As readers of my blog will know, I have a long-standing interest in the development of East London – in fact, ever since my blog was set up in early 2014.

So, I was pleased to attend an event involving many of the people involved in attracting the Olympics to London – not the big name politicians, but the civil servants and urban planners, many of whom worked for the London Development Agency, an agency which reported through an independent board to the Mayor, but was funded by the Department of Trade and Industry (to an outsider, the structure of government agencies involved in the Olympic bid is far from straightforward). They have collaborated in producing a book written by Michael Owens and Ralph Ward, two of the key players (Michael Owens was the Head of Development Policy at the LDA, Ward its Head of Sustainable Development) called Playing the Game: How the Olympics came to East London, which seems to be only available on Kindle, although I spotted hard copies for sale at the Bow Arts Trust, where the discussion took place.

We walked from Stratford to Bow while the two authors (mainly) reflected on the process of regeneration. From the walking tour, I picked up the following, but don’t guarantee that I have recorded the points correctly (they appear somewhat differently from how they do in the book):-

1. A key moment was in the late 1990s when plans for the regeneration of Stratford were drawn up by Arup as engineers and Fletcher Priest as architects for Stuart Lipton of Stanhope who, with Chelsfield, had bought large tracts of land in Stratford off British Rail, presumably recognising its future development opportunities. Big chunks of this land was subsequently bought by Westfield for the new Stratford Shopping Centre, which was key to the regeneration of the area before anyone had thought of London hosting the Olympics.

2. It is hard now to remember how rough the area was between Stratford and the River Lea before the creation of the Olympic Park. We stood on the site of what was known as Fridge Mountain and the area apparently was the source of many of the knock-off goods sold on Oxford Street, as well as of allotments which became a battleground over development.

3. In order to bid for the Olympics, Hargreave, an American firm of landscape designers, were hired to landscape an area of desolate tarmac. Their involvement is one of the more impressive things that was done and key still to the success of the project.

4. Ken Livingstone wasn’t remotely interested in sport, but he was in urban regeneration and seems to have been good at attracting a group of independent-minded and free-thinking people to work at the LDA.

5. The lesson at the end seemed to be that the bureaucrats felt that the success of the project was not the quality of the planning process and setting objectives, but allowing a certain inventive freedom in how the plans were drawn up. It sounded very likely.

I’m glad the history is being written because it’s so complicated even if – perhaps especially if – you hear it from those who were so closely involved.