Photography: Toby Smith
Editing: Holly Stead
London’s Olympic win had a bittersweet tinge in this 1,000-acre morass of derelict industrial land just three miles from the West End. In seven years, this will be the Olympic Park, boasting a spectacular array of stadiums and a pounds 650 million athletes’ village. And already its unique quality ” what psycho-geographers such as Iain Sinclair call a ‘liminal land’ ” a neglected in- between zone with its own unofficial, murky history ” is disappearing.
The Hackney fridge mountain ” Europe’s biggest ” is already gone, as are the Marshgate Lane allotments and the dog track. Can the cooking-fat recycling plants and the kebab-meat factories on Pudding Mill Lane and Waterworks River be far behind?
“The Independent on Sunday”