IT IS a walk that requires a triumph of vivid imagination over the grim realities encountered at every twist and turn.
Yet the attractions of hiking through what will become the 2012 Olympic Park are being eagerly promoted in an attempt to lure tourists to a rundown area of East London.
Sadly, the site has not yet been built and its glories can be seen only as an artist’s impression. But that has not deterred one local authority from championing the trek as an attraction for visitors. Hundreds of bewildered tourists have already found themselves stumbling around the trail.
The Olympic Park Walk is rather more gritty than traditional ramblers’ routes. Breathtaking, bucolic views are thin on the ground.
Instead, it offers the perils of crossing busy main roads and negotiating stinging nettles while meandering past scrapyards, derelict buildings and the “cathedral of sewage”.
Advertisement
Newham, the host borough, which will be transformed by 2012, is promoting organised walks and also offering directions for those who want to find their own way around.
The Times took up the challenge, downloaded a map and a list of attractions, and set off from behind a supermarket in Bow, East London. The first leg of the three-mile route wends along the Lea Navigation Canal. Walkers are told to “enjoy the wildlife along its banks”.
However, the towpath was lined with a graffiti-covered wall and masses of weeds, while the other side of the stagnant, litter-strewn water was overhung with dismembered car bonnets from scrapyards. The wildlife consisted of a solitary moorhen pecking disconsolately at a carrier bag as it struggled through the duckweed.
Intrepid hikers must then take their lives into their hands by crossing a busy roundabout at the intersection of the A11 and A12 dual carriageways.
Back on the canal and the duckweed had become a solid carpet, adorned with an upturned workman’s hat and a deflated football. Dilapidated sheds rose above the barbed-wire-topped wall.
Advertisement
The directions refer to the old Bryant & May building, the birthplace of the first women’s trade union. Now converted into luxury flats, it can just be seen by squinting across the canal and the A12 which runs alongside. Much closer is a cement works, with house-sized heaps of gravel topped by a conveyor belt. This is apparently the location for the warm-up athletics tracks.
More car-wreckers’ yards, skips, diggers, windowless buildings and a railway line complete the industrial landscape. We passed under sewerage pipes and reached a footpath that promised “panoramic views of the Olympic Park site”. Dense undergrowth obstructed any vista, and peering through the bushes brought little enlightenment — only the sight of a metal fence shielding a Thames Water plant.
The smell of sewage hung in the air as we progressed to Old Ford Lock. The instructions told us to look out for kestrels, kingfishers, herons, cormorants, swans, gulls and butterflies. Instead, an empty vodka bottle floated in the sludge.
The trail became more pleasant as we progressed past the house where the Channel 4 show, The Big Breakfast, was filmed and spotted a heron.
Round the next bend, surveyors for the Olympic Delivery Authority were testing the water. They were perplexed by the number of walkers hoping to see the site of future glories.
Advertisement
Near the site for the basketball arena and opposite what will be the Olympic stadium, two anglers sat on the bank of City Mill River. In three hours they had caught one roach.
“I have no idea where the Olympic site is,” one said. “It shows how little it matters to people around here.”
The directions implore walkers to “imagine how this area will look in 2012 and visualise the world’s greatest sporting event unfolding in front of your eyes”. Difficult, since the height of the embankment makes any view of the site impossible.
After passing a chemical works, the river path becomes more isolated, overgrown and sinister. Walkers emerge at the vast Abbey Mills pumping station, nicknamed the “cathedral of sewage” because of its ornate Gothic style. Built in the 1860s, it produces half the city’s total sewage overflow and can discharge a million and a half cubic metres of waste into the Thames in a day.
The last leg passes a bank of brown sludge, in which numerous tyres are embedded, and takes in a gasworks. Trains rattle past as aircraft come in to land at City Airport. It ends at a picturesque and listed tidal mill next to film studios, housed in a former gin distillery.
Advertisement
Walkers are told to take care on busy roads and to wear walking boots for a better grip on the narrow and muddy terrain.
But many have not been deterred. Bob Bicheno of the Newham Striders, which offers accompanied walks in the area, said: “People seem to be fascinated. We had 60 last Sunday on two walks.”
He added: “You can’t see right into the site because that’s a large industrial area. And the only work that has started is tunneling for power cables.”