The Local History Behind London's Olympic Unease

Last week, an unexploded bomb was discovered at a training site for London’s Olympics. The one-kilogram incendiary device, a remnant from Nazi bombing during World War II, was found on marshlands where a basketball training center is being built for this summer’s Games. Removed safely, the device is a timely reminder of the rough handling the area hosting this summer’s Olympics has often lived through. Far from being a blank slate, East London’s Lea Valley has a long, busy history – one that makes the process of building major public works sensitive and contested.

Once the boundary between warring Saxon and Viking kingdoms, the Olympic Park’s site on the River Lea’s southern reaches was for long London’s industrial heartland. As early as Shakespeare’s time, it was so polluted that a new river carrying drinking water to London had to be dug to avoid dirty trades at its mouth. During England’s 19th century manufacturing boom, the world’s first plastic was developed here, and the word petrol first coined.