I’ve mentioned here before how often I go up to the Olympic park. I like it there, and it has become the default destination for my daily trundles. There is a lot of building work going on there, so I have got to watch the area slowly change over the past few months and years. There usually isn’t that much to note, but today I was in for a bit of a treat: the development called the East Bank has now started to open up. Five years or so ago, it was just a bit of waste ground used, I think, for temporary buildings during the Olympics. Since then, though, the park elected to build three large arts venues there, including a new base for BBC Music.

Whenever I have visited the park I have caught snippets of the three buildings being constructed. Before today, of course, the area has been a building site which I couldn’t go into; even yesterday it was still fenced off. When I went up there this afternoon though, I noticed that some of the hoardings had been removed so I could go up to the buildings.

While you still can’t go into them, I couldn’t help feeling impressed: that area, opposite the Olympic stadium, promises to be a wonderful new cultural hub for London. To be honest finding somewhere new to explore and new paths to go down today thrilled me like a new toy thrills a five year old. The whole complex felt so dynamic and new: A hell of a lot of money has obviously been put into constructing it, totally from scratch. When it is fully open the East Bank promises to be incredible. As I have said on here before, the thought that that entire area was pretty much totally derelict and forgotten until so recently staggers me, but between the shopping malls, velodromes, stadiums and now theatres, it’s hard not to be in awe of what this city can do. I have never known anywhere which is capable of such epic creation, or which can regenerate itself so rapidly.