The Olympics Scam
Iain Sinclair
In the mornings, there is a clinging, overripe smell that some people say drifts in from the countryside, a folk memory of what these clipped green acres used, so recently, to be. Mulch of market gardens. Animal droppings in hot mounds. The distant rumble of construction convoys. The heron dance of elegant cloud-scraping cranes. Flocks of cyclists clustering together for safety, dipping and swerving like swallows. Hard hats and yellow tabards monkeying over the scaffolding of shrouded towers, the steel ribs of emerging stadia. Early risers, in the privilege of first-use recreation, a smudge of sun burning off the fug of pollution that hangs over a pre-Olympic city, fall into quiet conversation. Ice-cream kiss of almond blossom, bridal abundance of cherry: pink and white. Yellow pom-poms of japonica, horticultural cheerleaders. In a corner, under a high wall that gives away the previous identity of this public park as a decommissioned energy-generating plant, retired workers sway, stiffly and slowly, in t’ai chi ballets.
I’m fascinated by the elderly Chinese couple who circle every morning for more than an hour around the perimeter fence of the newly laid, too green carpet of the sports complex, achieved in advance of the Great Event. An outwash of generosity, a compensatory gesture for those who must endure years of drilling, dust, demolished schools and theatres, banishment from functioning but inconvenient housing developments. The white block-building, assembled overnight it seems, could have been designed anywhere for any purpose; blinding whiteness complemented by the deep blue of the interior, an aspirational and upbeat colour that we must learn to associate with the culturally unifying message of the Games. The Chinese woman walks, right shoulder to the fence, in a clockwise direction; her husband short-strides with less urgency the other way. And when they meet they do not acknowledge one another, not so much as a nod or a smile. My impression is that he is less enthusiastic about the regime. He wears a monkish hooded top and looks like a sixty-a-day man who has given up his addiction, reluctantly, after receiving bad news. A drag of burned air, one final cancer-stick, is his reward for completing the hour’s penance. The woman, in flat cap, arms pumping, is remorseless, gaining ground with every circuit. ‘The opportunity has come for them to lift up their heads,’ Mao said. ‘The authority of the husband is getting shakier every day.’ Gazing at the horizon, she pistons forward on a self-imposed treadmill: a comrade-athlete driving, by force of will, the engine of the city.
This is East London, four years short of that 17-day corporate extravaganza, the ‘primary strategic objective’ to which we are all so deeply mortgaged. Haggerston Park, E2, a modest enclosure replacing war-damaged terraces and the demolished Imperial Gas, Light and Coke Company, has long been an oasis. It was opened as a public park in 1958. Its scandals are old scandals and have no bearing on the current frenzy for makeovers, peppery paths, wooden obstacles for training circuits, laminated heritage notices. Spanking new carpets are woven for clapped-out football pitches, changing rooms erected to replace shower blocks opened in the dark ages by Wendy Richard of EastEnders. Back in the 1820s Gas Company funds were misappropriated, illegal payments made to council officials and stock accounts falsified. Now, in more enlightened times, when bureaucratic malpractice is exposed and celebrated every day, urban-pastoral reservations hidden behind high walls win prizes for visionary planting schemes and restored municipal beds. Unnoticed, rough sleepers in thin bags utilise the stone terrace of the park café that has been shut for years. Late risers, having nothing much to rise for, burrow deep into dismal kapok-stuffed cocoons, while dog-accompanists use ballistic/prosthetic devices to hurl soggy yellow-green tennis balls for their hunt-and-retrieve pets. And the stoic Chinese couple, accomplishing their own version of the Long March, scorch rubber treadmarks around the padlocked novelty of the pristine football pitches. Artificial grass is better than the real thing, tougher, each blade individually painted. False chlorophyll dazzles like permanent dew, the permafrost of conspicuous investment. Some of the rough sleepers are not elective invisibles, victims of property mania or traumatised war veterans: they are construction workers, possibly Polish, saving their wages and choosing to kip down close to where the action is. The tsunami of speculative capital, wanton destruction, hole digging; the throwing up of apartment blocks, dormitory hives, warehouse conversions along the murky waterways. A new development calling itself Adelaide Wharf, and appearing very much like an aircraft-carrier that has ploughed into a wood yard, replaced a long-standing cold-store operation. ‘With its 147 units (prices up to £395,000), this is a tremendous example of aspiration coming to fruition,’ says Stephen Oakes, area director for English Partnerships. Inch by inch, the working canal between Limehouse Basin and the Islington tunnel has become a ladder of glass, connecting Docklands with the northern reaches of the City. Footballers, with loose change to invest, are rumoured to be buying up entire buildings as investment portfolios; many of these gaudy shells, low-ceilinged, tight-balconied, are doomed to remain half-empty, exhibitions of themselves. The look is mirthlessly playful, Ikea storage boxes gimmicked out of swipe-cards and toothpicks. The urban landscape of boroughs anywhere within the acoustic footprints of the Olympic Park in the Lower Lea Valley has been devastated, with a feverish beat-the-clock impatience unseen in London since the beginnings of the railway age. Every civic decency, every sentimental attachment, is swept aside for that primary strategic objective, the big bang of the starter’s pistol.
Much of this termite activity, the neurotic compulsion to enclose and alienate, justifies itself by exploiting temporary fences to use as masking screens, noticeboards for sponsors’ boasts, assertions of a bright, computer-generated future. In Laburnum Street, where a construction firm named Mace Plus is inserting a Close Encounters of the Third Kind space-platform school known as The Bridge Academy (an explosion of matchsticks, bubblewrap and extruded terracotta control modules), the surrounding fence boasts an exhibition of sanctioned street art: a pop-Hokusai novella of floods sweeping away the pencil-thin mosque and the abandoned Haggerston swimming-pool. A clever move: jazzy visuals, loud but on-message, pre-empt the attentions of spray-can subversives, class warriors, animal liberationists and wannabe Banksies hoping for exposure in the weekend magazines. There is no requirement now to use the rim of a derelict petrol station as an audition for a Hoxton gallery. As I said to a depressed realist painter with a unit near the London Fields railway arches: ‘The laughing crocodile splashed on your shutters is worth more than any of the stock you’ve accumulated over thirty years.’ Jock McFadyen, showing his edgeland retrievals in a Cambridge Heath Road car showroom, has taken to making painterly reproductions of graffiti cartoons found on canalside walls and condemned breakers’ yards along the broken perimeter of the Olympic Park.
When did it start, this intimate liaison between developers and government, to reconstruct the body of London, to their mutual advantage? Dr Frankenstein with a Google Earth program and a remote-control laser scalpel. In the early 1970s, when the deepwater docks were already ruined by containerisation, restrictive practices, fearful-angry ‘Enoch is right’ marches and the grind of time which reduces every labour myth to dust, Maxwell Joseph acquired the Truman Brewery in Brick Lane. The brewery – with its stables, cellars, cooperage, cobbled yards – acted, along with the Spitalfields fruit and veg market and Nicholas Hawksmoor’s Christ Church, as a buffer-reef against the encroachment of the City. A benevolent and paternalistic employer was lost, along with the heady drench of hops from the brewery and the wild gardens of adjacent streets. Joseph flogged the Gainsborough portrait of Sir Benjamin Truman, the brewmaster, asset-stripped the operation and bought up surrounding acres in canny anticipation of future development packages, the coming world of retro frocks, Moroccan internet cafés and ‘plastinated’ freakshow corpse art by Gunther von Hagens. The eastward shift, towards off-catalogue, underexploited territory, was launched. Spitalfields Market, with its parasitical life forms (small shopkeepers, restaurateurs, allotment gardeners, twilight prostitutes, vagrant drinkers around wastelot fires), was expelled to Hackney Marshes, where it would function quite successfully until the football pitches, alongside the new site, were required as parking space for the 2012 green Olympics. Johnnie Walker, chairman of the Hackney and Leyton Sunday Football League, was enraged: despite assurances from a multitude of faceless authorities that work would not begin for four years, the diggers arrived before the start of the 2007 season. Eleven pitches, trampled by hard-swearing enthusiasts, were lost. Anne Woollett of the Hackney Marshes User Group complained that the Olympic Development Authority (ODA) had sequestered portions of East Marsh, a year ahead of their promise, to construct ‘a huge 12-lane motorway’. The ODA admitted that two trenches had indeed been dug, for ‘archaeological’ research, animal bones and beer cans photographed and preserved; along, presumably, with the rubble of terraces blitzed in the Second World War over which the football pitches had been laid. ‘The heritage must be protected.’
Much of this tricky element, heritage, can be recovered from vintage films as they are reissued on DVD. The tall chimney of the Brick Lane brewery, a significant territorial marker, appears like an accusing finger in stills from Carol Reed’s Odd Man Out, which was released in 1947. Bethnal Green masquerades as an expressionist Belfast. James Mason is an IRA gunman on the run. Twenty years later, his Hollywood career in decline, Mason returned once more to an East End of smoky pubs, dark shadows, charity hostels, to narrate a documentary version of Geoffrey Fletcher’s The London Nobody Knows. Umbrella rolled, vowels clipped, he sleepwalks through a gone-in-the-mouth city, struggling to make conversation with marooned vagrants and fire-eyed witnesses. The Gainsborough film studios, where Mason established his reputation, brandishing a horsewhip in high-booted, low-bosomed costume dramas, are now a canalside development with drizzling water-features and a giant boilerplated head of Alfred Hitchcock. The clunkiness of this heritage appropriation proves all too loudly that anywhere is everywhere. History is their story and not yours. When Mason performs his dying fall as a Byronic gunman, gate clutching, staggering across the snow towards the lights of the police cars, he is in Haggerston Park, E2.
Another film, The Long Good Friday, arrived in 1979, so pertinent in its exposure of the coming land-piracy that it seemed prophetic. It was efficiently directed by John MacKenzie, but the meat of the thing is in Barrie Keeffe’s script, his intimacy with tired ground that is about to be invaded, overwhelmed, rewritten. The advent of Margaret Thatcher was announced, as MacKenzie’s crime fable makes clear, by a slippery handshake of mutually beneficial relationships between local government corruption (‘The new casino’s gone through’), kickbacks to rogue Irish Republicans in the burgeoning construction industry, bent coppers and old-style Kray hoodlums making overtures to the New York Mafia with their lawyers specialising in property and gambling tax. Much of this was documentary refraction: it had happened, it was happening, and it described the future we are now experiencing. According to a persistent urban myth, the gang that robbed the Brinks Mat warehouse at Heathrow on 26 November 1983 quadrupled the estimated £26 million value of the gold bars by investing in riverside regeneration. Swashbuckling capitalism led the way for timid hedge-fund managers and City sharecroppers. The defining image of this era – Bob Hoskins (in the movie) with his sleek pleasure craft moored in St Katharine Docks, Margaret Thatcher schmoozing the Reichmann brothers in Canary Wharf – is the maquette of the proposed marina, the city of towers. A Lilliputian theme park of unimaginable wealth creation. A DIY anticipation of computer-generated presentations for the Olympic wonderlands. ‘Water City’, a new Venice (without the memory-mud of centuries), will rise from the stinking filth of back rivers and green-scum canals.
Keeffe’s ‘Corporation’, a confederacy of villains, is a direct translation of alliances in contemporary political life. Hoskins, a pumped-up Dalston Mussolini, presenting himself as ‘a businessman with a sense of history’, spiels his pitch as the oligarch’s gin-palace powers under Tower Bridge. Thirty years on and he could be making his final plea as a candidate in the London Mayoral Election, right across the river from the crumpled buttock of City Hall. Which is neither a hall, nor in the City, but an architectural doodle with the perverse ambition of bringing Manhattan to Bermondsey. ‘We’ve got mile after mile and acre after acre of land for our future prosperity,’ Bob drools. ‘It’s important that the right people mastermind the new London.’
The scam of scams was always the Olympics: Berlin in 1936 to Beijing in 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. Rogue Californian chemists running their eye-popping, vein-clustered, vest-stripping robots against degendered state laboratory freaks. Bearded ladies and teenage girls who never have periods. Medals returned by disgraced drug cheats to be passed on to others who weren’t caught, that time. The Millennium Dome fiasco was a low-rent rehearsal. The holy grail for blue-sky thinkers was the sport-transcends-politics Olympiad, the five-hooped golden handcuffs, the smoke rings behind which deals could be done for casinos and malls: with corporate sponsorship, flag-waving and infinitely elastic budgets (any challenge an act of naysaying treason).
The Long Good Friday has a nice tracking shot through the deserted quays of the future Docklands. The TV comic Dave King, playing a corrupt 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 in the catalogue. Spontaneous public celebration, 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 the heavyweight arm-twisting pays off, the celebrity assaults, camera-kissing by Blair and Beckham: we get the Games on 6 July 2005. Then the shock of a traumatised London 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. Invasion conditions imported. Green zones staked out, helicopter-patrolled.