. An extensive area alongside the Crystal has been semi-cultivated with raised borders and diagonal paths - the 21st century version of an Elizabethan knot garden. Alas it was being summarily ignored by almost all the day's attendees, probably because it's had less than one season to bed in, but hopefully will look a little greener next spring. Meanwhile the café inside the venue was being well frequented, thanks to realistic prices and some appealing-looking baked snacks.
