A matter of taste

With the moment of truth nearly upon us, the great danger of the London Olympics is not, I think, that they’ll be a failure, just an anticlimax. They won’t be disastrous, just a bit naff. Brits will win medals. The Tube will probably cope. But from the smallest things upwards, the London Games give the overwhelming impression of being run by people with no taste, no imagination, and no idea how to have fun. 

I still remember Beijing 2008. I was lucky enough to go. The Bird’s Nest stadium stood there, more random and more beautiful than any mere camera lens could show, its outer tendrils waving in white against a blood-red interior. The Water Cube aquatic centre, the colour changes stealing gradually across its tortoiseshell sides, made a hard building into something soft and subtle and permeable.

In London, by contrast, it is hard to believe how ordinary everything is. The signature colour is grey. You enter through a shopping centre. The Olympics’ grand boulevard, Stratford High Street, is a half-built canyon of production-line ‘luxury apartments’. Cycling down it over the last three years, I kept thinking: give them a chance, they can’t have finished this yet. With two weeks to go, the awful truth now dawns: they have. 

In the west of the Olympic Park there is, I’m told, grass and trees. But from the main approach on the other side, there isn’t a speck of greenery, just grey steel fences and blobby, mostly grey buildings. On one side is the ArcelorMittal Orbit sculpture, red metal tresses flailing around. On the other is the water-polo arena, a cut-price copy of Beijing’s Water Cube, looking like something cut out of a hoodie’s quilted jacket.