The Hackney Citizen reports:

Only one Hackney apprentice on Olympics site: MP Diane Abbott slams low numbers of opportunities for local people

After discovering that only one apprentice working on the Olympics site comes from Hackney, local MP Diane Abbott has called on the Olympic Delivery Authority (ODA) to address the low numbers of apprentices on the Olympic site as a matter of urgency.

A sizeable proportion of the Games' massive budget has been spent dredging waterways, to help move materials to the Olympic site. The plan was for up to a thousand tonnes a day to go by barge. But the amount of business so far is only a trickle compared with what was promised.

During his recent foray into East London with the cabinet Gordon Brown once again played up the job benefits of the Olympics saying "Thanks to the Olympics, thousands of jobs are being created and protected in some of the industries worst hit by the recession - and in some of Britain's most deprived areas." Back in January he claimed the 2012 Olympics would create 50,000 new jobs, a considerable advance on the Compulsory Purchase Inquiry in 2006 when the LDA was saying there would be 6,000 net new jobs arising from the Olympics. With a budget of £9.34billion and rising, along with more spending to come after Games, there should indeed be some new jobs, but specifically how many, in what employment sectors and how many would have been created if the Olympics hadn’t happened? I decided to ask some Freedom of Information questions to see if the LDA could be more specific.

Olympic contractor tests a soil sample for radiation with a Geiger counter. Photo © Mike Wells

A document obtained from an undisclosed source reveals that hazardous radioactive waste was excavated and moved within the London Olympic Park before official permission was granted.

I came across this comment about the impact of the Olympics on the regeneration of the east end of London in a recent interview with Peter Hall. He is Professor of Planning and Regeneration at the Bartlett School of Architecture and Planning, University College London. From 1991 to 1994 he was Special Adviser on Strategic Planning to the Secretary of State for the Environment, with special reference to London and South-East regional planning, including Thames Gateway and the Channel Tunnel Rail Link. In 1998-9 he was a member of the Deputy Prime Minister's Urban Task Force.

Leabank Square residents have panned the design for the Media Centre. So has CABE, the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment. Only they won't have to live opposite what one resident has called a 'tower block on its side'.

Adding insult to injury following the destruction of the Manor Gardens allotments Tessa Jowell and Boris Johnson have announced there will be a competition to create a ‘quintessentially British garden’ in the Olympic Park. The fact the Park already contained just such a quintessentially British and East End feature seems to have escaped the notice of commentators and journalists, who failed to even mention the destruction of the allotments as part of the Olympic programme when describing the proposal. The Manor Gardens Allotments Society has just revealed the present parlous state of both the Manor Gardens community and their allotments caused by the incompetence and negligence of the LDA and its contractors.

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.

One of the proudest boasts of the 2012 London Olympics was that it would create the largest new urban park in Europe for 150 years. I asked a Freedom of Information question (see attachment) to discover how the ODA had arrived at this description. They were unable to provide any clear information. All they could say was that they had consulted with 'CABE Space and the London Parks and Green Spaces Forum (who) had assisted the ODA in preparing benchmark studies on parks around the world and in London including previous Olympic Parks.'Landschaftspark Duisburg-Nord: Europe's biggest new urban park at over 200ha, some 500 acres, was completed in 1999 retaining the industrial archaelogy

Of course, the largest new park is no longer as large as it was having shrunk by 19 hectares. But even when it was 129 hectares its claim to be the largest new urban park in Europe was questionable. A friend recently sent me a link to a park in Duisburg, Germany, constructed on a site with many similarities to the Lea Valley, as it was a former industrial area. At over 200 hectares it is considerably larger than the much vaunted 'largest new park in Europe'.

The Duisburg industrial park shows how the Lea Valley could have been developed in an imaginative way, which illustrated the industrial history of the area, by creating a park based around the rivers and canals linking sites like the Tidal Mill at Three Mills