On the Wrong Side of the Track?: East London and the Post Olympics

What did the 2012 Olympics tell us about who we are, who we were, and who we want to be? This book takes 2012 as a starting point for a debate on national identity, community cohesion, urban regeneration and the persistence of inequalities in British society - from the vantage point of East London not only as the main Olympic venue as but the main reason that Britain won its Olympic bid. The first half of the book looks at East London from the inside - including voices from East London communities and the Olympic Park workers - and from the outside - in the imagination of artists, social commentators and reformers. The second half examines the cultural strategies that were used to present an 'Olympian' vision of London to the world, and explores the rhetoric and reality of regeneration and legacy. On the Wrong Side of the Track is a counter-narrative centred on an area once described by a LOCOG official as a 'pretty terrible part of town', but whose residents now carry the burden of representing the nation's hopes of economic recovery; it challenges the arguments of Olympophiles for whom the Games can do no wrong as well as Olympophobes for whom they can do no right. The book includes a photo essay on the Olympic site, and original photographs by Jason Orton and John Claridge.

Table of Contents:
Introduction: 'Everyone a winner' - Welcome to the Post Olympics Part I: East London then and now: an everyday story of 'race', class and imagined community 1. London goes East: the gothic imagination and the capital's 'other scene'. 2. All white down our way: portrait of a working-class community in crisis 3. Living the dream? Some scenes from 'Growing up East Enders' 4. From Canary Wharf to Stratford via Thurrock and Southend: London's eastward's turn and the making of Thames Gateway Part II: The 2012 Olympics: between the artificial paradise and the beautifying lie 5. London calling 2012: notes on the haunting of an Olympic story 6. Signs taken for wonders: the politics and poetics of staging a mega event 7. Bodyscapes: class, gender and 'race' in the fabrication of 2012 8. East 20: Towards a good enough legacy

About the Author :
Phil Cohen grew up with Steve Ovett and Jean-Paul Sartre as his teenage heroes and has been trying to get them into the same book ever since. He is author of Knuckle Sandwich: Growing up in the working class city (with Dave Robins); Rethinking the Youth Question; London's Turning: The making of Thames Gateway (with Mike Rustin); and Borderscapes: memory, narrative and Un/Common Culture (to be published in 2013). His poetry has been published by Critical Quarterly, Agenda, Soundings and Kites. He is Emeritus Professor in Cultural Studies at the University of East London.