After more than a year of seriously annoying and disturbing the residents of Leabank Square with dust and noise from its construction project the Olympic Delivery Authority has further turned the screw by insisting that residents should desist from denouncing a member of staff. In comments, although not in articles, posted on the Leabank Square blogspot residents had vigorously condemned the performance of the ODA’s community relations manager, Giorgia Sharpe. The author of the blog was threatened by an ODA lawyer with libel action if he didn’t remove the criticisms.

Climate Camp 'Swoop'..."to show our solidarity with communities in East London displaced by the Olympics and fighting for a positive legacy"

Wednesday 26th August 2009 outside Stratford station, fo

Flagged up recently on our newsgroup was an article on the opendalston blog on the financial difficulties facing developers Barratts, contractors for the so-called Dalston Olympic Transport Interchange and numerous building projects around Stratford High St.

greenwich park

sockpuppeteers

Despite admitting that there is no housing legacy from the Athletes’ Village, as the housing would have been built anyway, the ODA is still claiming the Athletes’ Village is an Olympic Legacy, a kind of Time Lapse Legacy, because they assert that the involvement of the Olympics means the project will be delivered earlier than it would otherwise have been, see article ‘2012 Legacy Housing Double Counting’. So I decided to ask another FoI question to establish when the ODA thought the housing would have been delivered if the ODA had not taken over the site and to ask them to further explain their reasoning.

Latest Velopark plan

The ODA has had to admit that housing for the Athletes' Village being built at Stratford City, now renamed Stratford 2011, would have been built anyway, making a nonsense of the claims of a Housing Legacy from the Village, see the attached FOI response. To justify its continued insistence that the Village does indeed have a Legacy value the ODA is resorting to the argument that the housing on the Stratford City site would not have been delivered until much later, if it had not been for the Olympics.