Leabank Square residents have panned the design for the Media Centre. So has CABE, the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment. Only they won't have to live opposite what one resident has called a 'tower block on its side'.

Adding insult to injury following the destruction of the Manor Gardens allotments Tessa Jowell and Boris Johnson have announced there will be a competition to create a ‘quintessentially British garden’ in the Olympic Park. The fact the Park already contained just such a quintessentially British and East End feature seems to have escaped the notice of commentators and journalists, who failed to even mention the destruction of the allotments as part of the Olympic programme when describing the proposal. The Manor Gardens Allotments Society has just revealed the present parlous state of both the Manor Gardens community and their allotments caused by the incompetence and negligence of the LDA and its contractors.

Flagged up recently on our newsgroup was an article on the opendalston blog on the financial difficulties facing developers Barratts, contractors for the so-called Dalston Olympic Transport Interchange and numerous building projects around Stratford High St.

One of the proudest boasts of the 2012 London Olympics was that it would create the largest new urban park in Europe for 150 years. I asked a Freedom of Information question (see attachment) to discover how the ODA had arrived at this description. They were unable to provide any clear information. All they could say was that they had consulted with 'CABE Space and the London Parks and Green Spaces Forum (who) had assisted the ODA in preparing benchmark studies on parks around the world and in London including previous Olympic Parks.'Landschaftspark Duisburg-Nord: Europe's biggest new urban park at over 200ha, some 500 acres, was completed in 1999 retaining the industrial archaelogy

Of course, the largest new park is no longer as large as it was having shrunk by 19 hectares. But even when it was 129 hectares its claim to be the largest new urban park in Europe was questionable. A friend recently sent me a link to a park in Duisburg, Germany, constructed on a site with many similarities to the Lea Valley, as it was a former industrial area. At over 200 hectares it is considerably larger than the much vaunted 'largest new park in Europe'.

The Duisburg industrial park shows how the Lea Valley could have been developed in an imaginative way, which illustrated the industrial history of the area, by creating a park based around the rivers and canals linking sites like the Tidal Mill at Three Mills

Olympic promise inflation has hit a new high with Gordon Brown’s assertion that, in addition to 30,000 construction jobs, "there will be 50,000 jobs permanently created as a result of all the facilities that the Olympic site will make possible for the future", as reported in the Evening Standard ‘PM hails Olympic Job Prospects’. This claim has to be set against the original evidence from the London Development Agency to the Compulsory Purchase Inquiry that the 2012 Olympics would create 6,000 net new permanent jobs! Even that figure was open to question.

After writing about the new and reduced park I found myself involved in an email discussion about replacement funding. At the risk of repeating myself I thought part of it deserved a little airing. Below is part of an email from a Hackney Councillor, Christine Boyd, in response to a discussion about REAP funding which was meant to compensate local communities, notably at Hackney Wick, for loss of open space.

Thursday, 6 November 2008

(Open letter to Mr Jacques Rogge - President. International Olympic Committee)

Dear Jacques Rogge

Hi – you probably haven’t heard of us - but we are the residents of Leabank Square in Hackney Wick – right opposite your Olympic 2012 site.

The poison of Olympic lies and delusions is steadily spreading through the Olympic Boroughs. Earlier in the year Hackney Mayor Jules Pipe denounced Michael Rosen, the Children's Laureate, for criticising the development in Dalston as 'degeneration' saying Rosen wanted to 'keep Hackney crap'. Now this argument between Hackney's authors and its Council has plumbed new depths with the banning of Iain Sinclair, author of 'The Olympic Scam' (see attachment), from launching his new book, 'Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire', on Council premises.