When I joined the East of England's Cultural Consortium in 2004 I worked on building support for the 'back the bid' campaign and more recently I have been the Creative Programmer for the East of England for London 2012 working on the Cultural Olympiad. 2008 has been a real landmark year and as I have been working on the London 2012 Games for over four and a half years now, so I have been doing some looking back myself.

In 2008 the Olympic and Paralympic Games became ours. In the East of England over 45,000 people were at events celebrating the handover of the Olympic flag to the UK on August Bank holiday, and hundreds of schools marked the Paralympic handover in September. This was swiftly followed by the launch of the Cultural Olympiad at the end of September with events attended by over 36,000 people in the East of England. In short 2008 has been quite a year.

Over 60 of the events for 'Open Weekend', launching the Cultural Olympiad, took place in the East of England. We also had six Inspire programme projects taking place in the region this autumn. Over recent weeks I have been gathering in information and stories from these events and activities. These have been pulled together in a short document that describes what happened this autumn, and also draws out some of the legacy that the Olympiad is already delivering.

It has been really exciting to see some of the promises that were made at bid stage to begin to be delivered against. We talked about the excitement and engagement the Games could ignite, and this autumn I've witnessed that. In schools, parks, town centres, arts centres, people have been part of something big. And this is just the beginning, with the Cultural Olympiad running until the close of the Paralympic Games in September 2012.

You can download full case studies (PDF, 3.5MB) from the launch of the Cultural Olympiad and the first Inspire Programme projects in the East of England - also available on the East of England pages on this site.

For my part, I am about to take a short 'time out' from my own personal Olympic marathon, as I go on maternity leave for a few months, but in the meantime Stephanie Hogger will capably be stepping in as Interim Creative Programmer for the East of England.