Look East

I'd never been to Canary Wharf before I had this job. Now it's a regular part of life to pitch up at the skyscraper housing Locog, and I know every twist and delay of the Jubilee Line as it goes through the rebuilt docklands: further out to North Greenwich and the O2, or back to central London through Canada Water and Bermondsey.

But I also can't remember ever previously visiting some of the Olympic host boroughs. I'd been out to Dagenham once to watch Bradford City, but Newham and Hackney weren't much on the map - and Tower Hamlets and Greenwich are places visitors go to principally for sights like the Tower of London and the Royal Observatory.

So it's been something of a revelation - and a pleasure - to spend time where the Olympics will be staged next year.

When I've said this to friends and colleagues, some of them are mystified by the idea of liking parts of the East End.

Its Wikipedia entry may give a clue why. It says that in Victorian times "the East End became synonymous with poverty, overcrowding, disease and criminality"; and although the Olympic zone and the East End are far from being geographically the same, and time has moved on, its boroughs are still light years away from the affluence of the West End.

Hackney, for instance, was officially the second most-deprived borough in the whole of England and much of its media profile was for the wrong reasons as a crime hot-spot.

It didn't feel like that, though, on a pleasant March day when I was sitting having a coffee in the square outside Hackney Town Hall, watching a celebratory African-Caribbean wedding party emerge from the Registry Office.

As with the other core Olympic boroughs, this is a strikingly diverse part of London. The East End over the centuries was where immigrants came to the UK, and a constituency like East Ham nowadays has well over 40% of its inhabitants born outside the country.

The Olympic boroughs are culturally diverse. Picture: Getty

Irrespective of the political debate about multiculturalism, this is a place where people from a multitude of backgrounds co-exist; and the video submission from students in Tower Hamlets for our World Olympic Dreams project captures what that can look and sound like.

Talking to the councils in the area, they're conscious they have a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to showcase what's good within their communities and to deliver lasting benefits.

They point to the way East London has already changed, with the fashionable areas of Hoxton and Shoreditch and the regeneration going on alongside the Olympic Park in Stratford - most notably the arrival soon of a Westfield Shopping Centre.

There's no doubt they want to hold the Olympic organisers and the wider political establishment to account for their promises on the legacy of the Games; but, having in some cases shed their reputations as failing councils, they know they too have to deliver in 2012 and beyond.

One official said to me there was a lot of pride in their area that they would be the centre of world attention during the Olympics.

But the message going back to residents was they had to play their part in making sure it was the right image and that everything went like clockwork.

And that points to one of London's gambles in going for the Games: it didn't stick with the safe and tested, the equivalent of having the main stadium at Wembley and an athletes' village somewhere central.

Instead it opted for promises on regeneration and legacy, and for a base outside tourists' London.

We in the BBC and the rest of the media will keep a keen eye on how well those promises are delivered.

And when you wander down Mare Street in Hackney or along Broadway in Stratford, you realise these aren't abstract debates. They're about communities who've experienced tough times and for whom this is the chance of a better future.

Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/rogermosey/2011/03/look_east.html

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