Thank you. My name is Christine Franks. I was born in Stratford, raised here, went to school here.
My mum and dad lived across the road from where we are now, at number 12, and my grandma lived in this house, number 5. Aunties and uncles were in this property bringing up their children, so cousins were all born here. I met my husband at school. When we got married there was not property to be had and so we moved into a flat upstairs. We've been here since 1973. I have one daughter living with me still and the other daughter has moved into a property down the road which was my mother-in-law's. She's had one child since she's been living at that house.
So now we've started the circle again. I can remember the day that it was announced and it was just so exciting. It was just a bit of recognition of the area, you know. When you live in East London, you're sort of, oh, you're living in a really rough area. Stratford, Whitechapel, you know, it's all a bit rough.
I think that we were all sort of lumped together. And then suddenly, this amazing new development and the Olympics was being seen all over the world. It's developed so much more than other parts of East London. I mean, Whitechapel is very much as it was when I was a kid. Tower Hamlet's the same.
They've got their developments, they've got things going on, but nowhere near what Stratford has had. I mean this is major, major changes since I was a child. After I left school I went to work for a company called Roussel Laboratories in Stratford, which is on the site where the Olympics are now.
The site itself was quite interesting because it was highly flammable, it was quite dangerous to work on, you know, and where it was positioned was enclosed by canals on each side. If it rained heavily we were all marooned in there. So we had a tannoy system where they used to have to announce that there was rain coming and the canal would flood and that we were trapped in there and we all had to move out. So this happened on a regular basis.
We had all sorts of other weird factories down there. We had opposite where Roussel was, we had a nuclear research centre. It was very weird. There was sort of...
car repair places and junkyards. And next to us was a vile place called Harrison Barber, which used to... They used to clean skins and animal bodies and remove the fat and make soap out of it. It was absolutely notorious in the area. Stench was unbelievable.
The whole of Stratford used to smell from this one factory. If you came past at the wrong time, you'd see them unloading all the corpses. And it was rather horrible. I mean, it was stinky Stratford.
Parts of Stratford did smell, definitely. And some of the factories on the site where the Olympics are now were contributing to that, you know. So it wasn't a very nice place to live at that time. In terms of the environment, it wasn't such a nice place to live.
When I worked there, those canals that are now really lovely and have boats on and it's really nice, were not like that at all. They had dead animals in and old bikes and, you know, broken things all thrown in, you know. Bodies, you know, yeah, people used to dump bodies down there.
It was a horrible area, really. But that's all been cleaned out with the Olympic Park. They cleaned everything out.
There were so many chemicals in that soil, you know. They had to keep filtering it over and over again. Huge piles of soil as it was being filtered and refiltered and recleaned over and over again.
Yeah, obviously it was very dangerous stuff. It's not really suitable in parts for domestic occupation, if you like. You couldn't plant veggies in there or anything like that.
I've said that there is high levels of pollution being inhaled by young people. It's always been like that. For me, it's always been like that in this part of London.
Because prior to cars and airlines, we had the factories. And the factories were highly pollutant. When I was, yeah, I was in primary school, and it was so, so thick. I mean, there were...
Periods of time when the pollution was so heavy, you would have to wear a scarf over your face and you would have to walk along holding the walls to get to school. Yeah, it's hard to believe it. You couldn't see in front of you. I know when my mother-in-law moved back to London, she was shocked because she was forever dusting. Where she lived in Lyon Sea, and it was all lovely and by seaside, she didn't have to dust ever.
She came back to London and it was like dusting forever, you know. We do get loads of dust and rubbish, you know. That's London.
I think Stratford, at the moment, is really at the limit. There are so many people concentrated in this area now. It's difficult to get doctor appointments sometimes. Services haven't really kept up with the increase in the population.
I mean if you stand on the bridge and look, how much spare space is there? One of the things is the big new globe that they're proposing, that lots of people have proposed. There's going to be so many more people in that area at certain times. I think it's going to be too much for the area. It's bad enough when the football's on, I don't go to Stratford.
I'm used to the football kicking out but when it's at Stratford and you're trying to get shopping and suddenly you've got... Thousands and thousands of people coming out. The prospect of more people coming out of the globe is worrying. I think it's potentially quite dangerous. They still seem to keep persisting with it, despite the fact that lots of people have opposed it, and the council have opposed it.
They're still pushing the hook.