05 July 2005

London’s bid for the Olympic Games – IOC members please read this before you vote …

Tomorrow we find out if London will host the games in 2012 – an exciting prospect. But why should we host the games rather than any of the other cities?

Well we can and we want to, but so does everybody else. So why choose London over anybody else?

I suppose our bid is a bit more interesting because we seem to be planning to build a lot more than the others. That’s got to be a good reason – far better than building more supermarkets, furniture and DIY stores.

And if we don’t build it soon it’s quite likely we won’t have the space for it in the future.

I wonder if that is in the bid proposal – Britain is so over crowded and such a magnet to people that if we don’t carve up a bit of the East End soon it will be gone forever. I’m rather amazed that there is an area big enough in London that does not contain a conserved building, is part of National Trust (or any other trust for that matter) or is a part of or expected to be a part of an airport. We Brits love to slap conservation orders on any building that’s old, a ruin, very pretty, amazingly ugly or just a bit odd – perhaps this is the recipe for quaintness.

I’m not criticising building conservation or the National Trust it’s just that given the time to put another bid together we might well find that the proposed chunks of land will have conserved chunks of building on it … or trees.

It’s more likely though that we’ll get a supermarket, shopping centre and DIY store or another airport – that has got to be the best reason for giving us the Olympics.

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