An estranged homecoming

For four years I called London home, but that was eight years ago, and while I won’t go all Gotye, each time I visit we’ve grown a little further apart.  Our estrangement was highlighted when a friend quipped, ‘welcome home’ on meeting for a drink in a London pub the Sunday afternoon after arriving and it struck me how little London feels like home, in stark contrast to when I lived there and Australia felt like a distinctly foreign land.

As with many Australians my time in London was marked by a decidedly indifferent start, where I shared a cramped ex Council flat in a dodgy neighbourhood with a group of South Africans, lived on 8p tins of ALDI mushy peas (mmm, mushy peas) and forsook any alcoholic beverage for several months.  After a while however I found my feet, was able to trade in my South African housemates and enjoy the vibrant lifestyle London offers, such as I experienced during this visit when belting a little bit of LMFAO and other such classics with good friends till the wee hours of a Monday night in a Soho karaoke bar.

Our changed relationship was also highlighted during my visit by the time, or rather lack of it, I spent in London, for the vast majority of those I knew when living in London have either moved overseas or retreated to the countryside with their new borns.  So over the course of a week I became a doyen of British Rail and in lovely late summer sunshine (apparently I was very fortunate) took in relatives and two 2 year old birthdays through Bristol, Malvern and a classic English weekender in Brighton, where in addition to children’s birthdays and early morning swims in the sea, I was able to unsuccessfully stalk, from a respectable distance, Nick Cave’s balcony in the hope of a sighting in the unofficial Australian celeb quarter of Sussex Sq.

On my way back from Brighton I changed trains and had the pleasure of a truly English experience as I heard drunken soccer chanting coming from a platform of a recently arrived train, which struck me as odd considering there were no games that day.  As the crowd came into view and moved past me I realized from their emblazoned attire it was a very drunk group of David Weir supporters, the multi gold winning English Paralympic.  Being in London during the Paralympics I couldn’t help but be impressed with the level of support and genuine excitement from the English for the sold out event and their ingenuity in finding a reason to get tanked.

Emma, Susannah and I

From a sustainability perspective I was fortunate to spend my final day in the UK at the Olympic site in Stratford with a former colleague, Emma, who is manager of the Commission for a Sustainable London 2012, an independent body established to monitor the sustainability performance of the various Olympic and Paralympic bodies and Susannah, a sustainability adviser with the London Organising Committee of the Olympic Games and Paralympic Games (LOCOG).

Not sure either

There’s a pleasant video of Olympic and Paralympic sustainability examples by the thinking woman’s bit of crumpet, Kevin McCloud, on the LOCOG website, but from the interviews with Emma and Susannah the key insights I gained were the success of the Commission as an independent body proactively influencing and ensuring the sustainability targets were taken seriously, the commitment and resources available to LOCOG to address the targets, the no-white elephant approach to stadia and venues and the tension between corporate sponsorship and the sustainability vision for an event such as the Olympics. 

The corporate sponsorship issue is of particular interest as invariably events such as the Olympics and the World Cup require large multinationals to provide sponsorship to cover costs and supply products on the necessary scale.  From the discussions these organisations are often more than willing to consider alternative approaches for their activities at the events themselves, but how far the event is able, or should then influence how the company performs in the lead up to, or during, or after an event is a different conversation. As Emma and I discussed, even loved companies such as Apple have been enveloped in media storms around their international operations.

Leaving London two words, newly learnt during my time there, stuck in my mind, ‘strim’ (the Olympic wrapping surrounding everything in sight to signify you're at the Olympics), because it is quite clearly a made up and ridiculous word, and more seriously, ‘incession’ – an incessant recession, a challenge the London and the UK will need to address in the post Olympics come down.