Recently in Olympics Category

The kidult texted me from Exeter to say (and I quote) "Until 1948 there was a medal for town planning in the Olympic games. Love you." Can this be true?  (The medal for town planning thing, not the love bit). 

Mike Hayes? Leonora? Alex? Can you shed any light please?  

On interrogation it transpires that kidult got this from QI - that fount of all adolescent knowledge - so I guess it must be true. 

How absolutely marvellous! Let's get this medal reinstated immediately. After all, it's our show next, surely. (And you try telling that to the IOC!).

Talking of town planning, some of my correspondents have been anxious as to what transpired down in Ambridge - er, Lopen, sorry - at the planning committee the other night. I tapped up Teresa Sienkiewicz for a report on the latest in the saga. It seems that the proposal to extend the site has been withdrawn!

I was on the blower with my boss at CB Richard Ellis, Adrian Bunnis, (referred to, in genuine reverence, by his team as "The Bunni" - I think in some oblique cross-reference to "The Jedi"; actually and, I say this in all sincerity, the humour of surveyors is one of the very best things about them), anyway, we were having one of our immensely pleasurable rows about urban regeneration and the Royal Docks when he burst into fits of laughter.

Well, says I, in best huffy tone, "If you're just going to laugh at me then I'm going," whereupon he explained that, looking out of his office window at the Maplin across the street (you know, the one in Cheapside) he's seen two of our best boys-in-blue apprehend a shoplifter and retrieve a veritable pile of clobber from every pocket of this bloke's voluminous coat (which had clearly been designed for the purpose).

Well! I got a blow-by-blow account of every article of kit that was retrieved before blokey was carted off in the meat wagon and Adrian clearly enjoyed every minute of it (and I guess I did too, if somewhat at one remove). Nice to see a professional at work, we agreed (although couldn't be that much of a professional since he got caught).

Makes a change from our usual argy-bargy about the quality of the output from the housebuilder industry anyway.

The first thing for Mr Altman to tackle on starting in post at the Olympics Legacy Company on 1st August is the nonsense of the current proposals for the new DLR extension to Stratford International from Canning Town. We are sooooo missing a trick here.

The aerial photo on the left shows what, in my humble opinion, the line should do in order to drop in to the Media Centre site and create a hub (combined with the planned bus depot and station upgrade at Hackney Wick, not to mention the 1,200 odd space multi-storey car park). The thick blue line shows the approximate route. The line should continue from Stratford International and loop around the park following existing boundaries (like the A12).

The Media Centre is about 11ha or so and in terms of the Main Press Centre (MPC) and Broadcast Centre (IBC) is providing about 1.3m sq ft. Assuming a clean slate and a site coverage of 25% and an average height of 20 storeys (small compared to Canary Wharf) you would get 6m sq ft, a gain of about 5m sq ft. Not an inconsiderable uplift for a small amount of extra track.

One of my little friends has measured the approximate route for me and makes it 2.5 km.

This is a public transport opportunity that the Swiss would be proud of. Why oh why are we not (literally) more joined up?

The finger-on-the-pulse lobby of CB Richard Ellis demand to know daily: what's occurring with the Olympics Legacy Special Purpose Vehicle (SPV) then? And I struggle to answer.

In common with most of the industry, I have been watching like a hawk (when not being distracted by the pesky day job). Was I alone in thinking that the adoption of the 10 year old model of the Urban Regeneration Company (URC) for the SPV was something of a capitulation?

After all, we can hardly claim the URC template to be radical or on the cutting edge! Perhaps I am being a little harsh, almost certainly I would have been the first critic had the powers-that-be not learnt from best practice elsewhere, so perhaps I should be congratulating them on using a tried and tested vehicle (although with a patchy set of results up and down the country!)

A geeky mate of mine (who I suspect may not have quite enough to do right now) has sent me a report by some American economists - Professors Rose and Spiegel - entitled The Olympic Effect. Well, it's all a bit cerebral for me but even I managed to get my head around the summary, which states that economists are "sceptical" about the economic benefits of hosting "mega-events" such as the Olympic Games or the World Cup, "since such activities have considerable costs and seem to yield few tangible benefits".

Well, blow me down!