]]> http://stampcollector.wordpress.com/2011/03/18/untitled/feed/ 1 GafferBee Media_httpimagesinsta_unkgs http://stampcollector.wordpress.com/2011/03/05/has-technology-robbed-travel-of-its-riches/ http://stampcollector.wordpress.com/2011/03/05/has-technology-robbed-travel-of-its-riches/#comments Sat, 05 Mar 2011 21:35:05 +0000 gafferbee http://stampcollector.wordpress.com/2011/03/05/has-technology-robbed-travel-of-its-riches/ ]]>

via guardian.co.uk

The days of poste restante and a weather-beaten travel guide are a thing of the distant past. But does today’s hyper-connected traveller really get a true feel for the places they visit? The Guardian poses an interesting question.

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Roman Road Market, Bow

It’s been a while since I checked up on the Olympic site.

For two years now I’ve lived in the shadow of this omnipresent development. My wedding party last year was held at a new venue – Formans Fish Island – directly across the Lea River from the stadium itself.

The peaks of the stadium’s lighting towers peer over the A12 and are still visible through at the end of the street every time I head to the Roman Road market. It’s an instructive experience to see the locals of Bow pottering about their business, buying fruit and veg and cider and fags, worrying over their pennies even as the multi-billion Olympic development takes shape virtually at the end of their street.

A short walk across the A12 footbridge from the Roman Road and there is pedestrian access to a revamped “nature trail” known as The Greenway. The last time I had a look this trail it was shabby and sorry, its route from Bow to Beckton rudely interrupted by the Olympics at Pudding Mill.

Glimpses

Well, things have changed. The route is still interrupted (a diversion via Stratford is needed to pick up the eastern part of the path) but the environment is a good deal nicer. Paths have been repaved, signage replaced and revamped, and there are some cheerful blooms flowering along the side of the path.

The stadium dominates the pathway. It confronts you as soon as you turn off the light industrial basket case that is Wick Lane (good luck to them clearing that place up as the games edge nearer) and accompanies you along your amble, jog or bike ride.

Through the bushes there are glimpses of how it is all coming together: n workers’ entrance and cycle rack, service roads appearing to emerge from subterranean forests below the level of the pathway, mounds of earth, a few hard-hatted types meandering at ground level.

The structure appears complete now – the raked seating areas were in place 18 months ago, with the white external rigging erected by autumn 2009. The lighting towers, the final distinctive features, appeared as soon as my wedding was over, slightly undermining our staged photograph opposite what we thought was a complete stadium shape.

And now you can have a cup of tea as you take in the view, as the Guardian’s London blogger Dave Hill found recently. At the point where the Greenway runs out of green and out of way visitors can now stop as ViewTube, a new cafe and arts centre (everything around Hackney Wick is a flipping arts centre) constructed out of recycled materials from the ever-growing building site nearby.

The art is displayed alongside a giant map of the Olympic development site as you approach the ViewTube , before you reach a ground floor cafe (serving very fine chocolate brownies, I might add),  and a first floor classroom which boasts a fine elevated view of the stadium itself. The emerging Aquatic Centre and giant media centre are also easily spotted.

However, I chose to sit outside, and thus realised there is one aspect of the local environment that no amount of landscaping, landfilling, art projects or lottery money is really going to fix.

The place stinks. Of shit.

As the nice friendly man who owns/designed the ViewTube admitted as he gazed at the stadium alongside me, the cafe he built is perched, like the whole Greenway, on the Northern Outfall Sewer. The sewer is famous around these parts, a giant tube that scythes through the landscape under canal bridges and even makes it onto the local Heritage Trail.

It is a giant effluent transport system which takes in a whole load of crap from North and West London, pipes it through Hackney Wick and sends it eastwards. The Greenway was built literally on top of it. And a good way of sprucing up the environment it was, too.

But these days, with the world’s largest sporting carnival scheduled to take place 100 metres from the sewer’s gusset, perhaps something should be done about the stink?

London 2012 organisers have always said that with a fair wind, the city would put on a great games. They weren’t wrong.