Stratford is grim. Actually, it’s a dump. What a shame it’ll be the transport hub of the 2012 Olympics, and visitors from all over the world will have to walk its dirty, grimy streets and shelter from the rain in the depressing, limp shopping centre.
It’s also, unfortunately, the easiest place from which to start a walk around the Olympic park before it’s all boarded up for development. So we went there this morning, and did indeed shelter from the rain in the depressing, limp shopping centre, and walked its dirty, grimy streets.
Then we cut off onto the Greenway, which I’ve seen every college and working day for the last 14 years from the windows of the train, and we walked along a scrubby, overgrown path that probably counts for ‘countryside’ and comes nowhere close.
Already the developers had moved in and erected blue wooden walls to block some of the paths, and tacked up cropped print-outs from Google Maps, annotated with inadequate directions.
We did, eventually, find the site of the Olympic stadium, after picking our way through piles of discarded tyres and junk from scrap yards liberally scattered across the roads, and were presented by an unlabelled mound of earth supporting a small crop of pylons.
What a dump. I can’t believe the Olympic committee wanted to send the games here. They must have got mixed up with Paris.
Ugh.
So tonight’s entertainment was all the more enjoyable.
We walked along the South Bank, which is always the perfect spot for a warm summer evening, had pizza under the ITV Tower, and then wandered up to the sparkly fresh Royal Festival Hall for This is Tomorrow.
This is Tomorrow is a film about the Hall itself, so it’s somewhat bizarre to be sitting in there watching it, seeing how the seats, boxes, walkways and balconies all around you came into being. It’s also momentarily uncomfortable when they explain that each of the panels above your head weighs the same as a small family car.
But at the same time it’s endlessly diverting, helped no end by the fact that the soundtrack, which was scored by St Etienne, was played live by the band, a choir and an 80-piece orchestra for this premiere showing.
Of course, you keep forgetting that, and you have to keep reminding yourself that what you’re hearing is being played right there and right then by the people spread out on the stage below you.
It was highly evocative, and made me quite sad that I never saw the Festival of Britain site (of which the Hall was a part) in its full 1950s glory. For that reason – and that reason alone – I’m glad that we slogged our way around the dirty, battered and ugly Olympic site, if only so we can say we remember when it was all just rubble and dirt.
