Same old Old Street, always changing

I see from Professor Tim Stonor's blog that there has been a conference about improving Old Street roundabout as an urban space.Mmmmmmm....
I lived very close to the Old Street roundabout from 1997 to 2004. It was great, but the thing I learned about it was that the Old Street roundabout is always being regenerated, in the same way that the Forth Bridge was always being repainted. I don’t think there was a single day during those seven years when some part of the transport infrastructure that meets there (and there is a huge amount of that) was not under repair/malfunctioning/being redisigned. And there is always something there that someone will think they can improve.

The golden days of OlympicsJPAT

Now that the London Olympics 2012 are under way, a few TV viewers, in the gaps between being thrilled by the sporting prowess on show, may ask who gave planning permission for all these buildings in Stratford, East London,  to be erected.

I have written about this at some detail for Corporate Watch UK, but one quick answer is that it all started in 2004 with something called the Olympic Joint Planning Authority Team. This was made up of  democratically elected councillors from planning committees of the four boroughs that circle the Olympic Park.

On September 9, 2004, it granted outline permission for the Park, which was then just a circle on a map, and gave permission for 50 or so trees to be chopped down. You might think this important body has had a busy time since then. But no; as soon as our councillors had given permission they were kicked out of the way, and an unelected Government-appointed body, the Olympic Delivery Authority, took over.

Democracy doesn't lie down that easily, however. And on August 20, 2010,  OlympicJPAT was still going strong, as its website, which has since disappeared, demonstrated:

How green were my Olympics

The Manor Gardens Allotments, which used to be on a small island in the Lea Navigation, were concreted over to make way for the London Olympics 2012. The gardeners were moved to new allotments in Waltham Forest.

The conflict of interest between the allotment holders and the Olympic Delivery Authority presented a remarkable cultural clash. Intriguingly both sides in the conflict can trace their origins back to the same Victorian tradition - the philosophy of muscular Christianity. Those tracings present a fascinating picture of the social scales, shapes and sizes of democratic, economic and political processes.

The Manor Gardens Allotments are[1] the last trace of the Eton Mission to the East End started just after 1880. This mission was one of several undertaken by Oxford and Cambridge University colleges and public schools. These missions involved young men and sometimes women of wealthy and privileged backgrounds going out the East End and undertaking socially, morally and educationally improving works among the impoverished working classes.

The Eton Mission began just before 1883 in Hackney Wick with the building of a church and the establishment of premises for various clubs: men’s clubs, boy’s clubs, Sunday Schools, classes and social welfare programmes. It was funded by Eton College, then the pinnacle of wealth and privilege in the British education system and producer of endless Prime Ministers.[2]

Among the activities organised were several sports activities. The reason for their inclusion was based broadly in the Victorian philosophy of ‘muscular Christianity’ ideas prominent at Rugby public school under Dr Thomas Arnold.

Another person influenced by these ideas was the Frenchman Baron Pierre de Coubertin, who, at the same time as the Eton Mission started, was busy organising a revival of classical Greece’s Olympic Games.

“Thomas Arnold, the leader and classic model of English educators,” wrote de Coubertin “gave the precise formula for the role of athletics in education.”[3] In 1883 de Coubertin visited England to see how this public school athleticism worked in education.

The Eton Mission and particularly the sports clubs flourished. In 1924 four wealthy and well-connected Old Etonians set up the Manor Charitable Trust to administer them. They and their donors gave land for and funded an astonishing array of sports facilities, including the allotments - tilling the land being a healthy Christian activity - that became the Manor Garden Allotments.

After World War Two the Trust’s interests became more educational. Trustees purchased land outside of London, and the Trust eventually evolved into the Villiers Park Educational Trust which today helps ‘gifted and talented children’ from under-privileged backgrounds get into university.

The boys’ clubs closed in 1967 and, despite much recent somewhat nostalgic history about them, little is immediately publicly available about the disposal of the Trust’s assets. By 2000, however, the land on which the allotments stood was owned by the Lea Valley Regional Park Authority.[4] This land was compulsorily purchased by the Olympic Development Authority.

While the Eton Manor clubs thrived and declined, de Coubertin’s Olympic Movement grew into the global corporation which is today’s International Olympic Committee. Victorian ideals thus inspired both the creation and the temporary destruction of the Manor Gardens Allotments.

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Olympic Reading

Books

Brohm, Jean-Mari, Essays. Sport: A Prison of Measured Time. Translated by Ian Fraser. Ink Links, London NW5 2JS. 1978.

Hill, Christopher. Olympic Politics, Manchester University Press, Manchester. 1992.

Articles

MacAloon, John J. ‘Legacy’ as Managerial/Magical Discourse in Contemporary Olympic Affairs, International Journal of the History of Sport, 25: 14, (2008) pp 2060 — 2071).

Johansen, Michelle. Adventures in the Wild East: The Early Years of the Eton Manor Boys’ Clubs. This lecture was delivered at the ‘Up the Manor’ Project Launch in September 2007. http://villierspark.org.uk/web_images//pdfs/michelles_lecture_the_early_years.pdf

Villiers Park Educational Trust, Our History, http://villierspark.org.uk

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[1] The allotments are due to return to the Olympic Park area when the Games have finished, so I continue to use the present tense.

[2] Plus ca change…

[3] De Coubertin, Physical exercises in the modern world. Lecture given at the Sorbonne, November 1892. (cited at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_de_Coubertin )

[4] Answer given by the Lea Valley Regional Park Authority to a Freedom of Information Act question from Julian Cheyne of the Clay’s Lane Residents Association.