…And how’s it going?
I’ve heard the Underground is really filthy and full of graffiti – will any effort be made to clean this up?
Are you volunteering or actually getting paid to do something?
What are residents in general being told? Behave yourselves when they get here; be polite and friendly and helpful if you can; try not to use the Underground if you don’t have to; don’t pee in the streets? :eek: Keep Calm and Carry On?
Is there a siege mentality building up?
London England?
Yeah, you have to be specific or everyone will think you’re talking about the famous one in Canada.
The only impact its had so far for me is the possibilty of having to work from home for the two weeks its on. Commuting into London is bad enough under normal conditions so who knows what its going to be like during the Olympics.
As for the Tube its quite dirty but it does not really have any graffiti. I am sure there is probably some somewhere but its not a big problem. I really don’t remember the last time I saw some. As for the dirt I doubt they will do anything special as its just the nature of the tube system due to all the air currents you are going to get a lot of dust. Not much could be done about that.
As a taxpayer, I’m already supporting it. :smack:
The Underground is not full of graffiti.
We have millions of tourists annually already, so we’re used to visitors.
My mate bought a house in Stratford (near the Stadium) and hopes to rent it out during the Olympics.
Finally I’ll be watching it on TV (London streets will be packed with all the athletes + officials travelling.)
Yes, as far as I can tell it’s just going to be Summer Plus. The Underground is fine - the new carriages on the Metropolitan line are downright swanky, and the new East London Line is bright and clean.
Neither.
“Be prepared to walk to your office or work from home.” I’m quite pleased at the prospect of working from home this summer, although not being able to find a seat in a pub is going to be annoying.
There will be a huge upsurge in business-are there enough qalified workers to meet demand?
Are the sex trade workers compliant with ISO-9000, ISO-14000? (can’t have those used codoms being tossed around)
Finally, are the London Police ready for the acts of terrorism that might happen?
Pretty smoothly so far. They seem to be digging to every road in London to make it perfect, which seems a rather tall order, but otherwise calm prevails.
I’m not working on the Olympics myself, but I know plenty who have volunteered to work during the Olympics (ticket collectors, London ‘Ambassadors’ and wotnot).
I haven’t got tickets yet, but haven’t given up hope.
You heard wrong, there’s hardly any graffiti on the Tube - graffiti is much more prevalent on mainland Europe. Much of the tube is looking pretty smart these days, and some of the biggest train stations (St Pancras, Kings Cross) have had MAJOR overhauls. Our tube trains are also much nicer than any metro trains I’ve been on anywhere in the world (including Paris, Rome, Moscow, New York…)
“Brace yourself for travel delays” “Work from home if you can” “Start getting excited”.
Nope, I think people are starting to get excited now, aside from the odd moaning minny about travel delays. It’s a big year for London, kicking off with the Diamond Jubilee in June.
That has its own clean up to do currently.
Not been in London for a year, but that is different from normal…how? As an aside, have they finally given up on the “replacing London’s Victorian water-mains”. Seriously. I lived in that city for ages and in all the time I was there, I frankly never saw any site begun and completed, just permanently dug up.
I would also love to see people from the West End go to East London, it has always been a droll looking at their faces as you cross Aldgate.
AK84, there are even imoreroadworks now than before. But perhaps after that there’ll be less for a while because so much has been done now. That’s probably optimistic of me, but it could happen…
I’m preparing by doing up my flat so that I can swap it for one abroad during most of the Olympics. I’m not looking forward to how busy my area’s going to be, I don’t have any tickets (I don’t actually personally know any London residents who managed to get tickets) , and it’s the time of year I want to go on holiday anyway, so I’m hoping to save some money.
I do know a couple of people who are volunteering here and one whose job is about ‘helping London prepare.’
Blackfriars station open again? It was closed in IIRC 2008… 2009? At least it closed when I was still living there that much I do remember.
Blackfriars is open again though building work continues. It looks fairly far from finished.
The Underground station at Blackfriars is open again (AT LAST OMG), and the new South Bank entrance is open too, but work is still being done on the rail station.
You’re correct that it’s very likely there will be an upswing in human trafficking this summer, unfortunately.
I know the OP was directed at “London Dopers” but meh, either way, the Olympics are not top of a lot of people’s agendas out here in Britain-at-large unless they are going to profit directly or are actually ticket holders. We are watching Lord Coe and, erm, Co. try to control every little thing about it, and apart from the fact we are helping pay for it, London England might as well be London Canada for all it will do for us, the great unwashed carrot-crunchers out here in BFME (Butt Fuck Middle England)
London is like a foreign country to most people, it’s nothing like the UK the rest of us live in, yet seems to demand a disproportionate amount of attention and our taxes for its little pet projects like this one. Maybe it’s the current financial climate, but more and more people I speak to couldn’t give a toss about London, Londoners, or the Olympics and wouldn’t be that upset if the Luftwaffe re-appeared out of a time-space wormhole and resumed work on re-modelling it.
It’s not the UK Olympics, it’s the London Olympics, so ner ner (although their sailing events have to take place in Portsmouth because there’s not much sea in London), that has been made quite clear, but we are still footing a hefty part of the bill. The powers-that-be have even trademarked the term “London Olympics 2012” and threatened a company which wanted to have an exhibition outside London at the same time as the Olympics, with legal action if they didn’t remove “2012” from their title. It seems they don’t want anyone cashing in on the Olympics! It’s their toy and we’re not allowed to play with it.
A Union boss who merely suggested that public sector workers might think about industrial action to protect their threatened pensions, at a time which might coincide with the Olympics, was roundly stamped on. Lord Coe et al are crapping themselves in case of anything like that, everyone has to be smiley, happy and multi-cultural.
I saw a T-shirt yesterday which had the Olympic rings logo replaced by some round bombs, fuses fizzing. I imagine shirts like that will go down like a turd in an Olympic-sized swimming pool if worn in, oooh, let’s say Finsbury Park mosque or somewhere. It’s OK though, the RAF are standing by with jet fighters if any unauthorised balloons go up. No, really.
I suspect they may have SAS hit squads to eliminate any pleb who dares to use the reserved motorway lanes which will speed competitors and “VIPs” back and forth without them having to sit in traffic like normal people. Quite right too.
It may be just me, and my cynical mates, but we’re kinda hoping for the odd total balls-up that will ensure Lord Coe has to slink off under a cloud rather than be lauded as England’s, sorry, London’s Olympic Hero. We do so like to see the Great and the Good knocked onto their smug arses.
I’m sure the papers have gloating headlines already written and ready to roll at the first sign of disaster, they got the taste from the Millennium Dome, and it might be a nice chance to hit out at a Govt who might be about to knock them down a peg or two, without them having to resort to dirty tricks, the whole world will be watching. (Apart from certainly my house in Warwickshire, I’d rather watch a dog pinch a loaf). Sod the Olympics.
Now, the Queen’s Jubilee, on the other hand…
I’m pretty sure London is a net contributor to UK tax revenue, so it seems a bit much to complain about a contribution of a few billion or whatever it is from the rest of the UK for the Olympics.
Not that I wish to let them off the hook for going predictably over budget. I knew the Olympic budget was a work of fiction at the time, because I seem to remember that one aspect of the costing was the idea that the athlete’s village would pay for itself due to future increases in real estate prices. This was back in 2006 or so, when everybody knew that property prices always go up, forever.
Most capital cities are very different to the rest of the country - London isn’t unusual in this regard.
London has 8 million permanent residents - the official count, likely an underestimate - and swells by a couple million more every working day, plus the tourists. It has about the same number of official permanent residents as Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland combined. I think that needs to be taken into account when complaining about how much focus there apparently is on London, even without considering that it’s the seat of Parliament and the Square Mile is hugely important in finance.
But it is a net contributor to the economy.
And, FWIW, Londoners are paying more towards the games than anywhere else in the country - part of its funding is from our council tax. And we’re going to be the plebs that are barred from using our own roads. ‘Sod the Olympics’ is a popular sentiment in London too, for far more reason than you have.
I don’t quite think we deserve bombing for the audacity of living in London, though.
My Dad has a real thing against London. It’s a bit of middle England thing or little Englander. Any time any TV program comes on that centres around London it sparks a rant. He thinks there should be far more TV time dedicated to the area he lives in. Possibly even the specific village he lives in.
The other half has volunteered to be a welcomer-thingy, although in Kensington, which is about as far as you can be from the Olympic Park and still be in London.
I’m not doing anything directly but the huge influx of tourists will mean plenty of work for me as a part-time tour guide in Parliament 
It’s the fact that it’s so tightly controlled that pisses me off the most. If Boris, Coe and all of them wanted to put on their own little shindig, tapped up Londoners for the money to do it, hey, fair enough. They could keep it all to themselves, it would be their little party. However, as a whole, we’re pitching in for something which is their little party.
If we’re all paying, we should all be benefitting as much as possible. In other words, open season on the apparent multitude of tourists who are coming here for the Games (as opposed to the multitude of athletes and their crew who will be here). You see, call me a cynic, but I doubt there will be a flood of tourists spilling out from London during this beano, I’m of the opinion it is a huge White Elephant.
How many people here actually give a toss about athletics? No-one I know, those that did apply for tickets just want to go because they’ve been assaulted by publicity campaigns to convice them it will be the event of a lifetime. Not so, I say, a running race is a running race, there won’t be much difference between these and any other running race you see on telly really, unless you are some kind of athletics nerd. Someone might shave a tenth of a second off a world record, but there’s practically zero chance of anyone saying “Did you see that? Were you there?” I feel sure I won’t cum in my pants at any “spectacle” the Games produce. (We’ll discount any of the things that I dream of happening in the Women’s Beach Volleyball, they simply cannot occur, no matter how much I pray)
I realise that the organisers are going to be doing their utmost to whip up a frenzy in the lead-up to the Games, but I think the public might feel short-changed afterwards.
Maybe I’m wrong, but I think the money might have been better spent on promoting the UK as a whole in this, our Queen’s Diamond Jubilee, with the express purpose of bringing lots of foreign tourists to every corner of the land, so we can fleece them and give the economy a boost.
It’s a lot of money to spunk on something with such a limited scope and time, something which seems to cater more for Seb Coe’s London-centric ego, rather than a UK which isn’t exactly flush with cash right now.
Maybe London will buck the trend and the money spent on Olympic venues won’t prove to be a waste of time once the Olympic circus rolls out to its next stop. Maybe the urban decay seen in almost every other Olympic city that has hosted won’t be seen here afterwards. Maybe. Anyone fancy a wager?
Oh, and I feel guilty now SciFiSam, I forgot “normal” people live there and will have to put up with all this shite!