A story of what happens when the Olympics comes to town. The Olympic Games and the attendant juggernaut of its needs will threaten an area rich in history and loved by its community and visitors from the rest of London. Hackney has its own unique qualities, a wealth of community projects and a history of great significance and symmetry with today and the prescience for the behemoth of the Olympics, steadily rolling into view.

Fantastic news for the Irons, though perhaps no better as yet for the Os. (West Ham to be the 'winter tenant'?)
Olympic Stadium deal with West Ham collapses

Via @danhancox

"They just want to get us in prison for the Olympics" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JCeMJPiBtiw must-watch film of young Bow residents

Now, this isn't actually the Olympics, but part of the over-arching regeneration of the Lower Lea Valley / Royal Docks as part of Thames Gateway, and so clearly fits into the 'would have happened anyway category, but this tweet from Stop City Airport (SCAM) caught my attention:

Mike Weed is Professor of Sport and Society and Director of the Centre for Sport, Physical Education and Activity Research (SPEAR) at Canterbury Christ Church University. He also engages with #media2012, and was a speaker at the recent annual olympic and paralympic conference of PODIUM, the London 2012 Further and Higher Education Unit. Republished with permission here is a piece calling for a debate around 2012 sporting legacies which he asserts has been largely absent.

by Stuart Fuller

Here is a little secret for West Ham United and Tottenham Hotspur awaiting the decision on who will get the Olympic Stadium next week. Whisper it quietly, but football fans rarely want to watch football in an Olympic Stadium. Why do I say that? Well a simple look at similar structures around the world, built for non-football events reveals quite a bit. The prospect of an Olympic Games being awarded to a city sends them into construction meltdown, over promising and in most cases under delivering on the legacy of the games. The whole story of whether a stadium will have an athletics track or not is not a new thing. We all know that at the end of the day politics will win the day, and we have seen all sorts of stories in the past few weeks about who will do what when/if they win the bid.

@ProfMikeWeed has entered outraged mode on that fast-vapourising sports legacy and those