On a site tour around east London's fringe Olympic locations including the Royal Docks this week it was enlightening and entertaining to see how businesses relocated to make way for the Olympics Park are faring.
H Forman & Son, Britain's oldest fish smokery and the company that fought a noisy battle in the media with the LDA over its relocation from the Olympic site to nearby Fish Island, has undoubtedly cleverly made a positive out of the whole disruptive business.
The group now has a splendid salmon pink building located on the aptly named Bream Street directly opposite the stadium and has opened a restaurant there offering "unrivalled views of the Olympic Park". Don't be surprised if it becomes a major place for events during the Games.
Amusingly the canny business has also set up a camera on its roof which peers into the Olympic Stadium and offers a "fish-eye webcam" which you can watch here and which offers a live update on work on the site from the "closest venue to the London 2012 Olympic Games".
Speaking to an expert closely involved with the land acquisition project, the businessmen in the area were certainly a rum bunch, and generally extremely smart when it came to hammering out a good relocation package.
One family business that drove a particularly hard bargain used to turn up for meetings with the LDA in a battered Cortina. On visiting their site the LDA noted there were personalised Aston Martins and Mercedes parked outside their premises belonging to various members of the family.
"Why do you drive the Cortina?" the LDA asked. "That's our sales car," was the reply.
Another amusing tale about the whole process involves gypsies.
Apparently the most difficult job at one stage was persuading a band of travellers that had moved on to a key site to go forth and multiply. With negotiations stalled, the land assembly team's prayers were finally answered when the gypsies decided to torch all of their caravans. Apparently there had been an internal dispute over what they planned to do, and in gypsy world the only answer is to then torch everybody's caravan.
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