Additional information re Athletes Village in section []

One of the major promises of London 2012 was that it would create a large number of affordable homes for East Londoners.

In a recent Freedom of Information response to a question:

How many homes are now expected to be provided on the Olympic Park? What is the breakdown expected to be per neighbourhood?

This is the lineup for a panel to discuss the London2012 sports legacy for the London Legacies Group Seminar entitled: 'Has the Sports Legacy from the 2012 lived up to the commitments made?' Every single participant has a connection to the London Olympics.

Richard Sumray: Chair

The Olympic Park is stuffed with public art designed to mystify and mislead the public, like Boris's folly, the Orbit, a helter skelter without a skelter, which was dreamed up when Boris met Lakshmi in the washroom at Davos in 2009 and was built using steel from the site of killings and torture at the Serb concentration camp at Omarska, Bosnia. The skelter is now being added to make it into what it failed to be in a desperate effort to rescue it from oblivion. Another is RUN, which imaginatively consists of three large letters R U N, while elsewhere there are some upturned crayons called 'steles' stuck in the River Lea.

they still seem to be forging ahead with their efforts to make London a world class centre of excellence for rough sleeping:
Number of people sleeping rough in London doubles in past five years

Popular London2012 miracle stories keep cropping up, often in an academic context. Recent examples were provided at the ongoing UEL seminars held at the LLDC headquarters in the poshly named Montfichet Road at Stratford City. The upmarket de Montfichet was a Norman baron who founded Langthorne Abbey in Stratford back in the early 12th Century. Another classy name thrown up by recent events to inject an estate agent inspired aristocratic ambience in the E20 zone is Chobham Manor, the new address of the former rather down at heel Clays Lane.

London 2012 is still not inspiring people in the host borough of Newham to take up sport. A recent report from UKActive showed that the borough was home to the least active population in England. A second host Borough, Barking and Dagenham, came second in the list. UKActive also highlighted the unsurprising finding that participation was lowest in the poorest parts of the county. But not only is poverty a marker for lower rates of activity so, perhaps surprisingly, is youth. Far from inspiring sport participation among the 'target' age group of 16-25 year olds the period after the Games witnessed an actual decline in activity in this age group.

Britain’s Personal Best, which aimed to build on the Olympic Games by encouraging people to excel in athletic, educational or creative challenges. Given £997,960 in April 2013 by the Big Lottery Fund, it claimed it would sign up 120,000 people to take on challenges in their community – but was wound up within months after failing to meet all the milestones the Big Lottery Fund had set.

Oh what a lovely Legacy! The media are long gone but the scandalous treatment of the Manor Gardens Allotments Society (MGS) at the hands of the Lee Valley Regional Park Authority (LVRPA), Waltham Forest Council and the London Legacy Development Corporation LLDC) continues.

As part of the deal stitched together to prevent the MGS’s return to the Queen Elizabeth Aftermath Olympic Park (QEOP) at Eton Manor following their temporary relocation to Marsh Lane Fields, now ludicrously named The Jubilee Park, a Section 106 agreement had to be drawn up by the three conspiring ‘authorities’. The purpose of this was to provide plots at the now permanent allotment site at Marsh Lane in lieu of those no longer to be provided at Eton Manor and to divide up the costs of creating a meadow in their place at Eton Manor.

The LVRPA voted this agreement through without telling anyone, including the MGS, in May of this year. The text of the document presented to the Executive Committee states:

It is understood some kind of ‘understanding’ was reached between the London Development Agency (LDA) and the MGS in 2007 to ensure that following the Games the MGS would return to a site allocated for allotments somewhere on QEOP’.