London 2012 blog

It's 8am in the morning, you've been in a car for 3 1/2 hours, you've got a broken projector and a hall that is about to be filled with 180 primary school kids (who the headteacher has told you will either be hyperactive or exhausted because it's the penultimate day of term) waiting for you to deliver an assembly. Your idea of fun or your worst nightmare? 

Last Thursday, members of the LOCOG Education team and Communications team travelled to St. Peters Church of England Primary School in Caverswall, Staffordshire. Visits to schools are always very rewarding and entertaining but this one was particularly special as we were there to congratulate the school and especially one of its pupils, 10 year old Reece Berrisford, for winning a trip to the Beijing 2008 Paralympic Games courtesy of Visa, as part of our Paralympic Handover education programme.

After meeting Reece for the first time, we set him his first task - meeting the press. Reece handled the photo shoot and questions from photo journalists like a true pro, telling the press all about why he is excited about the Paralympic Games and all about his new nickname - 'Beijing Boy'!

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The three weeks at the start of July on the archaeology 'discover' programme were a lot of fun, getting to meet a whole load of students, community members and teachers from across the five Host Boroughs (Greenwich, Hackney, Newham, Waltham Forest, Tower Hamlets).

People attending the sessions at Hackney's East Marsh watched a ‘blanket dig’, which used blankets to represent the different layers of the ground, with each being a different period: starting with the modern day and a London 2012 badge, to artefacts from the Second World War and Victorian times, through to medieval, Roman and pre-historic finds, such as flint. The 'blanket dig' was followed up by some sketching, then an opportunity to get one’s hands dirty with washing archaeological finds from the Museum of London’s archives, by scrubbing and using toothbrushes.

Pupils wash some archaeological finds:

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At the end of June the Olympic Delivery Authority (ODA) took part in a jointly organised event with British Waterways to celebrate the London Festival of Architecture (LFA), which took place from 20 June to 20 July 2008. This year's festival focus for east London was Canary Wharf, Stratford and Greenwich Peninsular.

I was asked to take this forward and find a suitable event which would achieve a lasting association with the festival. The result was an event which involved a winning combination of boats, water, London 2012, a history of canals and rivers and, fortunately, sunshine last month.

Over the course of the weekend, trips on the 'Jenny Wren' canal boat took passengers from Limehouse Lock up the Limehouse Cut to the River Lea Navigation and stopped at Old Ford Lock to allow people to walk onto the Greenway and see the Olympic Stadium construction site. ODA volunteers joined forces with Richard Rutter, Mark Bensted and Jeremy Batch from British Waterways to take passengers on a magical tour of the London 2012 Games, the history of the Limehouse cut and River Lea navigation.

The Jenny Wren (image courtesy of British Waterways):

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