Occupied London... For Real

Today went down for a 'walk' starting at Stratford Station through the Carpenter estate organized by tenants under siege from Newham Council and the Corporate Olympics and felt sick with anger. Remembered that had been on a 'walk' some 6 years ago when the Olympic Committee came to 'see' London and its suitability for the Olympics to say that we didn't want it. We were far too few so that if it was noticed at all on a very cold day, it would have been counter-productive. But we did see what some of its implications would be -existing sports grounds being mashed up and Hackney marshes encroached on. That time it didn't take in the Carpenters estate.
Processes of class-cleansing have taken place in Hackney and been understood as such.  Knowing too that Global Sporting Spectaculars  in Beijing, Delhi and South Africa have been used to give a boost to this process in other cities and that it is already happening in Brazil where both the next Football World Cup and Olympics are due. Today though could see how comprehensively strategic the process is, how planned and how 'in your face' it is. First thing we see is that down the side walls of two oldish high rises in which people live there are huge (100 feet tall?) and aggressive advertisements for Gillette. This in addition to the ubiquitous Coca Cola and McDonalds flim-flam.
On the estate there are hundreds of empty flats.On the Council waiting list there are 32,000 and there will be many thousand more who can't even get on it. The council say they are unfit and have steel shutters over them. Our tenant guides say this is not true and even if they had not said it we could see it with our own eyes, how in the same two storey blocks some were lived in and others shuttered up. Lots of them. And the function of this we see as we pass one shop that is open, is to MAKE THE PLACE LOOK RUN-DOWN and therefore in need of regeneration.
How sick is this!

We pass one big piece of grass where some children with us are very happy to run free. Our guides tell us they are trying to get the council to listen and make a guarantee that it will be kept. meanwhile the local swimming pool in which kids from the estate were taught to swim has been closed. They are trying to get some promise that kids will continue to get this at the Olympic Aquatic Centre (which we can see in the mid-distance) once the Games are over.
There seems to be a normalisation that the promise that the Games would encourage/help people to get healthier/do sport and so on is moonshine. It's like now we're being confided in as knowing adults that no one ever really took this seriously, because whatever promise of access to the Aquatic Centre is, the entry price will make it a mockery. THIS is new but WE ARE ALL POSTMODERNISTS NOW and we can understand when the quote marks are there, thus achieving its democratic promise.
Reasonably priced good quality swimming pools in low income areas are simply INTOLERABLE. This was the case with the excellent pool on the White City Estate over in West London, demolished out of class spite.
A tenant, an elderly lady  who has been there since the 60s tells us they want to demolish the whole area but she will not go. This is outside an office with a New Labour kind of name which is supposed to liaise between tenants and the council. Only this outfit has been set up in meetings in which elections were held when some residents were kept out by the police. And this is what we are to see next, that all this requires the state's monopoly of violence.
The BBC have taken over the top floors of one of the tower blocks. They have been there well in advance of the Games and will continue. There was no consultation and no money is going back into the estate. They have, without consultation installed a huge generator on the grass outside the block and enclosed it. On the door of the block are BBC bouncers and more security geezers - fluorescent jacts and SECURITY all around. One of our guides is going to go in to visit a tenant on one of the lower floors. He is blocked with more security guys coming and then they call the police.
We are perhaps  20-25 people in all on this walk tour. Soon t in addition to the police now joined with the heavies at the door and extra cops standing around, there is a fucking helicopter above. This to prevent one tenant of the carpenter Estate going to the flat of another resident in a block in which the BBC have commandeered the top floors.
 
Obviously class cleansing requires the police as an essential component of the strategy. From the point of BBC HQ we also see that Carpenters which for ever has been a very useful, and the only road connecting Stratford to Hackney has been comprehensively closed off. A further component, the geographical isolation of the estate.
By accident,and having tried to avoid it in East London all day, the Olympic torch passes by just as we touch on the main road from Stratford towards Bow and the City and there is the thing. We are here to see how the River Lea is being colonised by new build "stunning" public-private places going up (the public ones will be small and have no river view) where Carpenters tenants might be offered (could well be offered far worse) in Housing Association flats with less secure tenancies than they have now.
The Olympic flame, invented by Hitler's director of aesthetics for the 1936 Olympics. Fortunately there are very, very few people 'cheering at the roadside' and it looks vert tacky accompanied by three advertisement buses of Coca Cola and Lloyds Bank on the top of which two or three young women go through the motions of the enthusiasm needed for a Historic Moment.
 
But this is small consolation, The Olympics is a fait accompli. Things will not go back to how they were, neither who libes where, nor the "SECURITY" needed to ensure that they do not go back.
All those young people getting 3 weeks paid work for the Games as Security will disappear again, but the organisation of physical control of the space will.
One set of hopeful recipients of the class cleansing of the space that is now the Carpenters Estate will be University College London. Students are money.