Mrs O and I ended-up in Hackney Wick yesterday afternoon. For those of you who aren't au fait with the east of the capital (of England), I ought to contextualise HW somewhat. The London 2012 Olympic site sits in a huge swathe of river valley in London's east end. Previously this site was home to a lot of down-at-heel industrial businesses. But during the 70s and 80s the businesses either went jugs up or relocated outside London, so the area fell into serious disrepair.
The residential areas that abutted this wasteland were, unsurprisingly, fairly shitty in their own right, thanks to their proximity to this eyesore. Stratford, Bow, south Leyton - none of them would set the pulse racing, unless it was from fear of molestation from n'er-do-wells. Hackney Wick sits to to the south east of the Olympic site, and is an odd place because it's always been rather beloved by the tattooed-graduate-set, who make a bee-line for London as soon as Durham University confers a degree on them. This is probably due to its name. It may have Hackney in the title, but Hackney it ain't.
So while the rest of this shabby cohort of districts have tidied themselves up, courtesy of the Olympic money and the need to persuade the rest of the country that they're no longer effectively open prisons, Hackney Wick has rested on its laurels rather. And who can blame it? The graduates still come.
To my cock-er-knee eye, however, it's an absolute shithole, HW. It's looks appalling. It's like being in an episode of The Sweeney, one of bleaker, nihilistic ones too. Shirley to goodness Britain's young things will cop on to themselves soon and relocate to nearby Stratford instead? I suppose, however, that would require them getting some self-awareness and then getting their thumbs out of their derrieres, and that's no going to happen.
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