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.

A judgement made today by the European Court of Justice (ECJ) could mean that London’s Olympics will either be built on poverty wages or not at all as industrial unrest spreads, say Unite, the UK’s largest trade union.

If greed is good, then the construction industry is a great place to be virtuous. The typical director takes home £400,000 a year more than he did in 1995, while employees’ wages have gone up nearly 75%. Indeed, the past decade or so has been extraordinarily kind to construction. Margins across the industry have more than doubled. Even contracting margins, which look so lowly when compared with the rest of British industry, have risen from an average of 0.8% to 2.4%.

Tunnel collapse site 2

Photo © Conrad Chua

Many of us in the local community are appalled by the blank wall of indifference which the ODA consistently puts up when outsiders wish to ask about what lies behind their barrage of PR hype about the project. The only occasions when they are put under pressure to answer awkward questions is when their apparatchiks are called before Parliamentary Select Committees.

"Right," said Sinclair, straightening up. "Are you ready for the zone? From here on in it's pure Tarkovsky." And so it was. Light-industrial spaces, car-wrecker's yards, square-windowed studios, haulage depots. Then, a mile further on, we hit the fence.

Olympic Park Warehouse Fire: 12 Nov 2007 photo by Martin Slavin
Browsing the web recently for pictures of the Olympic site I came across these aerial views by Darren Lewis taken for the ODA by the look of it.

Did the Millennium Dome site kill Joe Ferguson? He spent four years working on a massive clean-up of the poisoned area in Greenwich, South London.

Carcinogenic chemicals, including arsenic and benzene, were dug up from the old gas works - the largest in Europe.