From the Match Factory to Eastfield
Today, as I went to the football in Ipswich, I took a video as the train passed the site for the London Olympics in 2012.
The video starts as the train passes the old Bryant and May match factory and continues until the new Westfield shopping centre at Stratford. It opens in September 2011 and will inevitably be called Eastfield.
The red-bricked former match factory is now flats and a few houses and is called the Bow Quarter. It is famous for the match girls’ strike in 1888, which was part of the suffragette movement and one of the defining moments in trade union history. A musical, The Matchgirls, was written and produced about the strike in the 1960s. The musical was written by Bill Owen, who later appeared as Compo for many years in Last of the Summer Wine.
The Olympic Stadium is now substantially complete or at least on time for its full opening later this year.
The red tower after the stadium is the ArcelorMittal Orbit.
The Aquatics Centre is next.
The recently completed London Velopark is to the back of the Olympic Park and is not really visible.
The video ends at the new Eastfield Shopping Centre, which opens in September. The owners as you can see are still calling it Westfield.
But of course it will be part of that new Olympic sport; shopping, based on the new Underground line; the Shopping line, which must be the new name for the Central line. You start at Eastfield, after arriving by train and perhaps even from Paris, Brussels and Amsterdam on Eurostar, before travelling to Oxford and Bond Streets and then taking the line onto Westfield at White City.
Note that the video was shot from left side of the train in First Class. My thanks go to the driver, who specially slowed the train, so I could get a better video and to the ticket collector, who didn’t interrupt me to check my tickets. If you listen carefully, you can here his voice on the video.
It would be nice to repeat this on a clear day from the DVT on the front of the train. It would hopefully be as spectacular as the video, I took from the High Speed Train on the way to Inverness.
The Anonymous Widower 