London 2012 blog

As part of the London Festival of Architecture we decided to take a canal boat tour, an opportunity to see one of London’s most interesting areas on water and to check on progress at the Olympic Park site. My interest in this trip was both professional and personal. I once lived close to Limehouse Basin (in a ridiculously expensive one-bedroom riverside apartment that I shared with two other impoverished students), I like boat trips (any excuse to be travelling on water) and I work in environmental planning, so the management and delivery of a project on the scale of the London 2012 Games fascinates me.

We assembled at Limehouse Basin on a sunny Saturday morning and were briefed by a man from British Waterways before climbing aboard. We chugged out of the basin at a snail’s pace, weighed down somewhat by the 60 or so passengers. I don’t think the boat had ever carried that many folk before.

As we travelled north-east up the Limehouse Cut we were given an informative rundown of the history of the canal and of the buildings flanking either bank. I was struck by the contrasts; plush, modern high-rise apartments next to older, grey, modernist buildings which wouldn’t have looked out of place in communist eastern Europe. Well-maintained canal pathways sit next to stinking barges filled with rubbish and nature finds a way to adapt to all of this, happily at home on ready-made floating landscape banks as well as nesting or growing atop industrial junk.

Despite the visual contradictions, there is something incredibly tranquil about travelling on water. You forget you are in a populous, former industrial part of London which must have once been a thriving hub of activity, now reclaimed by armies of swans, coots and moorhens.

The boat came to a halt after around 45 minutes on board. We disembarked just south of Old Ford Lock and walked up the Greenway to a viewing platform (open throughout the construction period of the Games). Here we caught a glimpse of the enormity of this project – the site of the main Olympic Stadium, currently a bit like how I imagine life on Mars to be – dusty, with lots of little men in suits and one huge crater which will eventually house the sport stars of 2012 and tens of thousands of revellers.

The regeneration associated with Stratford and these outlying areas excites me and I feel privileged to be part of what might be a huge leap in London’s history. I hope the Games-driven growth will deliver what it aspires to and this part of London might come to life again.

One week on and I am back at Old Ford Lock, but this time at night, undertaking bat surveys (as part of the programme of ecological surveys associated with the Games that has been running since 2005). It is a wet and murky night and we don’t record a single bat. I think they must be on their summer holidays, or perhaps on extended leave until the Games begin...