Ile des Chiens 4min: Gare du Nord 70min

Let's face it, the 2012 Olympic Games, as far as the main site in east London is concerned anyway, are less about a now once a century chance to host the paramount global sporting event - no longer the amateur affair it was when London last hosted them of course - than they are about regeneration of an area of inner city that should never have been allowed to remain run down and uncared for for as long as it has.

And, because such regenerative development rests on the willingness of deep-pocketed capital to see the opportunity, dig deep and purchase land to develop, they need encouragement, often publicly funded encouragement that their investment will be a worthwhile one. And so the greatest asset in the Olympic village will not be a stadium or a veoldrome but Stratford City Station, part of the multi-billion pound development of the Channel Tunnel high speed rail link.

Some even did not need to wait around long enough actually to do any development, such as the Reuben brothers who saw their opportunity for land speculation, bought in and then had an almighty row with the Mayor of London and left, no doubt pocketing a large chunk of the value of the public investment in transport that will make Stratford one of the best connected locations in the UK - just four minutes from Canary Wharf on the Isle of Dogs, seven minutes from the older City of London powerhouses and closer in traveling time to Paris than to Heathrow.

In 2013, when the athletes have all left and the tumble-weed threatens the newly created white elephants, the removal vans arriving to disgorge their contents into the shiny new homes created by the regeneration are likely therefore to be crammed full of stuff from Heals and Phillippe Stark designs rather than DFS, the location values having been created being more than likely well outside the range of the people evicted to make way for it, as George Monbiot (not one I am usually wont to quote) points out in today's Guardian:

London is getting into the Olympic spirit - by kicking out the Gypsies:

London is about to establish its credentials as a true Olympic city by evicting Gypsies and Travellers from Clays Lane in Newham and Waterden Crescent in Hackney: 430 people will be thrown out of the Clays Lane housing co-op and a 100-year-old allotment will be destroyed to make way for a concrete path that will be used for four weeks. Nine thousand new homes will be built for the games, but far more will be lost to the poor through booming prices, which are rising much faster around the Olympic site than elsewhere in London. The buy-to-let vultures have already landed.

So the Olympic Games, however good a show it puts on for a few weeks five years from now, is a double opportunity wasted. For it is you and I who are paying for the bulk of the work. Londoners of course a little more on top too. And if you are both a Londoner and a lottery player, most likely to be in the less well off part of the population, you're paying proportionately the most. While developers and landowners around the site will be raking it in. Further, it is a scandal that it has taken an Olympic Games and billions of pounds of public investment to get regeneration going in the first place. The whole area should have been a natural choice for continued development spinning off from the eastward march of the City of London two decades ago, and had landowners been paying in tax the values that were created by proximity to the new City, they would have stepped forward sooner or been throwing money at the Exchequer for years.

Here was an opportunity to create a fairer way of financing such public expenditure and recapturing the investment from the people who will benefit the most, while at the same time ensuring maximum opportunities for those displaced by it to remain in their communities. There's another irony - that it should all be happening just spitting distance from where, in 1909, Lloyd George made his greatest attempt to explain the processes and inequity that results from not recapturing the location value created not by landowners themselves, but by the community around them, in his Limehouse Speech.