The Olympic shadow

Like many others in the further reaches of east London, Wise Road, E15, is an unremarkable, curved street of Victorian workers’ cottages that have seen better days. The road hangs off the south side of Stratford High Street like a U-bend under a sink.

I turned into it recently, during three weeks of walking through the neighbourhoods that ring the site of the 2012 Olympics, and came across a Somali man with a mop, washing a dark blue minicab. Each house around him was identically painted and numbered, indicating social housing, and outside each door was a similar, not entirely…