The following is part of a series of first hand accounts of displacement and criminalization due to Olympic-driven gentrification. The author chooses to remain anonymous.
I moved to London in the summer of 2009, four years after the Olympic bid for 2012 had been awarded. The site was planned to span Stratford, Hackney Wick, Bow, and Waltham Forest, with a clear intention of “community regeneration” as legacy.
Most of my friends are artists and activists, so it was unsurprising, perhaps, that I found myself living in an old warehouse in Hackney Wick. It was a former printworks, and had been occupied by two friends of mine who had transformed it into a functional live/work space, gallery, and event venue, which overlooked the Olympic site.
We poured our hearts into that space, building it out from scratch, changing spaces often, accommodating different artists. We endured one of the coldest winters in a decade in a building with no heat or running water, with one of our residents building an igloo on the roof made of TVs streaming a CCTV feed from the Olympic site. Hackney Wick is a part of east London that was predominantly industrial for decades, and when that industry died, warehouses were left empty. The combination of quite strong squatters rights in the UK teamed with vast empty warehouses with excellent natural light led to artists and anarchists moving to the area, establishing a cultural legacy in a disinvested area.
Before the Overground line opened, Hackney Wick was hard to reach, and felt abandoned and a bit unnerving at night. But it was home to so many artists who were increasingly pushed out of the Old Street/Shoreditch area which had gentrified fairly rapidly. We threw ridiculous parties. I remember one New Year’s Eve riding a motorbike down a flight of stairs with my friend while both wearing Flamenco dresses. We wound up asleep in a roll of carpet; it was a wild and joyful time.
We knew our time was limited. The building had been occupied around the time the bid was accepted, and moving there in 2009 was consciously living on borrowed time. Murals that had been painted by local artists in the Wick were beginning to be whitewashed and replaced with Olympic sponsored public art, all without consultation. By May of 2011, we’d received multiple eviction notices from the Olympic Authority, and with a good deal of resistance (refusing to leave, chaining ourselves to the building, etc) we were evicted on May 29th.
It was the end of an era. Many neighbors were forced out and more housing was zoned, which had a huge impact on the raves and event spaces that had thrived there. Most of us found that we couldn’t afford to live in that part of London, so we dispersed further across the ciy – to Seven Sisters, Tottenham, Bermondsey – never quite recreating the magic of our time in the Wick. A few years ago, one of our gallery founders returned to the warehouse to see what it was like these days, and discovered that it’s a co-working space. He sent us this bleak tour of the “offices” and we all lamented in a group chat how surreal it was to see our bedrooms turned into tech offices. The Olympic Park is now open to everyone, but it isn’t free to use the facilities.
In the ten years since I lived there, property prices have risen 64% on average, with a value change per property sold of roughly £178,240. It’s safe to say that the lasting legacy of the Olympics in east London has been advanced gentrification, and the displacement of a generation of artists who transformed an industrial wasteland into a cultural hub.