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
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
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