Residents in Hackney Wick have protested at the dust and noise being produced from the Olympic Park. The statement reproduced below was sent on Sunday 6th July to Boris Johnson, the Mayor of London, David Higgins, Chief Executive of the ODA and Sebastian Coe, along with other relevant officials and representatives, by Sona Abantu-Choudhury on behalf of the Leabank Square Residents Association about the disturbance being caused by work on the Olympic site.

Recent reports in the Press (see attachment) reveal that businesses evicted to make way for the Olympics are still having to battle with the LDA over compensation. Looking back in time to reports published by the media can provide an interesting insight into the attitudes of the Olympic team (and how the media approached the project) and the difference between the rhetoric and the reality of the programme. One such report was contained in the Property Week Newsletter of 05.12.03 (see attachment) which included some particularly chilling assertions for the residents at Clays Lane.

American landscape architects are promising east Londoners a park that will be "equivalent to Hyde Park" and "will give the area an equal weight to the west" (Olympics will leave east London an open space to rival Hyde Park, March 17). However, there are fundamental questions about the way the park and its surrounding developments are being planned that your article fails to address.

The website ‘They work for you’, referring to the various members of Parliament, Lords and Commons, contains some interesting interventions. Among the peers are the party apparatchiks who have been promoted to fill the benches on account of their ‘soundness’. One such is Lord Haworth, a former Secretary to the Parliamentary Labour Party, who made an eccentric contribution to the House of Lords debate on 17th January 2008 concerning the regeneration of the Lea Valley (see his attached speech). He states that his ‘only qualification’ for speaking is that he lived for more than 20 years in the Lower Lea Valley, which suggests that an awful lot of people are better qualified than he to speak on the subject.

Speech by Lord Low of Dalston, Patron of OPEN, in the House of Lords debate on Thursday 27 March 2008

"To call attention to the case...

...A massively expensive concrete slab over the railway will accommodate an unnecessary and potentially dangerous bus stand, where current routes will be cut short. TfL deployed a kind of circular argument: the bus stand is necessary to enhance the scheme and the scheme is necessary to finance the bus stand. A brutal phalanx of tower blocks of up to twenty storeys will be erected on the slab to help pay for it. These will blight the environment and bring no benefit to the area. Of their 300-odd dwellings, none is to be affordable. This is in direct contravention of the Government's policy as affirmed both in this House and in another place. But when we asked the Secretary of State to use her powers to review the scheme, we were simply told that the transport hub was essential of the Olympics..."