Ghost Milk: Calling Time on the Grand Project

by Sinclair, Iain

  This was a period when blowing the whistle on corrupt practices brought retribution in a traditional form. A Dalston solicitor, on the point of presenting evidence about fraudulent building practices, the use of the cheapest materials coupled with invoices for the most expensive, a dossier assembled by an outraged foreman, was warned off with a sniper shot, from a rooftop, as he stepped from the courthouse. The quality of the marksmanship was professional: the bullet missed by inches. He got the point. And had a story to tell.

  But the scam of scams was always the Olympics: Berlin (1936) to Beijing (2008). Engines of regeneration. Orgies of lachrymose nationalism. War by other means. Warrior-athletes watched, from behind dark glasses, by men in suits and uniforms. The pharmaceutical frontline. Californian chemists running their eye-popping, vein-clustered, vest-stripping androids against degendered state-laboratory freaks. Bearded ladies and teenage girls who never have periods. Medals are returned by disgraced drug cheats: to be passed on to others who weren’t caught, that time. The holy grail for blue-sky thinkers was the sport-transcends-politics Olympiad. The five-hooped golden handcuffs. Smoke rings behind which deals could be done for casinos and mosques and malls: with corporate sponsorship, flag-waving and infinitely elastic budgets (only challenged as an act of naysaying treason).

  The Long Good Friday has a neat tracking shot through the deserted quays of the future Docklands. The TV comic Dave King, playing a bent detective, reprimands Hoskins. A car has been detonated outside a Hawksmoor church. ‘We can’t have bombs going off, Harold. We can’t have corpses.’ But that, unfortunately, is the price on the tin. Well-rehearsed spontaneous celebrations, dancing, hugging, shoulder-punching in the studios, then private grief, explosions on the Underground. Mutilation, carnage. A fluster of BacoFoil suits and on-message medallists bouncing up and down as heavyweight political arm-twisting pays off. PR assaults, camera-kissing by Blair and Beckham: we get the Games on 6 July 2005. And the shock of a traumatized London on the following morning, death toll rising, dazed survivors captured on mobile phones as they stumble through smoke-filled, soft-focus tunnels. Bomb carriers looped on CCTV: malignant tourists at a Metroland station. Their posthumous journey, long after the event, a surveillance-television spectacular: motorway, car park, train. The Olympic project, from the start, would be about security. And budget. Baghdad conditions imported. Green zones staked out, helicopter-patrolled. Leaflets in the street with boxes to tick. Managed populism. Subverted dissent.

  ‘So this is where we’re going to build the 1988 Olympic Stadium,’ King muses. ‘Can you imagine nignogs doing the long jump along these quays?’ We can: vividly. We’ve watched Leni Riefenstahl’s Olympiad, her Wagnerian, body-fascism evocation of the 1936 Games, the triumphs of Jesse Owens, the grim-faced Hitler, the stiff-armed salutes of the Austrian, Italian and French contingents. The map montage in which the Olympic torch crosses Europe, Olympia to Berlin, is like an invasion rehearsal.

  When Horace Cutler, the Tory leader of the Greater London Council, made the speculative proposal, in 1979, that the 1988 Olympics should be held at the Royal Victoria Dock in Silvertown, right alongside Bow Creek, the point of access to the Lower Lea, he was ridiculed by the man who succeeded him, Ken Livingstone. ‘A gimmick.’ A megalomaniac right-wing fantasy. The worst sort of land piracy.

  By 2008, in a frank admission, during the run-up to the mayoral election, Livingstone boasted that he had feigned enthusiasm for the 2012 Olympics as a way of generating funds for brownfield development in East London and Thames Gateway, seeding his favoured pylon-forest estates alongside landfill mountains and poisoned creeks. The recklessly underestimated costs, based on nothing more than jottings on the back of an envelope, were simply a snare to ensure government approval. The initial tab of a couple of billion, liberated from lottery loot and siphoned from Arts Council vanity projects, escalated very rapidly as the reality of the damaged topography was investigated: up towards ten billion (and climbing). Japanese knotweed, radioactive watch dials, endangered newts: another £100,000. No breaks on this rocket-propelled debt elevator. Direction of travel. Paymasters held to ransom.

  ‘This was exactly the plan,’ Livingstone told his audience at St Martin-in-the-Fields. ‘It has gone perfectly.’

  In boroughs affected by this madness, the 2012 game-show virus, long-established businesses closed down, travellers were expelled from edgeland settlements, and allotment holders turned out of their gardens. As soon as the Olympic Park was enclosed, and therefore defined, loss quantified, the fence around the site became a symbol for opposition and the focus for discussion groups. A seminar convened by PNUK (Planners Network UK) was held at the boxing club in the old Limehouse Town Hall. Attending this public debate, I heard the Hackney solicitor Bill Parry-Davies describe how, after a series of mysterious fires, Dalston Lane lost its Victorian theatre and sections of Georgian terrace, to facilitate a new transport hub that would service the vital axes, south to the City, east to the Olympic Park.

  ‘Most of the development will be buy-to-let investments,’ Parry-Davies said. ‘Huge amounts of Russian and Saudi money. Tenants will move in and out constantly. There will be no community at all.’

  A few yards down Commercial Road, to the west of the Town Hall, was another defunct institution, the former Passmore Edwards Library. In front of the library was parked a black box, like an upended coffin made from offcuts of Olympic-fence plywood. It came with spray-on slogan: ATTLEE WUZ ERE. It contained the memorial statue of the former Mayor of Stepney, post-war socialist prime minister, Clement Attlee. Who was receiving a compulsory makeover and not being prepared for removal, like Lenin or Stalin, to some theme-park knackers’ yard. Perhaps Clement was, as a courtesy to the dream of the welfare state, being shielded from the self-regarding towers of Canary Wharf.

  Limehouse is a dormitory of unsummoned ghosts. The once-celebrated author of ‘yellow peril’ fictions, Sax Rohmer (Arthur Henry Sarsfield Ward), had a particular interest in the pyramid in Limehouse Church. It was known to his evil genius, Fu Manchu, a man of fiendish plots achieved through intimacy with London’s downriver reaches. A panel in the pyramid gave entry to a network of underground tunnels.

  But the fabled Chinese Limehouse of Thomas Burke and Sax Rohmer has long gone. The opium dens of Wilde, Conan Doyle and Dickens have been replaced by dockside bars with awnings and heaters. And now the Good Friends Restaurant in Salmon Lane, to which hungry diners travelled from all over the city, has been converted into a store for building supplies. The spirit of Fu Manchu, with his merciless cadre of martial-arts bodyguards and assassins, lives on, accompanying the Olympic torch on its progress between the two prime examples of bungled and underestimated grand projects: Wembley Stadium and the Millennium Dome (where the feeble flame ignited a burger-roasting shrine).

  On the morning the blue fence went up – OLYMPIC PARK: ROAD CLOSED HERE FROM MONDAY 2 JULY, FOOTPATH CLOSED, KEEP CLEAR – I met a man called Keith Foster. Mr Foster, who described himself as a ‘fieldwork photographer’ for Waltham Forest, had been keeping a meticulous record of the Lower Lea Valley, the shifts in land use, for more than thirty years. Until today. When he was challenged, and threatened with summary arrest by private security guards, for the crime of pointing his camera at the fence. A fence which shadowed the towpath, accompanied the Greenway, stuttered through Stratford, and marked out the half-abandoned estate due for demolition on Clays Lane. Foster’s dispiriting experience was a commonplace. Stephen Gill, another compulsive cyclist-photographer, haunter of scrub woods, produced two finely observed elegies to the doomed territories. A celebration of the sprawling, Babel-voiced boot fair held at the former Hackney Wick Stadium. And a documentary record of the Olympic Park in its limbo, before the first conceptual stadium slid from its computer screen.

  ‘I used to wander the Wick, completely on my own, exploring and taking photographs,’ he told me. ‘Now there are lots of people in yellow coats, boots and hard hats. “Sorry, mate, you can’t come in
here.” Suddenly there are places where you can’t walk freely. “Health and safety. You’re not insured.” It’s always the same: health and safety.’

  On Waterden Road, that improbable assembly of exotic food warehouses, evangelical African churches, steel-door nightclubs, bus garages, Gill snapped the Queen of England. On a private and unannounced tour. (Brave smile, like her late mother, tripping over rubble, as she visited the East End war zone.)

  ‘I was standing by the roadside. There were a lot of helicopters overhead. I waved. She waved. I took a few shots. The policeman said, “That’s enough.” The big black car purred through all the barriers, down the length of Waterden Road, past padlocked allotments, the abandoned travellers’ camp, sweeping back towards the motorway. She looked quite relieved to be getting out unscathed.’

  Gill has another nice capture: Lord Coe and David Cameron. Ties coordinated with the blue of the coming fence, dark suits, hands in pockets. Cardinals of capital strolling through the ruins of a captured city. It was in that moment I realized the game was up for Gordon Brown: he doesn’t stroll, he can’t do hands in pocket. He doesn’t drop in on Hackney Wick, he hits Washington looking for consoling handshakes, shoulders to squeeze. Brown won’t look good schmoozing athletes and freeloaders, he’ll have to go.

  On Sunday 6 April 2008, I set off down the Northern Sewage Outfall, our Greenway, to Stratford. We had been promised an Olympic taster, the procession of the torch through London. The elevated footpath is accessible through Wick Lane, as it passes beneath the A102. Here is the fault line where the virtual collides with the actual: a Second World War concrete pillbox, a stutter of built and half-built apartment blocks, a lock-keeper’s cottage converted into the set for a breakfast-time television show. Pylons are being disassembled and cables buried. A patch of wild wood is tamed with screaming chainsaws. Concrete-producing tubes cough and spew.

  The blue of the perimeter fence is tactfully echoed by ribbons of fluttering plastic, convenience-store bags caught on razor wire. Beyond the fence is a sanctioned view of never-ceasing convoys, showered and scoured dunes of treated soil. Everything aspires to the grey-blue colour of drowned meat. White boxes have been attached to slender poles, but they are not cameras; further surveillance is unnecessary with the Gurkhas in position. The boxes are ‘Air Quality Monitors’ produced at the Northwich Bus Centre by Turnkey Instruments Ltd. A contemporary version of the budgerigars taken down coal mines to provide advance warning of noxious gases. When the boxes begin to hum, it’s too late.

  The new fences, with their pointillist panels, are beautiful as Japanese screens. Mock-ups so convincing that it is churlish to disbelieve them. The real Canary Wharf skyline, fading into spectral blue, is stitched on to a computer-generated Olympic Stadium. Which looks like a frozen smoke ring. A souvenir ashtray from Berlin in 1936. And good for nothing very much, after the event. Lord Coe, in the vanity of his quest for legacy, has insisted on preserving running lanes which promise to go the way of the old Hackney Wick dog track: boot-fair oblivion. Coca-Cola, McDonald’s, Visa, edf, Samsung, Lloyds TSB, The National Lottery, The Department for Culture and Media, The Mayor of London: they want their expensive tags sprayed on that shiny fence.

  Along with multiples of that skateboarder logo for 2012. In shocking pink. Hundreds of thousands of pounds spent to mimic a street signature: a bubblegum swastika. Some aggrieved local has sprayed a response: A POX ON THE OLYMPICS.

  It’s a question of following the helicopters. I emerge on the A11 where a frenzy of indifference awaits the Olympic torch. Motorcycle outriders in yellow jackets cover the side roads and form threatening lines, white-helmeted against the blue shutters of emerging tower blocks. A procession of police cyclists puff up the hill, reluctant box-tickers for the eco-lobby. A scarlet open-top Coca-Cola bus – ‘Supporting the Olympics Since 1928’ – waits for the action, somebody to enthuse. The low-loader, with its line of shivering Samsung cheerleaders in white tights and heavy blue mascara, blasts out a triumphalist chorus. The girls charm-assault motorists held back by cycle cops. They semaphore, dementedly, waving furry pompoms that look like Persian cats dipped in blue-dyed toilet cleaner. But the ultimate blue belongs to the shell suits of the phalanx of stone-faced Fu Manchu guards in baseball caps who protect the sacred flame as it wobbles towards us out of Stratford. Lord Coe, in thrall to the Sax Rohmer stereotype, refers to the torch-minders as ‘paramilitary thugs’. The Chinese ambassador insists that they are mild-mannered students, volunteers. The expected London mob is elsewhere, down the pub, or at home watching playbacks of the mayhem that attended the flame on its faltering progress across the city, on and off buses, under constant attack from kamikaze cyclists.

  Two or three mobile phones are raised in tribute from behind a steel sculpture that resembles a dynamited palm tree. A Chinese gentleman from the takeaway waves a tiny red flag. Poor David Hemery, the 400-metre-hurdles champion from Mexico City, is obliterated by his protectors. The torch is a cone of flaming banknotes, a brand to light a witch’s bonfire. Black-clad APS Crowd Safety operatives with shaven heads, and thuggish joggers in acid-drop cycle helmets, shoulder-charge a solitary Free Tibet banner-waver. Smashing him backwards into the Gala Club bingo hall. Members of the security services, with cameras registering dissidents, outnumber the embedded television crews in their blast-resistant trucks. The whole circus more of a foretaste of the real thing than anybody could have predicted.

  When, a few days later, I return to Stratford, a city state with a population ‘the size of Leeds’, it seems that nobody has given them the news of their status as a post-Olympic jewel. The Rex Cinema is defunct. The main road difficult to cross and vandalized by public art. The Labour Party offices are boarded up. The library is operative: it features a scale model of the coming Stratford City tended by legacy fundamentalists, sharp suits pouncing like Mormons on casual observers.

  ‘Is there anything you’d like explained?’

  I back off, instinctively, in the English fashion. ‘How did you get away with it?’ doesn’t need asking. Here, in essence, is the solution to the Olympic mystery, the enigma hidden behind the smokescreen of upbeat PR, websites, viewing days, junk-mail publications and professional obfuscation. Stratford City will be ‘the largest retail led mixed regeneration in the UK’. In other words: a shopping mall. With satellite housing we must call, for convenience, the Athletes’ Village. But the heart of it, the land swallower, is a gigantic mall conceived and delivered by the Westfield Group, which is controlled by Frank Low, the second-richest man in Australia. Westfield are the fourth-biggest shopping-centre developers in the world. They have assets of £30 billion. A last-minute deal was struck for them to take control of the 180-acre Stratford site, for which privilege they paid £180 million.

  The brothers David and Simon Reuben, who held a 50 per cent stake, were put under some pressure to sell out. Ken Livingstone, with characteristic tact, invited the Indian-born siblings ‘to go back to Iran and see if you can do any better under the ayatollahs’. City Hall and the various Olympic quangos prefer to deal with a single monolithic entity. Westfield would also take on the White City shopping mall (a traffic island separating the Westway and Shepherd’s Bush). Planning permission has been given to Westfield for 13 million square feet of ‘mixed use’ development, with the Olympic Village being converted into housing after the Games. The word on the street being that if nobody can be persuaded to take up residence in this reclaimed wilderness, the tower blocks (generic and architecturally undistinguished) will serve as holding pens for asylum seekers and economic migrants, until they can be shunted back through the conveniently sited Channel Tunnel link.

  In the gold-rush land grab of flexible futures – hyper-mosques, evangelical cathedral-warehouses (£13.5 million offered to the Kings-way International Christian Centre to move off the nine-acre site they were illegally occupying) – legacy is all-important. It’s like reading the will and sharing the spoils before the sick man is actually dead. ‘T
he legacy the Games leave is as important as the sporting memories,’ said Tony Blair. And the legacy is: loss, CGI-visions injected straight into the eyeball, lasting shame. We have waved this disaster through, we have colluded: dozens of artists roam the perimeter fence soliciting Arts Council funding to underwrite their protests. It’s so awful, such a manifest horror, we can’t believe our luck. All those tragic meetings in packed cafés, the little movies. Blizzards of digital imagery recording edgeland signs clinging to mesh fences alongside compulsory-purchase notifications: we buy gold, we sell boxes. Gold from the teeth of dying industries, cardboard boxes to bury murdered aspirations.

  In Stratford I met some of the legacy professionals. They have an office in Westminster, close to Green Park. A typical career path to the business of fixing the future might come out of Hackney Council in the bad old days, when they were £72 million in the hole, and on through the selling of Thames Gateway. And now this: the invention of something that will never happen by people who won’t be there when it does. In the entrance hall of the library, I notice the head of Keir Hardie in a perspex box. He’s not quite forgotten, the first Independent Labour member of parliament, voted in at West Ham on 4 July 1892. Cast in bronze by Benno Schatz, Hardie has his place in the scheme of things: a paperweight, a legacy we prefer to ignore. A tongueless bust in an airless cabinet.