In 2005, when London won the 2012 Olympics, Seb Coe of Locog Ltd wrote "The London 2012 Games will provide a unique opportunity for businesses of all shapes and sizes across the UK, providing essential goods and services for this historic event." Unsurprisingly, as with most Olympic promises, the reality has turned out to be somewhat different.

by Mike Wells

The Giant Cover-up: the Warning Marker Layer covers up to a million square meters of contaminated ground on the Olympic Site

"The Olympics is a great brand." So says David Higgins, Chief Executive of the Olympic Delivery Authority. One of the words Higgins would not like attached to his brand is – rubbish. Yet rubbish features large in relation to the London Olympics. The Main Stadium, Basketball Arena, Velodrome, and the Media Centre are all built on rubbish, or to be more exact former rubbish dumps. Most of this rubbish (with associated contamination) remains under these venues.

Olympic Games Impact Study: Final Report Dec 2005

Produced by Price Waterhouse Coopers for the DCMS to assess the likely national, regional and local impacts of hosting the Olympics in London.

Hard on the heels of the belated admission by those who should and almost certainly did know that tourism will not benefit from the Olympics comes another moment of clarity. Local businesses are beginning to get a taste of Olympic reality. In Stratford and Weymouth very different kinds of businesses are seeing how trade does not necessarily follow sport when the Olympics comes to town.

A quick mention for the excellent Bow Back Rivers pages on the londoncanals.co.uk website.

Compiled in the period just before the Olympic onslaught hit the area, it's the definitive tour round all the waterways with their cocktail of history, industry and rampant wildlife which makes me realise how many places I never got to before it all disappeared.

As Steve pointed out in the Or maybe there's an extra swan in the CGI? post, the ODA's latest 'unveiling' of plans for the Athletes Village landscaping contains nothing that hasn't already been publicised previously by LendLease (who are responsible for the project) on their own Athletes Village website.

CABE - the "government's advisor on architecture, urban design and public space" - have been routinely wheeled out to provide token criticisms of the London Olympic planning proposals.

The design review of the London 2012 ArcelorMittal Orbit is no exception. The review shows earnest concern for "artistic integrity", while being seemingly oblivious to the conflict entailed in jamming a restaurant, lifts, toilets and viewing platforms inside a structure whose raison d'etre is a marketing monument for its sponsors and the imperative of filling an empty area with a 'must-see' visitor attraction at short notice.

...it is sobering to recall that one of the original planning conditions for the Olympic Park was that ground should not be broken until legacy uses had been agreed. Subsequent changes to the Games planning application mean that the condition no longer applies, but it shows how far the original vision of an Olympics development built to fit in with the legacy plan, rather than vice-versa, has slipped.