Tonight:
5°c
Farewell Cultural Olympiad. We loved you, but were not surprised to see you go. The Olympics were once about poetry as well as sport, but that was long ago. Now they are about sport, big spending and national glory, but in reverse order. All else is froth.
Mention the Olympics to anyone — in government or opposition, mayor or minister — and heads are buried in hands amid moans of pain. It is all a “spent conviction”. At a time of savage cuts, £600 million on Olympic consultants alone may make Croesus seem stingy and Al Capone a respectable citizen. But it is “too late to do anything”.
One thing is clear. As overspending starts to bite and something has to give, it will not be executive bonuses or professional fees. The overwhelming bulk of the £9 billion for the Olympics is ring-fenced to those on the inside track, especially building contractors. They are the spiv bankers of Big Sport.
The pain will be on the fringe. From the start, culture, heritage and local sport had to carry the brunt of the Olympic Development Authority's voracious lottery demand. This meant a searing 20 per cent tax of some £1.5 billion on the entire charitable sector, to tip money into the ODA offices in Canary Wharf. Now it is the Olympic fringes that must deliver up their cash.
The staging of various crazy festivals in 2012 was part of London's pitch to win the Games, though no sane person thought the original pledges would be honoured. They included “youth” ships going around the world, Olympic torches, legacy projects, festivals throughout Britain and something called a “cultural Olympiad”. The International Olympic Committee was duly dazzled.
These are vanishing in the night. The ship has already gone. The Cultural Olympiad was launched in 2008 by Lord Coe weirdly running up and down inside Tate Britain “for art”. It was not to be a competition of poetry, art and music, with winners paraded as in ancient Athens. Instead the Olympiad was what you always get when the public sector has more money than sense: a mishmash of dotty ideas and celebrity names. The Rolling Stones and Paul McCartney are invariably mentioned. There has thus been much talk of hiring a hundred rock guitarists, ballet classes at the Coliseum, opera in 3D, a pillow-shaped museum and a “non-kitsch homage” to ancient Greece.
Now the Olympiad chairman, Tony Hall, has briskly decided to drop the concept of Olympiad altogether. He rightly says it lacks “clarity”. But the spending is not dead. Hall still apparently has £40 million to disperse, money taken from deserving causes to celebrate the Olympics in some notionally artistic fashion. Hall has hired a new chief executive, the ubiquitous Labour groupie Ruth Mackenzie, on £130,000 a year plus help from an executive board.
The weary taxpayers can take two approaches to this. One is to howl that enough is surely enough. Please could someone curb this squandering of public money and return it to its rightful owners. But since any such plea falls on deaf ears, we can at least plunge into the trough with our own pet ideas — on the off-chance that we too might get a share of the action.
My pet scheme is radical. It is not to blow the £40 million on salaries, offices and events, of which there is abundance in London every year. It is to blow the money on London itself. We should spend it on simply making London more beautiful for 2012, on making the existing metropolis more a work of art.
Were this Paris or Rome preparing for the 2012 Olympics, committees would not be meeting to discuss pouring concrete, hiring public relations or buying ever more security. They would meet to discuss how to enhance the city's appearance, on beautifying places and piazzas, or glorifying the banks of the Seine or the Tiber.
Admiring the view yesterday evening on Westminster Bridge, I wondered at how London's loveliness now jostles with ugliness, in a manner inconceivable in rival capitals. The lighting of London's public buildings is now comparable with Paris or Amsterdam. At night the Palace of Westminster, County Hall and Somerset House are delicately etched in colour and shade. The river bridges are gently lit from below. It is well done.
Yet there is no co-ordination of the lighting of buildings overall, as would be the case abroad. Glaring across the soft illuminating of the historic façades is the garish and massively engineered London Eye, like a clockwork monster from outer space. A gash of neon outlines the new hotel south of Westminster Bridge and other towers in the distance.
The rules that used to ban advertising along the Thames are broken with impunity. Where once the Oxo company had to incorporate its logo in the windows of its tower, the National Theatre defaces its already brutal façade with flashing electronic advertising. Such vulgarity would be unthinkable on the Paris quais — let alone from an arts organisation.
The same aesthetic collapse is seen in the flouting of rules that once controlled posters and liveries on London's once-all-red buses and once-black black taxis. Roundabouts at Wandsworth, Shepherd's Bush and Old Street are defaced with advertising hoardings. The Waterloo Imax cinema must surely breach planning consent by coating its exterior in promotional advertising. As for the poor royal parks, could they not be spared the indignity of being flogged off to the highest bidder in the summer of 2012? And could not hideous road-works cease for one precious year?
Most improvements to the appearance of London need not cost much money, only firm enforcement. We hear much of legacy with no sign of what it means. If a morsel of the billions going on this sporting fortnight could go on something of lasting value to London's environment, the Olympic extravagance might evoke less fury.
Reader views (4)
He can't be serious.
This is sophism masquerading as logic. From a literal angle, it does sort of make sense. The problem: how to show London in the best possible light. The solution: more street lamps.
It’s the kind of delirious scheme he begins the article by condemning. Great for the night hawks who will be stalking the midnight streets of London come summer 2012, but what about the daylight hours?
The Olympics will arrive in all its sparkle and splendour, and the Olympic Park will be a frenzy of flashbulbs, world leaders, anthems and athletes. There will be crowds in national colours, flag-flying, tears and jubilation, and then, like the implosion of an atom bomb, the chaos and excitement will silently fold back into itself, withdrawing without so much as a whisper from London’s vibrant arts scene. With a bit of luck they won’t even have noticed we were there.
- Lucy, London, 23/04/2010 15:41
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Pls continue to write about how Ldn could be improved. We need trees planted all along the river fron the Thames Barrier to Wandsworth to soften all those quick-buck developments. And those roundabouts - do something with them! Wandsworth r-a-b is horrible horrible. & stand for mayor..
- David, ldn uk, 03/02/2010 13:48
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The Royal Parks have been on a downward trend for a few years now.
Apart from the fact that Hyde Park has become a mausoleum of symbols to dead people, most of them are regarded as money spinners for whomsoever is the abject apology of a person "running" the Parks.
The dreadful Christmas fairground has been enlargened and moved into a part of Hyde Park that was an important walk of beauty. Now it is a scarred mess of earth somewhat like the Somme with all the spring plants utterly destroyed.
Each year we have yet another ugly apparition which appears beside the Gallery in Kensington Gardens designed by the current luvvie loophead.
Apparantly we are about to have a new building in Hyde Park which means more people driving on the footpaths so I take it that soon the whole area will be concrete.
The Royal Parks are parks for the people, dammit. Can we please stop all the money grubbers trashing the most beautuful parts.
- Minnie, London, UK, 02/02/2010 13:32
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Whatever you might think of sport`s worth to society, the Olympics has become mainly a show (off) case for the country it’s held in.
A reflection of our times, looking ahead to a bright future etc etc.
We will try, therefore to compete with China’s amazing (sometimes virtual) spectacle.
Trouble is, this is very bad timing for our country.
Oh, yes, some of us, and of course the BBC (if it still exists as a mainly sports dominated organisation in 2012) will be rolling our eyes in ecstasy at the odd gold, but by then many will have felt the pain of the big crunch - and will not be at all impressed - very angry in fact by the decadence that is the world of sporting glory and it’s parasitic sycophantic entourage.
Given the BIG show that it has become, all glitzy bright laser lights and loadsa glittery girlies, perhaps Las Vegas would be a more suitable home for the modern Olympics?
Just what the world needs at the moment - big big spend on Triumphal Nationalistic narcissists!
- Darius, London, 02/02/2010 11:01
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