Wednesday 21 April 2010


So what happens next? Well to be truthful, this isn’t the place to come and fine out “Secrets of Builder”, what gets told to us , stays with us..ahhhh, never mind, stay with it, there’s still other stuff to read

Its been a bit of a roller coaster, I had been invited to attend the Olympic Park Legacy group meeting on what the park will look like during and post Olympics.

Very ‘swish’, lots of parkland, lots of trees, lots of open space for people to wander about. However, no way of getting there unless you walk. So that’s going to exclude a lot of elderly people, disabled people and mums with small children. The distance is just too far, very lovely park, but no ones going to be able to travel to it unless they set out early and then the facilities around the new park, well, there wasn’t a lot of talk about that. But we have found out that the Legacy group now want £400 million to build toilets and amenities in the area (goodness me, what sort of toilets they going to build?)

They did inform the group I was with that they had set up a BMX track near the cycle Velodrome, which is fine, except most kids round here don’t won a bike, they cant afford it, parents don’t see the point in buying their child a bike when its just going to get them mugged and have it stolen off them. So someone came up with the brilliant idea of having BMX bikes for hire? Errr, how much money do they think children have in this area of East London? The government statistics show that 4 in 10 children in London live in families which are living below the poverty line. Thats nearly half the children in London, and guess what, in Newham alone, the statistics are worse. So just who is going to hire a BMX bike?

Now private funds and £ million subsidy from the Olympic delivery Authority are going to build a huge (I mean HUGE) sculpture in the Park, called after the sponsoring steel company “ArcelorMittal Orbit” .
Its going to be 115 meters high and with viewing platforms which you can pay to go up to, it looks really interesting and I suspect its going to be a money spinner , also its likely to become Stratford’s version of the Millennium Eye, except the MillenniumEeye carries you round in a circle, and this edifice will sort the fit from the fat, as you have to walk up and down it (no, not me, I’ll be happy to stand and stare up at it)

The roads round here have been dug up and re-laid, and several roads are still cut off, so we have through traffic making ‘rat-runs’ through the previously quiet estates. Tea times are worst because everyone wants to get home and so knowing their back street short cuts we have a constant stream of traffic flowing past the vicarage and no one seems to want to stop at the stop lines, so near misses are a frequent thing. (Still not sure how a 38 tonne truck managed to get round these side streets but by heck he must have been some driver, however, he did manage to slow the traffic to a crawl because he had to take the corners so carefully)

Well that’s enough for now, speak to you soon. Kelvin

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